There are many reasons to dislike Sarah Palin. Huntin' ain't one.

ref: http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2008/sep/13/uselections2008.republicans

In Saturday's Guardian, Paul Theroux attacks Sarah Palin over her moose-huntin' credentials: "torturing animals to death with buckshot", "creatures senselessly slaughtered". I'm assuming Paul Theroux is either a vegetarian, or only eats animals that have willingly thrown themselves onto the butcher's blade, died of old age, or fallen out of trees.

I'd rather eat wild game than factory farmed animals any day. Wild game lives a natural, wholesome existence before being offed. Farmed animals live short, brutal, unhealthy lives.

Theroux's short sighted comments also ignore the fact that vast tracts of land are maintained as pristine, biodiverse environments for hunters - grouse moors, for example. Without hunters, many of these environments would be turned over to the next most profitable use - which in the case of grouse moors is blanket coniferous forestry, which creates a monoculture that poisons soil and water courses.

It may jar with the prejudices of the urbanite, but it's a fact that hunting and shooting are more ethical than factory farming and go hand in hand with conservation, contributing to a more biodiverse, environmentally sound planet.

There are many reasons to dislike Sarah Palin, but moose huntin' is not one of them.

Could this be karma for getting her fanny out in a bad film?

Sharon Stone, whose big hairy fanny I saw in Basic Instinct, recently drew the ire of the small portion of Chinese citizens who are allowed to express ire with an ill thought out comment about the Sichuan earthquake, which has killed tens of thousands of people, being karma for Chinese oppression of Tibet.

Unfortunately, Sharon is the face of Dior, who sell a lot of overpriced tat to the portion of Chinese people who are allowed to be rich. Dior have distanced themselves from Sharon’s comments for all the wrong reasons, saying, “We would never support any opinion that would hurt the feelings of our customers”.

What, any opinion that would hurt the feelings of their customers? Expressing opinions such as “peaceful protesters shouldn’t be shot”, “people should have freedom of religion” and “proper building regulations should be followed, especially when building schools in earthquake zones” would hurt the feelings of more than a few of their Chinese customers – the corrupt Party officials who are buying their Dior handbags with backhanders from builders who are bribing them to ignore regulations – but it doesn’t make them bad opinions. Dior give the impression that they would fellate a horse if it meant Chinese people would buy a few handbags.

Besides, Sharon’s opinion is actually quite Buddhist, which I think is the religion of choice for the portion of Chinese citizens who are allowed to be religious. Buddhism is based around karmic reincarnation, where deeds done in this life are rewarded or punished by your reincarnation. A wise and noble belief if you’re the Dalai Lama, but if you’re Glen Hoddle and you say disabled people are rightly being made to pay for the sins of past lives, everybody thinks you’re a cunt.

Clearly Sharon was wrong; the tens of thousands of Chinese who died in the earthquake are the wrong targets for karmic punishment; they had nothing to do with the occupation of Tibet and can hardly be blamed for not campaigning for its liberation. It’s easy to take the moral high ground when doing so endears you to your liberal Californian showbiz colleagues; not so easy when such expressing such dissent leads to life in Grandpa Wen’s gulags for you and a few of your close family.

Sharon’s a bit of an arse. Of course Dior are disowning her comments, but they should at least pretend they are doing it because the comments are abhorrent and wrong, rather than because it’ll hurt profits. Since when did companies not care about looking mercenary?

Closing loopholes and hanging arseholes

In my area, a 16 year old girl was recently kidnapped by a gang of men, taken to a deserted house and gang raped. The gang then used caustic soda to try and destroy the DNA evidence of their crime. Even against a background of the inner city’s banal horrors, this crime struck me cold to the bone in its cruelty and horror. Detectives still can’t question the girl. Her injuries are so severe she is in a coma. She will spend at least another year in hospital. If she ever makes a prolonged recovery, her life will be severely inhibited.

A detail from the case interested me. A suspect was arrested shortly after the incident. Detectives wanted to question him urgently as he knew important, time sensitive information such as who his accomplices were (the more time it takes to bring them in, the more time the perpetrators have to destroy DNA evidence and develop alibis and cover stories) and what chemicals they used to maim the girl (knowing which chemicals were used would aid her treatment).

However, detectives were unable to question him. Instead they had to take him to hospital. Not because he was hurt or displayed symptoms of any injury or illness. He claimed to have swallowed a ten pence piece and, as they have a duty of care to those in their custody, they had to take him to hospital.

My cousin, who has worked as an accident and emergency doctor, revealed to me that this is common practice by suspects trying to get out of custody. The suspects know that two officers have to remain with them while they are taken to hospital, assessed and treated. Typically, the police force won’t have sufficient manpower to free up two officers for the hours this takes, so for less serious crimes the suspect is ‘de-arrested’ at the hospital. As soon as the police officers have left, the suspect miraculously recovers and leaves.

This loophole needs to be closed. Those in police custody deserve access to medical treatment, but not at the expense of their victims, and certainly not if it gives them a literal 'get out of jail free' card.

What sickens me is that this rapist thought that it would actually work this time. This wasn’t a pub punch up or disorderly conduct. This was the gang rape and grievous maiming of a teenage girl. But the rapist thought the police would actually de-arrest him rather than have officers spend the time waiting for him to be treated. It gives a clue as to how seriously he viewed the crime. Meanwhile, his accomplices (seven have now been arrested) roam free and their 16 year old victim lies in a coma on a hospital bed, horrifically scarred.

To any liberal apologist who thinks the scum responsible for this can be rehabilitated, I say; why bother? They should be hanged by their intestines. I’m sure I wouldn’t be alone in gaining a grim satisfaction from seeing it, and I doubt society would miss them.

UPDATE: One of the suspects of this crime has been stabbed to death on Oxford Street. Don't get your hopes up that a vigilante is going round dealing out some justice - it was apparently an unrelated incident. http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/england/london/7399760.stm

Step away from the fridge

DISCLAIMER: Because XXXXX's girlfriends, parents and clients of his rentboy service keep looking at this blog and assuming it's a verbatim documentary account of his life, I've had to edit out the bit where I talk about him XXXXXXXX all manner of XXXXX XXX XXXXXXXXXXXX and being XXXX XXXXXXXXX, even though it's all XXXX. In fact I could have told you about the time he XXXXXX a XXXX who had completely XXXXXX XXX on a XXXX, which is technically XXXX. Lucky I didn't.

I like living in a shared flat. I like the cheapness. I like having friends to hang out with when I get home in the evening. I like how it's environmentally friendly. I like how I can block the toilet with a big dump, and nobody can really say if it was me or Emma.

I don't even mind that my milk and olive oil get used. It's all part of the give and take of communal living, even if as the only registered card carrying yuppie in the flat, I give organic extra virgin first pressing picual olive oil, and take industrially produced hydrogenated Bernard Matthews turkey milk. I don't mind. It doesn't bother me.

What does bother me is when someone blatantly ransacks my shelf in the fridge without even leaving a note saying sorry, or texting me to tell me I might want to pick up some food on the way home as they've eaten mine. Last night I got home and pretty much everything on my shelf had been fingered:

Parma ham - half the pack gone.

Flat mushrooms - half of one gone (they're BIG!).

Cheese - an insolent morsel left.

Orange juice - opened.

Humus - been tampered with. Thie really pisses me off as not only is it posh man's humus, with pine nuts and everything, but the scooping implement used appears to be a finger! Given that XXXXX XXXXX all manner of XXXXX XXXX XXXXXXXXXX, sticking his XXXX-raddled fingers in the humus kind of ruins it for other people. I might be hungry, but not hungry enough to risk getting XXXXX in my XXXXX.

I thought this wouldn't happen any more. Last year, XXXXX came home drunk and demolished half a free range, corn fed chicken that I had lovingly roasted and left in the fridge. I got home from the gym the next day, absolutely starving. I cooked up some rice and veg to go with the chicken. I got the chicken out, pulled off the foil…and was confronted by a dirty carcass that had clearly been pulled apart by bare hands. I was incandescent with rage and inconsolable. When I confronted XXXXX, he looked bemused. "But I thought you'd just put it in the fridge for anyone to eat?". I nearly killed and ate XXXXX. There's a supermarket 3 minute's walk away now.

The irony is that he flies into a hysterical pissy pants rage if anyone touches his food. My flatmate Lizzie ate a few slices of his bread and he spent several days righteously whining to everyone in earshot and Miss Marpling the identity of the thief (I helped him - I believe that even food thieves shouldn't be victims of food thievery). Emma forgot to get electricity and he went teenager, slamming doors and refusing to speak to her. And when I nabbed a condom from his art installation in the bathroom he went nuclear, even though it was extra large so would've been no use to him.

Nah, only kidding, I love him to bits. But writing "My flatmate nabbed my food and I'm not really bothered" wouldn't be worth writing, would it?

Ann Coulter's a (night of the) living (dead) doll

Continuing the Ann Coulter theme, here's some footage of the talking Ann Coulter doll being demonstrated at a Conservative book convention. The second best bit is when the representative manages to put her finger on the pulse of the American nation, succinctly summing up the reason why Hillary Clinton would be a bad president:

"I have a full time job with a Conservative publishing company so it would be bad for me if Hillary was president".

I'm sure almost everyone who works full time for a Conservative publishing company will be able to identify with that one.

The best bit is that the doll, which is supposed to have 30 sayings, doesn't even remotely work - it manages one saying, before repeating garbled bits of the same saying like a confused ideological mantra. Actually, I suppose that does captures Ann pretty well.

I'm sorry to attack Coulter for her gaunt, dead-eyed looks and her risible action figures, but it's far too easy to take her to task over the spiteful polemic she relentlessly spouts.

"Poor little Pakis. They're never very high in anyone's caste system, are they?"

"Liberals support the Taliban and Al Qaeda the same as they supported Stalin."

"Canada is lucky the US allows it to exist."

"We should invade their countries, kill their leaders and convert them to Christianity."

"Whether they are defending the Soviet Union or bleating for Saddam Hussein, liberals are always against America. Liberals always manage to take the position that most undermines American security."

"I don't know if Clinton is gay. But Al Gore - total fag."

And let's not forget her kind words for the widows of American men who died on 9/11:

"These broads are millionaires, lionized on TV and in articles about them, reveling in their status as celebrities and stalked by grief-arazzis... These self-obsessed women seemed genuinely unaware that 9/11 was an attack on our nation and acted as if the terrorist attacks happened only to them... I’ve never seen people enjoying their husbands’ deaths so much."

Of course, I love Ann really. Her attacks on the left might get the Republican knuckleheads whooping along, but they're are so ridiculously extreme that they just inspire bemusement in normal people, who will then be less likely to take more reasonable criticism of liberals seriously. There's a real danger of all right wing punditry being tainted by association with Coulter and Limbaugh's brand of hyperbole. Perhaps only PJ O'Rourke can save them...

Better yet, she pisses off liberals, which can only be a good thing. It'll be even more fun to watch when the liberals are in power again.

You will learn to love the Brides of Funkenstein

This is a video of Henry Rollins (he was in Black Flag and he appeared in a couple of movies, but mostly he's just scary) writing a letter to right wing commentator Ann Coulter. If you're familiar with Ann Coulter's relentlessly ideological attacks on reason you'll understand why he's pissed off. But mostly this is funny because we all feel this dementedly pissed off sometimes, but the cruel, funny and true emails we write never get sent. Rollins doesn't just send them, he films himself writing them. And he's funny, too.

Don’t do drugs. You might end up mad. Or Tory.

The David Cameron drug revelations (he smoked marijuana in his teens) have been more interesting for what they’ve revealed about the Tories and their supporters in the media than what they've revealed about Cameron himself. The Tories are in a quandary; after a decade in opposition they finally have a credible leader who appeals to voters. However, this appeal comes at a terrible price for the Tories’ blue rinse hardcore.

In order to make himself appealing, Cameron has been forced to embrace socially liberal values. Instead of banging up criminals, cutting taxes for the rich and privatising state services, he’s a Tory leader who hugs hoodies, home composts and loves the NHS.

The fact that Cameron would rather 'get on his bike' to save the planet than to find work rankles with the old guard – Norman Tebbit famously compared him to Pol Pot, "intent on purging even the memory of Thatcherism before building a New Modern Compassionate Green Globally Aware Party".

(Evidently they haven’t yet worked out that Cameron is just a cosmetic front for the Tories, there only to make the same old bunch of regressive, corrupt poshos palatable to voters. There’s even the nagging suspicion that Cameron himself had a hand in releasing these revelations in a Gary Barlow-esque attempt to make himself look bit more ‘street’.)

Which explains why there is such a furore in the right wing media over these revelations – they’re the strongest example so far of the shift towards liberalism. In the Mail on Sunday, political commentator Peter Oborne gave his tuppence worth on the David Cameron drugs revelations. It’s classic Mail froth – disgracefully uninformed, frequently hilarious and relying on furious twists of logic that make you think that perhaps madness is caused by a lack of reefer, rather than too much. And underpinning it all is this fear and loathing that Oborne’s beloved Tories are being led down the neo-liberal path by their fresh faced leader…

Leftwing pro-drug conspiracy

Oborne speaks of the "covert alliance" amongst the social progressives who "took drugs in the Sixties" and (he claims) now run this country. Apparently they downgraded cannabis to inoculate the dirty, druggie habits of themselves ("they still light up at dinner parties") and their children against prosecution.

Cannabis has been downgraded for many reasons – because medical studies show that it is not particularly harmful, because millions of people in the UK smoke it so illegalising it is as ineffective as prohibition of alcohol was in the US, but mainly because the vast majority of users are otherwise law abiding citizens – but this idea that there has been a concerted conspiracy by Sixties druggies to inveigle the bureaucracy of government in order to legalise cannabis decades later is a little far fetched (and at cross purposes to Oborne's argument that cannabis causes apathy).

Helpfully, Oborne explains that the downgrade to Class C "meant that possession was no longer a criminal offence". This is blatantly untrue - it is still very much an offence to be found in possession of a Class C drug. It could result in a two year prison sentence. The fact that it usually doesn’t has more to do with police and courts rightly recognising that the vast majority of people in possession of cannabis are otherwise law abiding citizens, whose interests (and those of society) are not best served by incarceration and a criminal record. The alleged downgrade also resulted in an increase in the possible sentence for supply or intent to supply to 14 years.

Oborne also speaks of the "paradox" of cannabis being downgraded while cigarettes are banned. Of course, the point could be made that Government reviews investigating a possible link between cannabis use and lung cancer have failed to find a definitive causal connection between the two, whereas a link has been made between tobacco and lung cancer. Also, cannabis hasn’t been legalised – as I have pointed out, it’s still illegal – and tobacco hasn’t been banned – it’s still openly sold everywhere. The steps that have been taken to ban it in public places are just to protect non-smokers from second hand smoke. Private use is not affected.

Besides, the law has little effect on drug use. Cocaine use has soared in recent years, despite being Class A and therefore subject to the stiffest penalties. And cannabis use amongst teenagers is much lower in the Netherlands, where cannabis is fully decriminalised and widely available, then in the UK where it is illegal (according to a recent UNICEF report, 35% of British 11-15 year olds have used cannabis, compared with 22% of Dutch youths). Drug use clearly has more to do with societal and cultural pressures and it is naïve to assume that it can be reduced through legislation.

His paranoia that social liberals are infecting all levels of government extends to "free market fanatics, such as the Institute for Economic Affairs".

The Institute for Economic Affairs does not sound like the kind of lunatic fringe organisation that would contain "fanatics". In fact they’re a free market think tank of the sort that conservatives, new and old, should approve of. The IEA believe in simplified, lower taxes, the privatisation of state assets, secession from the Common Agricultural Policy, strict welfare reform and GET THIS: a public holiday on Margaret Thatcher’s birthday!!!!!!

Oborne speaks so distastefully of "progressives", you wonder what he would prefer. "Regressives"? Perhaps he sees the utopian society as living in caves, grunting and eating roadkill. And voting Tory, natch. And if he thinks that the Institute for Economic Affairs are dangerously social liberal “fanatics”, he must think Hitler’s only flaw was being a bit of a soft touch.

Guaranteed to blow your mind. And wreck your life.

Oborne’s biggest issue with cannabis is the apparent huge risk to sanity it presents to users. He speaks of three "very close friends" of his whose sons succumbed to reefer madness.

"At one moment their sons were bright, lively and with brilliant futures ahead of them. A few months later they were apathetic, morose, uninterested in life." he relates.

Do these symptoms sound familiar to parents of teenage children? Oborne appears to be making a scapegoat of marijuana for all the travails of puberty. It doesn't stop at teenage apathy, though. "At a later stage cannabis smokers…start to hear voices. Psychiatrists say that cannabis use is now a factor in approximately three-quarters of schizophrenia cases" he claims.

This is a rabidly disingenuous generalisation. There is no doubt that abuse of marijuana can in certain people aggravate pre-existing mental conditions such as schizophrenia. However, these claims are misleading and quoted out of context. Those suffering from mental illnesses commonly seek out psychotropics to ameliorate the unpleasant aspects of their condition. Correlation does not imply causation. It absolutely does not follow that marijuana causes three quarters of schizophrenia cases; a more objective analysis would be that marijuana triggered a fraction of them and was used by others, either coincidentally or to self-medicate.

To drive home the dangers of marijuana, Oborne asserts that "A soldier going to Iraq has a far higher chance of emerging unscathed than a boy lighting up his first spliff". Now I’m no expert, but the fact that 132 British soldiers have thus far lost their lives in Iraq over a period of just four years, while no deaths from the toxic effects of marijuana have been recorded over a period of thousands of years would seem to suggest fairly conclusively that being sent to fight in Iraq is hugely more dangerous than smoking marijuana.

Trawls of the record books also do not throw up many cases of people being severely injured by marijuana, unlike the thousands of soldiers who have lost limbs or been physically devastated in Iraq. I know that right wingers love war and hate hippies, but there are better arguments to put forward than these ludicrous assertions. Oborne might as well be claiming that listening to Phish leads to apathy and poor hygiene. Actually, maybe that’s a bad example...

The soldier comparison is doubly interesting for the one angle that Oborne could be given merit for is that marijuana contributes to mental illness in some people and can, if not destroy lives, at least lead to apathy. However, 60 cases of mental illness are diagnosed each month in the British army in Iraq (727 in the whole of 2005), caused directly by the stress of army service. Bear in mind this figure does not include undiagnosed cases (in such a macho environment, many will not come forward) or the large number who suffer stress and mental illness after their tour of duty and have difficulty adjusting to life after the army (ex-servicemen are a hugely over-represented demographic in the rough sleeping population).

He also claims that marijuana is addictive. It is not. I used to work as a drug crime analyst and so was privy not only to the official government guidelines but also to the opinions of doctors, drug workers and drug specialists, none of whom believed marijuana to be addictive. Marijuana is not addictive – at worst psychological dependence can develop. The real test of a physical addiction is if the withdrawal can kill. This tends to only happen with depressants such as heroin or alcohol, rather than with stimulants such as cocaine or marijuana. Withdrawal from alcohol can, and does, kill alcoholics. Withdrawal from marijuana might lead to anxiety or insomnia in heavy users, but will not kill.

The real Cameron issue

There is another issue, raised as a spin off from Cameron’s drug revelations, that will damage him more with Britain's voters, yet hasn’t been mentioned by right wing pundits. The spotlight on his rowdy past has also shone on his membership of the Bullingdon Club – an exclusive Oxford 'dining club' made up of Old Etonians such as Boris Johnson and David Cameron, famous for using their wealth and background to escape punishment for their violent, champagne fuelled binges.

A typical depraved night out for these moneyed reprobates involves booking into a normal restaurant, completely trashing it (flowerpots through windows, champagne bottles smashed on walls) before offering obscene amounts of money to buy off the owner. The trouble frequently continues outside, with street lights and signs being smashed and torn down. Ordinary people would rightly be charged with criminal damage, but when the police were called, Cameron's wealth and connections kept him out of the cells.

This unbelievable arrogance, belligerence, and mocking of the law cuts through Cameron’s attempts at being a 'man of the people' and will not endear him to voters. Oborne needn’t worry. No matter how much weed Cameron smokes, he's still very obviously a supercilious scion of privilege, an arrogant prig who abuses his position to shit all over the ordinary man.

Oborne signs off with this hilariously straight faced assertion, "The revelation that a figure such as Cameron took the drug is worrying. It may send out the message that taking cannabis is cool."

Yes, David Cameron could make cannabis cool, just like Anne Widecombe could make amyl nitrate hip again. Peter, can I have some of what’s in your pipe?


Most of Peter Oborne’s commentary on David Cameron
http://calibre.mworld.com/m/m.w?lp=GetStory&id=241455271

Mental illness in the British Army in Iraq http://news.independent.co.uk/uk/politics/article1018575.ece

Studies examining link between cannabis and cancer
http://www.norml.org/index.cfm?Group_ID=6891

Institute for Economic Affairs on politics.co.uk
http://www.politics.co.uk/campaignsite/iea-institute-economic-affairs-$366317$4.htm

Oxford hellraisers trash pub:
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/main.jhtml?xml=/news/2004/12/03/nsesh03.xml

A look at the Bullingdon Club:
http://www.oxfordstudent.com/ht2006wk0/Features/smashing...

Do YOU think local government bullshit bingo callers are born, or made?

You may have noticed that in the past seven months my blog postings have been a little sparse. This is because I was promoted to a management role - Acting Deputy Intelligence Manager - at my workplace, a London local authority crime and disorder reduction partnership. I put all my time and energy into this role, which left little for me outside of work to expend on my blog.

Today I interviewed for the permanent position. In a two horse race. Against a guy who is five years younger than me and has no management experience. I didn't get it. I'm a little pissed off and surprised.

Pissed off, because I know I did a good job and I really enjoyed being manager. The worst thing is knowing that everybody at work and even some of my friends will now secretly be thinking, "Ah, Leo must've been a bit shit not to get it". Which I wasn't. Any time I had an issue, such as not delegating enough, I addressed it. I recognised and learnt from my mistakes and didn't repeat them.

Surprised, because I have many successes to show for my time as manager. I developed an innovative way of showing the performance of our Safer Neighbourhoods police teams by combining their performance - against priority crime, against fear of crime and level of resources deployed - that gave an easy to understand overview and let the user drill down to the specific variables, the individual crimes or resources. I developed an innovative product that showed teams the people likely to be committing crime in their area, based on PPO, ASBO, ABC, school exclusion data, DAAT/DIP data, with photos and briefings of their likely MO. I identified data gaps and filled them, for example linking up with social housing suppliers' logs to get details of incidents of ASB that were dealt with on the estate and not by the Council or Police (and thus not recorded by us).

When the police rolled out their problem solving process, I developed and standardised the analytical products used to baseline, set aims, deploy tactical resources and evaluate the success of the process in tackling the crime or disorder issue and trained the analysts in applying the techniques. These techniques and my management of their application was so successful, a problem solving inspectorate at the Territorial Policing Headquarters recognised Westminster as being "a flagship borough for problem solving documentation". I also dealt with all the day to day things involved with running a team of analysts - managing performance, or taking misbehaving staff through the disciplinary process. Et fucking cetera.

Is this starting to sound like an interview? Well not like a local government interview, because in local government, hard work and success are not rewarded. What is rewarded is an ability to waffle bullshit answers to bullshit questions such as, "How do you value equality and diversity?", and "Do you think leaders are born or made?". Both of these were in my interview. Never mind the innovative processes I put in place - what's really important is playing bullshit bingo.

At the end of the day, my successes counted for nothing. Instead of spending the last seven months developing innovative and effective processes that brought real value and recognition to my department, I should've just sat on my fucking arse and learnt some bullshit bingo that would make the PEOPLE who run these things tick the right fucking boxes.

Anyway, I'm looking forward to focussing on things other than managing an intel unit. Such as blogging. It's good to be back.

BAEby, oil luv U(K)

The Serious Fraud Office has just announced it is to drop its investigations into the Al-Yamamah Saudi arms deal bribery, and already my ears are ringing with cries of sleaze from both ends of the political spectrum. "Britain - The New Banana Republic" bellows the Times; "Blackmailed By Dictators" screeches the Guardian. Two campaign groups have hired a QC to mount a legal challenge.

They have a point. Tony Blair was elected on a promise to clean up corruption. He promised the Labour government would have an 'ethical' foreign policy. He made international bribery an offence in 2002 (the very law the current investigation hinges on). Lord Goldsmith promised nothing would stand in the way of the SFO's investigation. And yet he, on Blair's advice, still killed the investigation off. There is (apparently) clear evidence of bribery and fraud on a massive scale. So why should we be happy that Goldsmith has called off the dogs?

The original deal struck with the Saudis in the 80s (basically a swap of British armaments for Saudi oil) has been worth a staggering £40bn to us over the past two decades and the deal currently being jeopardised by the investigation is worth a huge £6bn. Sadly the deals have been greased along with bribery to the tune of tens of millions of pounds. The SFO's investigation into this is likely to sour these trade relations, with Saudi royals and government officials unlikely to be pleased at being called into court to discuss backhanders and callgirls.

Worsening trade relations with Saudi Arabia would mean a squeeze on Britain's oil supplies at a terrible time. China has its claws into most oil suppliers, particularly emerging ones in Africa, so we need to hold onto as many established sources as possible. Our other big source of oil - Russia - is freely using its oil as a tool to put political pressure on customer countries, having already cut off supplies to neighbours such as the Ukraine and openly stolen back the Sakhalin reserves from Shell. And with the recent pollonium poisonings, diplomatic relations between the UK and Russia are strained - this is not the time to be handing them a stick with which to beat us.

But the collapse of this deal would mean more than a debilitating squeeze on the UK's energy supplies. The UK would be a double loser as this deal involves us offloading a surplus of jets we'd ordered but don't need any more. The loss of revenue flowing into the UK would be huge. The job losses at BAE and its suppliers could run into the tens of thousands. Britain would lose its position as a world leader in making things to blow people up (I know this doesn't sound desirable, but rather us than Russia).

And even if Saudi dignitaries and BAE executives were hauled before a judge and punished for their misdemeanors, the outcome would not be a transparent global arms trade free from corruption and backhanders. The Sauds - and other cash rich dictators looking for killing machines to spunk their wedge on - would simply trade with countries with less strictly puritanical attitudes to the arms trade. Such as France.

The Cabinet and Lord Goldsmith have done the right thing in securing Britain's oil supplies (for now) and safeguarding thousands of jobs. In an ideal world, the fat hypocrites running Saudi Arabia and the people in BAE who caved into their bribery demands would be brought to justice for their crimes. But in an ideal world, British cars would run on pompous armchair moralising, British homes would be heated by shrill leftwing histrionics and BAE's workers would be fed and clothed with condemnations of an excellent government. It's a shame they can't, because it's one resource we don't need to worry about running out of.

The Lebanon conflict and media manipulation: the final word

Israel's recent invasion of Lebanon (hey, it was recent when I started writing this) highlighted the starkly different ways Israel’s conflicts with its neighbours, and original tenants, are reported in British news compared with American.

While British news gave in depth analysis of the roots and history of the conflict, American news showed a 132 pound anal polyp resembling the baby Jesus that was removed from a Mexican woman. While British news showed interviews with disaffected Israeli bomber pilots who believed their orders were making them murderers, American news showed adverts for Arby's. While British news gave a frank account of the wholesale destruction wreaked on Lebanon by Israel, American news showed a woman who'd lost 38 stone. But was still as fat as fuck.

If only it were so. If American news anchors will insist on talking shit through teeth that can be seen from space, I'd far prefer the shit talk to be about inconsequential celebrity drivel rather than matters of life and death. Sadly, since 9/11 made Real News interesting to Americans, American news has tried to 'do' Real News, but flavoured in whichever way their owners wish and coloured with whatever slant they think is going to make them most popular with their flag waving audience.

This is never more apparent than when they are dealing with the grinding, eternal disputes between America's ally Israel and America's enemies Them Brown Fellers W' Tea-Towels On Them Head. American news applied its usual levels of rigorous objectivity, informed analysis and reasoned debate to covering the Israel/Lebanon conflict. Snotty national superiority aside (and when I criticise the zealous dental care routines of your news anchorpeople, you know I'm only jealous), the difference between American and British coverage was striking.

I caught an hour of CNN during the conflict. Much of that hour was spent with a grinning "Chuck Fadanoid" style reporter who was embedded with an Israeli artillery battery which was firing shell after shell over the border into Lebanon, a scenario sold to the viewer as plucky Israelis bravely fighting back against hordes of evil Muslim fanatics who were hell bent on their elimination. Other reporters showed the damage wreaked by Hizbullah's Katyusha fireworks in Haifa - scorch marks on walls, holes in cardboard, that kind of thing. "I only just got these curtains up, and now they're FUCKED" wailed one old woman in Hebrew. I think. Anyone basing their view of the conflict on American news reports would surely think that Hizbullah/Lebanon was the aggressor and had wreaked terrible devastation and death on Israel, and Israel merely responded in a limited and fair way to defend itself.

Another example of the lack of objectivity in US reporting was shown when, at the height of the conflict, photographs were published of Israeli children writing messages on bombs that would later rain down on Lebanese villages:

Israeli kids write messages on bombs headed for Lebanese kids:


Although the photographs caused uproar, as they were a clear indicator of the culture of hatred many Israeli children grow up in (Arabs apparently don't have a monopoly on indoctrination), right-wing commentators fell over themselves in a rush to excuse the situation. The children had spent many traumatised days in a bomb shelter, it was claimed. The children weren't writing hateful messages to the civilians who would be immolated by the bombs; they were writing messages to Hamas' anti-Israeli leader. Conniving anti-Israeli photographers had manipulated the situation and encouraged parents to let their children scribe hate mail onto WMDs. The bombs weren't really bombs at all, but made out of string, and the children were actually holographs. Of midgets.

(Whatever excuse you choose to swallow, the situation does not bode well for Israeli childcare safety standards. Apart from playing with primed explosive armaments in an area where enemy rockets regularly land with little warning, what other limb-threatening activities can toddlers expect on an Israeli play-date? Blindfold motorway frogger? Five-round Russian roulette? Tigerslapping? I'd rather send my kids to stay with Uncle Jacko than leave them in an Israeli daycare centre.)

Compare the media's excusing of these events with the footage of cheering Palestinians shown after 9/11. No caveats accompanied this footage, although I can think of many. The revellers hated America because it funds and arms Israel, which has kept them under a harsh military occupation for four decades. These people can’t scratch a living because their fruit rots at Israeli roadblocks. These people grow up hating the US and Israel because they're forced to live as refugees in pathetic slivers of their own land. Don't get me wrong; I was disgusted by the revelling too - there wasn't any booze, all the hot chicks had sacks on their heads and the potato salad looked like it had pineapple in it. But on balance, what self respecting Palestinian wouldn't cheer on a rare blow against their oppressors?

One of the events of the recent Israel/Lebanon conflict that drew most ire from the American media was the doctoring of images of the conflict that were distributed by Reuters.

Original pic:



Doctored pic:


To the American news media these were a classic example of left wing news providers with a chronic bias against America and Israel conducting an orchestrated campaign to damage Israel by exagerrating the death and destruction in Lebanon. The truth is much more mundane - they were the work of freelance photojournalist Adnan Hajj, and while the ultimate responsibility for checking the veracity of the pictures lies with Reuters, given the number of photographs they distributed and the pressure to get them to the media as quickly as possible, their apology for overlooking these few seems sincere. They instantly withdrew all 920 photographs by Hajj and initiated investigations into his other work. Hajj might have a personal bias against Israel, but I’d imagine that his motivation for the doctoring was a desire to file better pictures. I'm sure if there WAS a left wing conspiracy looking to smear Israel, they'd employ a less hamfisted Photoshopper.

And as with complaints about Hizbullah staging photographs of bodies being pulled from the rubble, the images themselves did not misrepresent the events. Much of Beirut WAS bombed to smithereens. There are thousands of undoctored photographs showing far more death, destruction and smoke than Hajj tried to paste in (see below). That's the real scandal.

Satellite photos prove Beirut really was pretty fucked, it wasn't ALL slapdash photoshopping:



Ironically, these few doctored images have been some of the best propaganda that Israel has had in the whole conflict. Not that they need it – the Israeli government has a sophisticated, well funded and well connected department to ensure that their side of conflict is easily available to the media. Matthias Gebauer, a journalist who spent time in Tel Aviv covering the Israel/Lebanon conflict, recounts his experiences with Israel’s Government Press Office in his article, “News on a Platter”.

While none of it will shock anyone familiar with the sophisticated media relations employed by governments in Western countries, the details make interesting reading. The Press Office offers ideas for stories to journalists, busses journos out to visit sites of Hizbullah rocket attacks, interview victims and film them in carefully staged scenes – leafing through the family photo album, for example. Experts are provided who are briefed to give snappy soundbites for the journalist’s convenience. Lunch is provided. In fact, everything is provided except for the stamp of integrity that viewers assume must be there in a CNN report.

Which goes some way to explaining the American news media’s bias towards Israel. Why go out of your way to dig out sources and stories that haven’t been vetted by the Israeli government or find news that will be unpalatable to your audience and advertisers, when everything is provided to make it easy for you to quickly file a story that will tug at your viewer’s heartstrings?

Fair enough – as Gebauer points out, propaganda is a part of every war. Israel’s is sophisticated enough to be palatable to the West. However, Hizbullah’s propaganda shows the same level of modernity and sophistication as their baked-bean-tin-stuffed-with-match-heads rockets. For example, a series of now notorious images of ‘Green Helmet Dude’ suggested that he paraded corpses pulled from the rubble for the benefit of photographers who gathered around, asking him to adopt dramatic poses such as running for the ambulance, or holding the corpse to the heavens.

Green Helmet Dude



Differences in time stamps for photographs of these incidents led to accusations that Hizbullah were not just milking genuine situations for their anti-Israeli propaganda value, they were also completely staging incidents by transporting dead children to be used as props in fake rescues for the benefit of the photographers who were complicit in the events. This may well be the case, as Hizbullah are widely reckoned to use children and civilians as human shields to protect their troops and armaments; with such an attitude to civilian life it seems entirely possible that they would use the corpses of their human shields as propaganda tools. However, I’d want better proof than photograph time stamps. With the globe trotting, time-zone hopping nature of photojournalism, I’d expect discrepancies in time stamps between photographers who perhaps had not reset the clocks on their cameras.

I’m waiting for some right-winger to suggest Hezbollah killed the child themselves to use as a prop in their propaganda, but perhaps even Michelle Malkin realises that Hezbollah’s armaments would be ineffective against a baby at point blank range.

Some American news commentators have said that because the same old wailing woman popped up in front of so many scenes of carnage, she must be the old-wailey-woman version of Green Helmet Dude – bussed out by Hezbollah to wail convincingly for conniving photographers. However, there is good evidence that she is just an example of the culture of ‘professional mourners’ that goes back millennia in the Middle East.

Old Wailing Woman


Because bodies decompose so quickly in the heat and the funeral party wants to get the event out of the way before the Israeli army start using the coffin bearers for target practice, funerals in the Middle East often take place just hours after the death. Because cousin Ali might not be able to get the express mule, it’s customary in the Middle East for families to hire professional mourners to make up the numbers and beef up the grief. It’s even in the Bible. “In every square there shall be lamentation, and in every street they shall cry, Alas! Alas! They shall summon the farmers to wail and professional mourners to lament” (Amos 5:16, apparently). Yes, along with inviting tramps in for dinner and refraining from arse-sex, it’s actually proper Christian protocol to have old women wailing professionally at funerals.

Anyway, why would Hezbollah go out of their way to find an old, wailing woman and position them in front of the cameras? Old wailing women are ten a shekel in the Middle East. They build houses out of them and use them as firewood. And even if all the right-wing commentators’ most paranoid fantasies about Hezbollah’s media manipulation are true, to me the ‘Green Helmet Dude’ and ‘Wailing Crone’ incidents just show the desperate ineptitude of Hezbollah’s attempts to get their side of the story told in the West.

Besides, there’s a very big elephant in the room, and it’s shaped like a dead baby. Even if the photos are staged, even if the photographers posed the rescuers for a more dramatic shot, even if the wailing woman was deep down not really that arsed about all the destruction, even if Green Helmet Dude isn’t a rescuer at all but an animatronic bearded puppet on loan from the Tehran Institute of Infidel Hoodwinking, even if the corpse had been kept in a beer cooler and couriered in from another location, it’s still an innocent child, dead at the hands of the Israeli military. This is the real tragedy, repeated some 1,200 times across Lebanon, along with the serious wounding of 3,600 civilians and the destruction of vast swathes of homes, roads, factories and infrastructure to the value of $3.5bn. It’s to the eternal shame of American media that they present the only tragedy as being the 44 civilian deaths in Israel.

PHOTOSHOPPEN IS VERBOTEN, YA???

I haven't had time to talk about Hizbullah's amateurish attempts at propaganda or the doctoring of a couple of photographs distributed by Reuters coz I've been in Belgium ROCKING OUT in snakeskin spandex:





But I will very soon.

http://s76.photobucket.com/albums/j37/lkearse/Pukkelpop/

Lebanon

One man’s true and shocking account of a boring peace march in London.

One of the unheard tragedies of the current Israel-Lebanon conflict - a horror that has gone unreported in the media and passed without comment from even the most hysterical of the human rights brigade - came to pass on Saturday. Never mind the pain and suffering inflicted upon innocent Lebanese civilians or the hardships endured by the tens of thousands of refugees. In order to voice my objections to Israel's annihilation of much of Lebanon, I was forced to rub shoulders with, and breathe in the musky odours of, the crowd of wet lipped pinkos, terrorist apologists, besandalled Marxists, shrill dumpy feminists, demented Islamists, anti American birkenstocktards (cheers Varmint), self loathing Jews, sanctimonious student hairballs and general stinking hippy twats. I shouldn't have to do that. I'm virtually a yuppie, for fuck's sake. It was horrendous. It was my Holocaust.

The marchers tended to be split into defined groups, each carrying a big banner proclaiming their specific cause. Some of these were clearly ironic - "The Islamic Human Rights Commission". Yeah! Think you should maybe wave that banner in a Muslim country, buddy... Some of them were the usual suspects who turn up at EVERY demonstration and try and turn it around to their cause... "War in Lebanon is a British Working Class Issue" inexplicably shouted the British Communist's placards, though none of the communists looked like they'd done much work for a while that didn't involve collecting dole cheques. Some were anarchists, closely followed by some non-anarchists who were waiting for anarchy to rein so that they could boot in the anarchists without getting arrested. And some of them had clearly got lost on a completely unrelated march a few months previously and were still walking around looking for their minivan - "Reinstate Sacked Gate Gourmet Workers" read one large banner, I shit you not.

All in all, it was hard to resist the urge to carry a sign saying 'Golf Sale' or 'Thai Buffet £3' and answer the chants of 'What do we want?' with shouts of 'Cheaper car insurance'. The only thing that stopped me (apart from the well documented humourlessness of your average Islamic fundamentalist, some of whom turned up too) was the fact that my voice would've rung out with embarrassing clarity over the chanting. I've heard more righteous passion and rage from agoraphobic wallflowers trying to get everyone to sing happy birthday.

Actually, it was fun, despite not living up to the newsreels of 60's protests I've seen (there was no free lentil stew and I didn't see any painted tits or beefy cops whaling on students with big sticks). The only things I had to worry about were accidentally walking behind a big banner saying something like "Gay Muslim Association Says Drop George Michael's Pants Not Bombs!" (knowing my luck it would appear on the front page of the Guardian with my grinning mug next to it), or walking too close to the more loopy elements of the march who were shouting 'WE ARE ALL HIZBULLAH!!!'. (Given that Israel has been bombing UN outposts, ambulances and minivans full of children on the suspicion of being Hizbollah, standing next to people with tea towels on their heads who are loudly proclaiming themselves to be members is positively suicidal - instead I edged away from them shouting "I'm not!" into the skies around me for the Mossad satellites and drones to see).

And you can see why I had to do it. Picture the scene. There's a country in the middle east that's a stable democracy, with a thriving economy and an informed and moderate population who are generally in favour of peace and freedom. An oasis of liberty and prosperity in a desert of dictatorships, Koran bashing fundamentalism and dire poverty. We'll call this country 'Lebanon'.

It's right next to another country which was created by the West 60 years ago on disputed land. Since then, it's made a name for itself by stealing more land and keeping the Palestinian residents of the land under brutal military oppression - a modern apartheid. Their land stolen, their economy stifled, their homes bulldozed, humiliated by roadblocks, traumatised by bombs and incursions, dependent on foreign aid, the Palestinians have eked out a miserable existence for the past 40 years. This country has even erected a big wall to keep the Palestinians out. We'll call this country 'Israel'.

Unfortunately, Lebanon is also home to a terrorist organisation (who are funded by fundamentalists in other countries) which, in sympathy with the Palestinians, has been firing crappy homemade rockets into Israel.

What do you think an appropriate course of action would be? Maybe give assistance to the security forces in that country so that they can rein in the terrorists? Maybe arrange for a beefed up UN force to go in and prevent the terrorist organisation from operating? Maybe stop shipments of blue touch paper and Swan Vespas from entering Lebanon so that the Hizbos can't light their rockets? Or is the best course of action to annihilate the infrastructure and economy of the country, killing hundreds of innocent people and greatly weakening its government and security forces so that they can't deal with the terrorists?

Unless you've been reading a paper that starts with 'Daily' and ends with 'Mail', you'll know that Israel chose the latter option. (If you do read the Daily Mail, you'll know that Princess Diana is still dead). An invasion hasn't been so badly thought out since Rumsfeld thought it would be a good idea to dismantle Iraq's security forces and replace them with fresh recruits, in one fell swoop ensuring that not only were there tens of thousands of aggrieved hard nuts ready to join the ranks of the insurgents, but also that the thin blue line between them and violent anarchy was a bunch of easily corruptible seventeen year olds with three week's training and shoes that didn't fit. Nice one, Rummy. Nice one, Olmert.

In their effort to crush the terrorist threat, nothing is being left standing in large swathes of Lebanon. Bridges are being bombed in case Hezbos try to take drugs under them. Roads are being bombed in case Hezbos try to cross them. Factories are being bombed in case anyone in Hizbollah gets a job driving a forklift. (A paper tissue factory was destroyed last week - if Hezbollah can't blow their noses, they're powerless!). Power stations are being bombed so that Hizbollah can't watch Pop Idol. Red Cross ambulances are being bombed in case they are treating anyone injured in all that bombing. UN outposts are being bombed, probably at the insistence of John Bolton. Leaflets are dropped on towns hours before the bombs rain down warning Lebanese to get their families together and leave, but not to leave in a truck, minivan or motorbike, as these will be considered Hizbollah and bombed. In fact, anyone trying to flee on anything other than a Segway is considered a potential terrorist.

Punishing the Lebanese people for the actions of terrorists among them is ridiculously unfair. For decades, Lebanon has been the field upon which other people's battles have been fought. The current battle is really between Israel/US (who give Israel close to $3bn a year in military aid) and Syria/Iran (who give Hizbollah some baked bean cans and gunpowder to make their rockets). But there is much evidence to show that the Lebanese people don't even like Syria and Iran. Last year Lebanese marched in their hundreds of thousands in protest at the Syrian assassination of former Leb leader Rafik Hariri and drove Syria's troops out of Lebanon. And the Lebanese have become used to a European level of personal freedom and fun so are hardly hankering for a grim Iranian theocracy.

Giving a collective punishment to the civilians who have no connection to and little sympathy for Hizbullah is also utterly counter productive. Every person who lost a brother or a home will have a vested interest in wreaking a terrible revenge on Israel. It will drive people into the arms of Hizbollah and give them legitimacy. All through the Arab world, outrage will show in support for Hizbollah. Worse, Israel has unthinkingly destroyed the main thing that stops terrorism - prosperity. The Lebanese economy has been bombed back to the stone age. Well, the early 80s anyway. The people who have lost everything have nothing to lose now. It is also terrible PR for Israel. There can't be many people outside of Tel Aviv or the US who haven't been appalled at the indiscriminate destruction, dead children, bloodied grandmothers, acres of collapsed tower blocks. These images will dog Israel for decades.

Israel is also going to steal more land from Lebanon; ostensibly as a buffer zone between Hizbollah and Israel. Israel has stolen Arab land after nearly all their wars, with some justification - they need a buffer zone free of people who would launch rockets at them. Which seems fair enough, considering that the wars tend to be started by Israel's much larger Arab neighbours with the sworn purpose of annihilating Israel, driving all the jews into the sea and burning every existing copy of Yentl. After valiantly repelling the invaders, Israel grabs some of their land. It's not because they're "dirty thieving hooknoses", it's so that they can defend themselves with buffer zones and clean borders.

Seem fair. Except Arab organisational skills have been in sharp decline since the last time a bunch of them got together to build a pyramid. Anyone who's holidayed in an Arab country will know that if they organise land invasions like they organise a continental breakfast, the Arab armies could be repelled by a troop of Down's Syndrome kids armed with tennis rackets, who would have to do little but watch and ask for hugs as the Arabs wheeled their tanks in circles, taking accidental pot shots at each other and catching their beards in the tracks. Taking the barrel after shooting the fish it contains isn't right. Particularly when Israel's theft of Arab land is the main justification for Arab aggression.

Hizbollah are doing little to show Arab warmongers have improved. Yesterday they launched 245 rockets into Israel, wounding three goats and knocking over a dustbin. In fact they've been firing around 100 rockets a day into Israel for the past three weeks, with the express intention of killing ALL Israelis, and have killed exactly 19 civilians. Israel have been bombing Lebanon with the intention of NOT killing any civilians and have killed around 900 civilians. Personally, I'd rather have Hizbollah trying to kill me than Israel trying not to kill me.

As I write this, Israel's troops are flooding across the border into Lebanon. Hizbollah, who have spent the last few years preparing tunnels and ambushes, will fight back, possibly even chipping the paint on some of the Israeli tanks. Will peace come to Lebanon? Pahahahahaha!!!!!! But let's hope so, because I don't want to have to rub shoulders with the peaceniks again.

The photograph has been staged to exaggerate how dead the kid is

What do you see when you see these photos? Do you see a dead child? Or do you see a photo opportunity, cynically staged to provide anti-Israeli propaganda?
















Giving a valuable insight into the nasty, blinkered idiocy and moral relativism of the right wing mind, this guy sees the anti Israeli propaganda machine whirring away. The photos are staged; the people removing the bodies from the rubble pose them for the camera in an attempt to discredit Israel. The press photographers are complicit in this propaganda by taking these pictures and passing them off as natural scenes. Everyone's out to get Israel.

Huh?

There's a very big elephant in the room that the right wingers are ignoring. What I see in the pictures is a dead child, killed by Israeli bombs, being pulled from the rubble of a house. Whether or not the child is being held up so that a photographer can get a better shot is completely immaterial - the point is that Israel is killing hundreds of children in Lebanon. If the photograph had been underexposed, or from a bad angle, that wouldn't change the facts.

I expect professional photographers to take good pictures. It is not manipulation of a situation to get someone to pose for a better composition. If I was pulling the corpse of a Scottish child from the rubble, I might want to show the world what tragedy had been visited upon my people. Unlike Israel, the Lebanese can't afford PR campaigns and don't have huge influence in Western media and government. The truth is the only propaganda the Lebanese have. To use dead children as props you first need dead children.

You can't jail me - I'm too posh

After weeks of handwringing and condemnation from the media, politicians and human rights groups, the death of Enron head honcho Ken Lay and then the 'suicide' of key witness Neil Coulbeck (tied his hands behind his back and shot himself 3 times in the head), the NatWest 3 are finally being extradited to the US to face the music in a US courtroom.

The extradition of the fraudsters has made unlikely bedfellows of the Lib Dems, the Tories and Liberty, the human rights group who are usually to be found accusing the police of arresting people before they've blown themselves up on public transport. The Lib Dems, loopy bedwetting apologists that they are, believe that the government should be doing more to prevent British criminals from being extradited to face justice for their crimes. The Tories, corrupt old boys and friends of the rich that they are, believe that the men should be let off because they’re rich, posh and mates with the Tories (David Bermingham is a neighbour of calculatedly loveable faux buffoon Boris Johnson, adulterer and Tory MP).

The government is under fire from all sides. Even some of the government's own backbenchers have been whining about the supposed injustice of the extradition. Businesmen have marched through London to protest it. Every newspaper has run editorials attacking the government. The Daily Mail briefly stopped banging on about the need for blacks and teenage burglars to be hung to demand Blair lets these crooks stay in Britain. And human rights organisations such as Liberty have jumped on board with the same message. I guess they can’t find any evidence of people imprisoned indefinitely without trial in Guantanamo Bay, or environmental campaigners tortured in China, or dissidents incarcerated in Russia, so they’ve had to move on to defending the rights of rich fraudsters who can afford the finest lawyers and PR campaigns and have enormous political influence.

The government seems to be the only bunch of people taking a sensible stand on this issue. Calling these men the NatWest 3 makes them sound like the Guildford 4 or the Birmingham 6 – innocent men framed for heinous crimes by corrupt law enforcement looking for a scapegoat. These men are not innocent bystanders caught up in Enron's machinations. They are guilty as sin. Basically, they were involved in setting up the complex network of companies and subsidiaries that were used to mask debts and falsely inflate profits at Enron and led to its inevitable collapse. As if this wasn’t bad enough, the men then went on to recommend that NatWest sell its stake in one of these companies for far less than market value. The men then bought NatWest’s stake and sold it for a cool $7.3 million profit – a textbook case of insider trading. Thieving on top of defrauding.

Their defence doesn’t revolve around innocence. They claim that because they were operating in the unregulated Cayman Islands, they could operate as they pleased. And as evidenced by the campaigning from all sides of the political spectrum, from posh Tory capitalists to shrieking lefty humanitarians, there’s a great deal of public support for them. Surely they were smart men bending the rules to compete in a ruthless marketplace? Surely they rewarded themselves with a sliver of money from the companies they administered?

Are you people nuts? These men did not commit a victimless crime. When Enron collapsed, thousands of faultless Enron employees lost their retirement savings. Thousands more investors suffered on a smaller scale as many banks, governments and pension funds around the world had some kind of exposure to Enron – you and I probably lost some money, albeit indirectly. And the fallout across the stock market was felt wider still as investors lost confidence in other companies. The $7.3 million that they siphoned off from their dodgy deals wasn’t magicked up from nowhere – it was stolen from the pension fund of YOUR GRANDMOTHER, who will now have to mortgage her soul to some Carol Vorderman fronted sharks if she wants to have more than one bar on the fire this winter.

Enron is a slur on capitalism. These men didn’t create wealth, they destroyed it. If every company behaved like Enron, we’d revert to state owned socialism in a jiffy. Something for the Tories, supposedly the party of wealth creation, to consider as they condemn Labour for doing the right thing and sending these men to face justice. The sooner these men are rotting in Folsom Prison with the bleeding ringpiece blues, the better.

PS: I know spectra have wavelengths, not sides, but it just doesn’t sound right.

A bit Pete Tong

Ha! I had a DJ slot at a festival I went to at the weekend in Wales. With the help of my mate Martin and Adobe Audition, I created a mash up of the best coke rock the 80's had to offer, so when I got to the pardy I just had to put my bandana on, stick in the CD and then dick around with knobs and turntables like I knew what I was doing. Here's a small excerpt (check out the bit where, while dicking around to make it look like I'm DJing for real, I accidentally spin the CD turntable and make the song go 'woowurp')....

Does Israel actually want peace?

It appears that Israel's removal of settlements from the Gaza Strip was not a gesture of peace, or a recognition that the Palestinians perhaps deserve a little bit of land to scratch out a living on. Given recent events it's clear that Israel just moved its citizens out of the way so that they wouldn't get hurt when Israel started lobbing even more bombs, bullets, tanks and bulldozers into the Gaza Strip.

Gaza is basically just a big refugee camp, one of the most densely populated places in the world where for 40 years people have lived in hopeless poverty under bombardment from their well armed and funded neighbours. Israel has not lost large tracts of economically important land; withdrawing from Gaza was a token political gesture, although it was still unpopular with the loud minority of ultra religious Jews who think the whole of 'Greater Israel' belongs to them and oppose a two-state solution. (Thank fuck it doesn't say anything in the Old Testament about Dumfries and Galloway being part of the Promised Land).

Although incidents such as the bombing of a family picnic have been going on for weeks, their awful ubiquity hardly making them newsworthy, events over the past few days have taken Israel's oppression of the Palestinians to a whole new level. Bridges, power stations and water supplies have been demolished, troops and tanks are reoccupying Gaza and 64 members of the Palestinian government, Hamas, have been taken hostage.

Israel's actions are ostensibly a response to the kidnapping of an Israeli soldier by Palestinian militants. They're demanding the return of the hostage in return for the Hamas MPs; the bombings are punishing the Palestinian civilians for the kidnapping and for homemade rocket attacks on Israel. Which does sound fair until you realise that hundreds of Palestinian women and children are held unlawfully in Israel's jails, Israel's military has been blowing the heck out of Gaza and many times more Palestinians than Israelis have been killed in the conflict.

I reckon Israel's incursion and bombings are just a ploy to continue the conflict. The death of Yasser Arafat removed a big corrupt belligerent blockage to negotiations and peace. In recent days Hamas has for the first time recognised the right of Israel to exist - a big step for an Islamic militant organisation previously committed to the annihilation of Israel, and a big step towards negotiation and peace.

So with all the pieces in place for Israel and Palestine to move towards peace, why is Israel acting increasingly warlike? The only answers I can come up with are that:

1) Zionists have too much control in Israel and their government's aim is to take over the West Bank and Gaza with the Palestinians killed or banished to Jordan, so negotiation and peace has no purpose as it would actually take them further away from their goal of a Greater Israel.

2) The Israeli government has realised that in the current climate the main obstacles to this plan (the West) look kindly upon states that take a hard line against supposed terrorists, so it's now or never to up the ante, have a big war (which would be a foregone conclusion: Israel's military might against Palestinian's homemade fireworks) and take over the West Bank and Gaza and kill/banish the Palestinians.

I might be wrong, but if I am, please explain Israel's actions...

Al Qaeda Peanuts

Saw United 93 at the Islington Vue last night. What an amazing film. Even my girlfriend liked it, and she usually only likes romnoncoms about some combination of weddings/Jennifer Aniston/haircuts/gayness/shoes. I was on the edge of my seat throughout, more tense than Craig Charles when his chauffer got out to buy him some porn, as the horrific events unfolded on the screen in front of me - not just the demented violence of the hijackers, but also the confusion and ineffectiveness of the military response. In all likelihood, those brave passengers prevented the White House from being scythed down like the Twin Towers.

But about 40 minutes into the film, a man of Middle Eastern appearance, wearing thin rimmed round glasses that made him look like the lead terrorist in the movie, walked in and sat in the row behind me. Soon after he opened a packet of peanuts (was this a reference to the preferred snack of the airline passenger?) and started eating them loudly, crinkling the packet.

During the quiet moments - for example, when the on-screen passengers were tearfully gasping out last desperate goodbyes and 'I love you's to the pizza delivery boys and donut shop staff they would never see again - this crinkling really got QUITE FUCKING ANNOYING. So much so that the man seated in front of the Middle Eastern nutmuncher complained.

This triggered a barrage of abuse as vehement and fervid as any exhortation by a Kalshnikov waving fundamentalist on CNN. Except it was in a fey English accent and concerned snacks, instead of being in Arabic and concerning death to infidels. "It's a cinema! You're allowed to eat peanuts in the cinema!". The peanut eater clearly wanted confrontation so that he could whine like a Big Brother contestant and ruin the film for everyone.

Which got me thinking: have Al Qaeda given up on breaking down Western civilisation by doing the odd big bomb? Have they instead replaced it with a 'death by a thousand cuts' strategy of causing loads of incidents of minor irritation that will build up and fray the fabric of society until the Muslim brotherhood can take over?

With this in mind, we didn't let the terrorist win. We were all soon absorbed in the film again. And if he'd got out a packet of Kettle Chips, I was ready to shout "LET'S ROLL!" and rush him.

Japan Whaley Killer

Whales: intelligent endangered leviathans of the deep, or big cows that live in the sea?

That's the question absolutely nobody seems to be asking as Japan and other pro-whaling nations seek a return to whaling following a long lobbying campaign and sneaky techniques such as 'buying' poorer country's votes. Instead, predictably, newspapers are awash with emotive headlines - "The shadow of slaughter hangs over whales", shrieked the Observer a few days ago.

Apparently whales are just too intelligent and rare - even when there's loads of them - and whaling is too cruel for it to even be contemplated. I've got a problem with this. First off - how do we know that whales are intelligent? They could be stoopider than dormice - what tests have environmentalists carried out to empirically prove the intelligence of whales? Swim for a bit? Honk like Enya? Natural constraints would seem to limit whales' ability to show their putative Kasparov-esque intellect.

Natural history has shown that intelligence - or any other resource intensive physical attribute - evolves only when there is a clear evolutionary benefit that makes those with that attribute more successful than those without it. Human intelligence evolved so that we could use tools and work in complex social groups. I can't see the evolutionary pressures that would require whales to develop a comparable intelligence. And the things that whales do - swim, eat plankton and honk - are all done by much of the animal world. We don't attribute geese with intelligence because they migrate in groups; nor thrushes because they sing to each other.

Saying that whaling is more cruel than pig farming is highly subjective. If anything, whaling seems preferable - the whale lives a healthy life in the wild, before spending a few painful hours being harpooned and butchered. A pig, on the other hand, is reared in a concrete stall under artificial light, fed a diet of processed fishmeal, antibiotics and hormones in incredibly stressful conditions. And while the slaughter process for pigs may not be as overtly cruel as harpooning, pigs do not willingly hurl themselves through the abattoir doors and onto the butcher's blade.

As for rarity - if whales were so rare we wouldn't be able to find them and chuck spears at them. There must be a level of harvesting that is sustainable. Environmentalists tend to focus on a few animals that they can sentimentalise or anthropomorphise (seals, pandas, whales) but ignore other equally deserving but less cute species. A third of amphibians are at risk of extinction due to their porous skins which makes them vulnerable to pollution and climate change. But they are of no interest to environmentalists, for obvious reasons. Do you think the average environmentalist is going to be able to get a dippy college chick to rub them off through their hemp trousers if they fix a steely gaze through their dreadlocks and say, "I help out at a newt sanctuary" instead of, "I'm searching for the Orca"?

Anyway, Britain unsustainably harvests dozens of wild species - cod and skate are two. Maybe we should put our own house in order before we start telling other nations what they can and can't harvest. The whole anti-whaling campaign reeks of cultural imperialism. In this country we don't eat whales or dogs and are disgusted by people that do. But Hindus consider cows sacred - how would we react if they tried to ban our beef farming?

Mind you, according to Japanese research, consumption of whalemeat in Japan has fallen so dramatically in recent years that whalers are throwing their catches back into the sea. Unlike whales, Japanese people are intelligent and know full well that whale meat tastes crappy and makes your bum big. As they eat less whalemeat, fewer whales will be caught.

Perhaps Greenpeace could step aside and let good ol' market forces put an end to whaling?

Do not treat

In honour of the 'Donor Card' (a card carried in your wallet that lets hospitals know that your organs can be whipped out while you're unconscious and sold to rich Americans for use as anti-ageing products or comedy ashtrays. I think.), I've created this card for people who disagree with medical animal testing and support the groups who are slowing down such research.




So if you're one of these nutjobs, print this out and put it in your (plastic) wallet. Wouldn't want you benefitting from animal research when you're trying to stop treatments being developed that could be saving people right now.

Coming soon: what happens when Leo presents these cards to the nutjobs who man the anti vivisection stalls in Oxford Street and Covent Garden? I bet it all ends in demented women shrieking 'PERVERT!' at me again. I can hardly wait.

Also coming soon: an A4 PDF for you to print out and give to the animal rights nutjobs in your neighbourhood.

Heather Mills McCartney jokes

In the absence of anything better, here are a couple of jokes about the break up of Heather Mills and convicted drug felon Paul McCartney.

OK, first one:

A miner in Africa has an accident and loses his leg.

He says to a friendwho comes to see him; "I'm f**ked, who's going to want a one legged gold digger?"

His friend instantly replies, "try Paul McCartney"

And this effort:

Paul McCartney apparently bought Heather a plane for Christmas.

Her leg's never been smoother.

Wahey. On the subject of Heather being a gold digger/shameless self publicist, I notice that on her website she has a list of 'facts' debunking the nasty things that have been said about her - http://www.heathermillsmccartney.com/factfiction.php.

First up is FICTION: "Heather is a publicity seeker"
Heather's answer to this starts "FACT: Myself and Anya Noakes (Heather’s publicist) receive..."

Surely a PUBLICIST's job is to PUBLICISE. The fact that Heather employs a PUBLICIST implies that she is a publicity seeker. Not the first thing to mention when you're lamely trying to deny that you are a publicity seeker. Honestly. SHE MUST NEVER BE QUEEN!!!!

"From my cold, dead foot..."

Evidence for the lunacy of America's liberal (small L) gun laws is not hard to find. Statistics clearly show that America, whose gun laws are as slack as its citizen's bingo wings, has far higher per capita homicide and gun related death figures than countries with more sensible gun laws (pretty much every other country bar Somalia).

However, statistics are a little boring and can be hard to understand, particularly if you're the kind of redneck chump who thinks automatic weapons should be freely available. And as 78.9% of analysts know, statistics are also open to fantastical interpretations - witness the regular claims by pro-gunners that murders/gun crime/deformed births are more prevalent in countries with tight gun control than in the good ol' US of A. They're not, and we're not overrun with burglaries and muggings because we're defenseless against the swarming hordes of criminals that flourish in our soft society, preying on us at will without fear of a cold barrel pressed against our necks. But if you turn the statistics upside down, soak them in vinegar, bury them in the garden for a month then chuck them in the bin and make up some new ones, you can pretend that statistics prove anything you want.

Pro gunners also have some laughably convoluted explanations as to why the stratospherically high homicide and firearm related death rates in the US are not at all due to the proliferation of these weapons made possible by slack gun laws. You might remember, for example, the Columbine gun store owner saying that the problem that fateful day wasn't that the children had automatic weapons, it was that the teachers weren't armed and able to deal with the situation. Mmm-hmm.

With this in mind, the video (click here) gives a pretty graphic illustration of how dipshit pro-gunners are. A Drug Enforcement Administration agent - a highly trained policeman (you'd hope) - shoots himself in the foot while giving a talk to some schoolkids about how dangerous guns are. All very amusing, but a few seconds before he was waving his gun around his head. That could easily have resulted in a kid's head bursting like a pumpkin, rather than Jar Jar Binks with a limp.

This being America, hoppity-cop is suing his employers, not for being so stupid as to hire him in the first place, but because the leaking of the video has made him a target for "jokes, derision and ridicule". Well no shit Sherlock, but you're kind of culpable in the whole ridicule thing, what with shooting yourself in the foot and all. If you worked for a butchers and you got hurt trying to shag the bacon slicer I don't think you'd have much of a claim going there either. He also claims that it is no longer possible for him to give "educational motivational speeches and presentations". What, you want to do your other foot? Or maybe take out a couple of 4th graders too this time? Don't sue - thank your stars you're not serving out a sentence for manslaughter.

But yeah: guns. They're fun to fire and if you REALLY believe your fellow countrymen are all bandits and thieves I suppose there must be some sort of (misplaced) warm feeling of security in knowing you've got a glock under your pillow. But if they're not safe in the hands of America's highly trained policemen, how can they be safe in the pudgy mitts of its belligerent, paranoid and THICK redneck citizens (sorry Mrs H, not you obviously)? Seems the sensible thing to do would be to ban automatic weapons and handguns and tighten regulations on rifles and shotguns. Just a suggestion.

26 Foot Jobby!

Have you seen this? It's an artist who, with the help of the University of Michigan, a high fibre 'Metamucil' diet and a butt plugg, did a 26 foot jobby in a bowling alley! She evacuated the full length of her colon in one go! Fantastic!

A fellow blogger has done a little, um, muckraking and it transpires that the girl did it to punish her father, a prominent bowler who neglected his family to bowl at this alley and bowled two perfect games a few months before she layed her perfect cable. Now the alley made famous by her father is famous for another reason.

As ever, tragedy inspires high art.

I hope she was wearing non-marking soles. I’d hate to think she left dark streaks on the bowling lane.

http://intermaweb.net/index.php/2005/10/29/world-record-4-peristaltic-action

"I don't know much about art, but I'd smear that on my wall" - Bobby Sands

Show your support for medical testing on animals

Howdy folks,

I just want to bring to your attention a petition that has been set up for people to voice their support for medical testing on animals in the UK.

Medical testing on animals might be unpleasant, but anyone who has seen a friend or loved one suffer from an incurable disease such as cancer, leukemia or Alzeimer's will understand that the suffering of a few mice does not compare.

And although great progress has been made to develop alternatives to animal testing (such as cell cultures and computer models), in some situations animal testing is still required.

The UK has some of the highest welfare standards for animals in medical testing in the world. Contrary to what the anti-vivisectionist movement would have you believe, the vast majority of animals used in medical testing are not monkeys or fluffy puppies, but rats and mice. During our entire lives, medical research will use about 2 mice and half a rat to develop cures for us. If you care that much about mice, campaign against domestic cats. (Seriously! They're pointless and, as well as needlessly killing rodents, they have led to a serious decline in wild songbird populations in urban areas).

In recent years the anti-vivisectionist movement has been successful in slowing animal research by preventing laboratories from being built and terrorising people involved in medical research. Every pound spent on security is a pound that cannot be spent developing cures for diseases. It's wrong for a small group of extremists to force their ideology on the public like this.

Who do you think should make decisions regarding the development of medicines; the doctors and scientists who are experts in this field, or a bunch of hysterical miscreants who cannot think beyond their demented ideology and who think nothing of firebombing, physical attacks, death threats, paedophile smear campaigns and graverobbing to get their point across?

If you do not agree with medical testing on animals, there is a simple way to oppose it without affecting others. Refuse any medicines or treatments that have been developed using animal testing. Refuse antibiotics, anaesthetics and insulin. In fact, refuse pretty much any kind of medical treatment except for homeotherapy, acupuncture and faith healing (good luck if you get cancer or diabetes).

After all, it's hardly fair to reap the rewards of animal testing while slowing research that will provide cures for illnesses that other people suffer from. It would be akin to a vegetarian eating meat but forcing others not to.

Doctors and scientists don't want to test medicines on animals. They do it because they have to in order to cure illnesses that any of us could suffer from. Show your support for them by signing this petition.

www.peoplespetition.org.uk

There's also a SETI-type project that uses your computer's screensaver power to screen molecules for their cancer fighting potential: http://www.chem.ox.ac.uk/curecancer.html

COCK BIG!

I was out carousing in the hostelries of North London last Friday when my girlfriend, apropos of nothing, pointed at me and yelled "COCK BIG!". "Why thank you", I replied, "TITS NICE!" I yelled back, pointing at her chest. "No", she explained, "due to some trick of the light the words COCK BIG are displayed across your chest. And indeed they were, as this image shows:



Here's the culprit - the words "COCKTAILS" and "BIG CITY SNACKS" on the window with a street light behind them:



And here, for no reason, is a picture of me with some ill-advised facial topiary. I walked around with this bad boy on my face for about a week before I had to shave it off for a job interview (sadly the position wasn't lumberjack or gay mardi gras leader or I could've kept it). It was the best few days of my life. Men gave me new respect ("Dude..."), women threw themselves at me ("Tee hee hee! Please fuck us Mr Stone Cold Badass!") and children looked up at me in awe with tears in their eyes.
"Mummy", they'd say plaintively, "when I grow up can I be a stone cold badass sonofabitch like that hardass motherfucker there?" "Of course you can, honey".



I didn't get the job, btw.

"Genocide? Hilarious!" - Spectator ed

Came across this poem while researching a piece (or, depending on your point of view, pissing about on the internet) on Ken Livingstone's detractors and the rise of Swift Boat style right wing smear groups in the UK. BNP links...outrageous hypocrisy...mindnumbing pedantry (and not just from me this time!)...it's gonna be a good 'un, honest. But get a load of this - it was published in lame glossy Tory (tossy glory?) comment rag the Spectator last summer:

FRIENDLY FIRE

The Scotch – what a verminous race!
Canny, pushy, chippy, they're all over the place,
Battening off us with false bonhomie,
Polluting our stock,
undermining our economy.
Down with sandy hair and knobbly knees!
Suppress the tartan dwarves and the Wee Frees!
Ban the kilt, the skean-dhu and the sporran
As provocatively, offensively foreign!
It's time Hadrian's Wall was refortified
To pen them in a ghetto on the other side.
I would go further. The nation
Deserves not merely
isolation
But comprehensive
extermination.
We must not flinch from a solution.
(I await legal prosecution.)

James Mitchie
The Spectator 14 August

Can you believe it's calling for comprehensive extermination of the Scots? I'm sure the author would use humour as a get out clause, but there is a history of genocide by English against Scots, so this poem is equivalent to a German writing a poem jokily calling for the extinction of Jews, or an American tongue-in-cheekly calling for all blacks to be shackled and forced to pick cotton.

Anyway, regardless of the history of oppression, England today is run by Scots - the current Prime Minister is Scottish educated, the next one is more Scottish than Groundskeeper Willie and Scots remain over-represented in politics, engineering, medicine, acedemia, law enforcement, finance, the armed forces, science and voice overs for bread adverts. Oh, and we'll be having our tens of billions of pounds of North Sea oil back too, lest it 'undermine your economy' any further. How d'you like them haggis flavoured apples Mr Mitchie ya doss cunt? (as they say in Edinburgh)

Funnily enough I bought a copy of the Spectator to read on the way back from my hols. It was appalling - endless wibbling about how New Labour is dragging Britain into a second Dark Ages; dribbling old lech Rod Widdle pulling his dick out of whatever impressionable young temp he's left his wife for this week to pontificate on Iraq; investment advice for retired army Majors. The cover story? "What the Queen really thought of Diana". Jesus. By the time I got to the centrefold I was trying to choke myself to death on complimentary peanuts.

The Spectator is to the Daily Mail what Loaded is to Pregnant Asian Housewives; watered down right wing anti Labour/Diana conspiracy stories for people too embarrassed to buy the real thing. You might be wondering what I was doing buying such a mag in the first place, but there weren't any copies of the Economist left and a tit mag wouldn't have lasted past takeoff. Not a mistake I'll make again.

Australia: land of fun!!!

Howdy folks, sorrymy blog has been abit threadbare of late; I've been in Australia for a month. Couldn't miss the chanceto do a bit of white supremacist rioting or experience keyboards with malfunctioning space keys. So to fill the dead air, here are the emails I sent back home, if anyone's interested...

26/2/06 - Air cripples, extra meals, John's house smells like wet dog

Howdy folks, here safe and sound, I got into Melbourne last night fine and met John at the airport. Flight was fine but my passport fell out of my pocket when we got off in Singapore so I had to tan back to the plane and find it! That was a moment of panic for sure! Apart from that the flight was fine. I was knackered by the time I got on it as I got fairly drunk the night before with workmates/flatmates so I took a couple of valium before I got on at Heathrow - I was out like a light, didn't even notice the plane taking off, woke up somewhere over Europe drooling on myself!

I had a window seat for the flight from Vienna and there was an empty seat next to me so that was cool - I could stretch out and sleep. There was a really old woman on the aisle seat who was a wheelchair job - every time I went to the toilet she had to shakily get to her feet which I felt bad about, until I realised I could jump clean over her. The food was pretty good and they brought me extra meals when I asked! My bags got sniffed when I got to Australia because I had fruit in my bag which is not allowed but I managed to convince them I'd just been to a party where other people were eating fruit. So they didn'tstrip search me to see if I had vegetables in my a$$.

John's house and flatmates are cool, he's right near the centre of Melbourne. Went out for drinks with his mates last night but I was knackered so got the tram back about midnight. His mates are a laugh, one of them saw Dr Carl Kennedy;s band last week and got up on stage to sinfg with him! Going to do all the Neighbours stuff when Fermer gets here. The food here is really good, just went for a burger that came with a ton of salad, it's quite a hippyish place like Vancouver so the cafes all sell really healthy tasty food.

Just emailed a hostel in Cairns - heading up there on Wednesday. Can't wait to see some reef and jungle. There are dive boats that you live on for several days on the outer reef where all the really insane big fish and animals live so I'm going to try and do some of that. Going to try and get to the Whitsundays and Fraser Island maybe and definitely the Daintree rainforest and the Atherton Tablelands where cool caves etc are. It's good catching up with John but looking forward to seeing some wildlife and reef etc.

I forgot to make a list of people's email addresses so if I've left anyone off the list I hope they don't find out.

Hope everyone is having fun, speak to you soon, Leo

1/3/06 - Food

Howdy folks,

The food here is amazing. We've mostly been eating out and every meal has been soooo tasty. I got a burger the other day that was the size of my head and came in a huge foccacia with loads of cheese and bacon. I also had seafood pasta the other day with huge scallops, so fresh and tasty. They have McDonalds here and Burger King etc (BK is called 'Hungry Jacks', Aussie fact fans) but I'm amazed they do any business when you can get such good cheap food everywhere. John and I got a kilo of prawns from Victoria market yesterday and had them for dinner. So tasty.

The beer is really expensive though - London prices - and comes in silly little glasses instead of pints. So you wear out your shoes walking to and from the bar. Aussies here say it's so the beer doesn't get cold but beer in a pint glass doesn't get cold if you drink it fast enough. I reckon it's coz Aussies are lightweights.

The money here is huge! 50 cent coins are like manhole covers. Old people must love it here! I'm walking with a limp coz I have about a dollar in change in my pocket weighing my leg down.

Off to Cairns tonight, my cheapo flight doesn't land til 1am so I will no doubt wake everyone up at the hostel when I stagger in. Staying at the Dreamtime hostel. Dorming it so I can save my money for extreme radical diving which will be a bit of a pain; there's always someone in a dorm who starts crinkling plastic bags in their rucksack at 4 in the morning.

Went to St Kilda beach with John the other day. We didn't swim at the beach, just went and ersed around, got ice cream and went for a walk. Then we got drunk and John pulled a German girl.

Haven't heard from Watson - he stayed with John for a night when he got to Australia but then went walkabout. I'm guessing he's been butchered by a trucker. Or by a girl who is going to blame it on a trucker. Maybe he can't be bothered staying in touch with his oldest and dearest friends... That should guilt trip a response out of him.

Looking forward to Cairns. Then looking forward to Fermer getting here. It will be a top laugh. John's flatmate Ricko is off to the UK in a couple of weeks so I will meet up with him in London.

I have got to go get some food as I am starving.

Ryan, could you forward me Cat's email address please as I don't think I got it right.

Cheers everyone, Leo

3/3/06 - Snorkelling and barbies

Howdy,

Got a boat to the outer reef today for some snorkelling. Reef was fun - loads of cool coral, anenomes, crazy fish, giant clams etc. And sharks! Just reef sharks, probably no more than 6ft long but still cool as in the water. Saw one in the depths so dived down to follow it but it scooted off. Thought that was all I'd see but then later there were 3-4 of them at the surface, diving through clumps of seaweed - apparently schools of fish collect around the seaweed so the sharks dive through with their mouths open to catch them. Mental to watch in the water as if you squint they look like big sharks that are far away rather than small sharks that are close up. Got pics of them in and out of the water.

The water was kind of murky though which was a surprise after the crystal clear waters of Thailand. Maybe it is clearer on other parts of the reef. Went to an island on the reef too and we put the sails up for the return trip which was cool as, it was really windy so the boat was leaning right over in the water and spray was going everywhere, total Canada Cup mayhem.

Cairns is a hole although my hostel is nice, an oasis of fun amongst the auto repair shops and strip malls. Funniest thing - down on the beach there are signs saying beware of the crocs, don't go in water, don't gut fish etc, and one of them is right next to a kids playground! So either the threat from the crocs isn't that great, or they don't like their kids that much. Or maybe they don't like holidaymaker's kids.

So I'm getting out of Cairns to the rainforest for a few days canoeing biking n trekking Sun-Tues. Off on a pub crawl and to see some toad racing and some pish dance band called Kosheen tonight with some people from the hostel. So that should be fun.

All you can eat 6 dollar barbie on now got to go or my medium rare steek will be medium...

Cheers!

Leo

15/3/06 - Helicopter/dive mayhem!!!

Howdy folks,

What's the weather like? I get hot wearing a T shirt here. Just had 3 days on a boat and am swaying all over the shop. Few beers tonight should set my rudder straight. Did my advanced diving course which was cool; we did navigation, deep diving, night diving, naturalist (that's plants and animals, not diving in the buff), underwater photography etc. Was like toadally AYYY-summm dude, on one dive we saw loads of turtles, clown fish, massive maori wrass, reef sharks (big 'uns too! for reef sharks anyway) then saw this turtle that was seriously the size of a big dinner table, it was as long as me,absolutely mental, I didn't know turtles got that big. We dived some pretty good sites, much better than the places they take you on day trips. Saw squid,trigger fish, all sorts of stuff. Wish I'd done more diving now and less rainforest but that was cool too. Food on the boat was good too and you could eat as much as you wanted.

Was supposed to do 11 dives but only got to do 10, coz a woman got decompression sickness while we were waiting to jump in the water. Apparently she knocked her mask off under water then panicked and started swallowing water, then had to make an emergency ascent that made her ill. She looked rough when they brought her to the boat - blue face, white lips, face all contorted and moaning, but they gave her treatment and oxygen and she seemed pretty chipper when the fast boat came to take her to the helipad. Pretty chipper for someone who'd just COST ME A DIVE anyway. Half the divers already were in the water so got a full dive. Me and my buddy were ready to go but obviously weren't allowed in. The ill woman wasn't doing a course, her and her husband came along to do their own thing, she had had panic attacks before - I'm pretty annoyed that some numnuts who can't deal with something like a mask coming off thought it was OK to jeopardise everyone else's fun - if there'd been no heli, we would've had to take the boat back to Cairns.

Only got one more day in Cairns so looking to do something tomorrow with a couple of people from the diving. Rafting or skydiving hopefully, but rafting is dear and skydiving is weather dependent. Was going to get a boat up to the ribbon reefs in the north but my feet are flipper blistered and the sea is pretty choppy for snorkelling right now and there are strong currents. Can't dive coz flying the next day.

Talking of expensive leisure pursuits, before I went diving I spunked $250 up the wall on a helicopter ride out to the reef in a bout of financial profligacy that would make Julian blush. It was like toooaaddddaly aaayyyysumm too, dude - it wasatiny 4 man chopper, I got to sit next to the pilot and we flew over rainforest and mangroves, zooming over ridges in a James Bond opening sequences type manner, lots of 'OH SHlT!' moments. Landed on a pontoon out on the reef and there the fun stopped - we joined a day cruise of Japanese tourists who were snorkelling in a penned off bit of the reef (you weren't allowed outside) and the coral was all smashed from people standing on it or breaking bits off. Still the helicopter ride was mental! Worth the entrance fee alone.

Fermer got into Melbourne today - can't wait for the capers! Got a week there so will see about hiring a car and getting out of the city for a while. The road trip we did here was ace fun.

See you soon,

Leo

Cartoon Muslims offended by Muslim cartoons

What a week it's been for shameless, self serving hypocrisy. And I'm not talking about Lib Dem leader wannabe Mark Oaten lecturing us on family values in between mouthfuls of rent boy cock.

I'm talking about Abu Hamza, finally doing Halal porridge after years of fomenting religious extremism and violence just round the corner from where I'm sat typing. He'll be popular in chokey what with his extra ocular orifice and lack of hands to fight the bully rammers off with. He's even got a beard for the career criminals to hold on to while they pork his eyesocket, making him possibly the only fundamentalist Muslim cleric who'll let convicted burglars lube his eyehole up with marmalade and fuck it in return for three snouts. Now that's what I call a Jap's eye for an eye!

Boom boom! And, uh, if you're reading this and you happen to be a fundamentalist Muslim please don't kill me. Shit... I shouldn't be putting ideas into your head... Forget the killing thing altogether! Sheesh. All I'm doing is having fun. And if you think fun's a crime, you should fuck off. Enough about Abu Hamza being mouth-eye-ass-roasted by B-wing; the Lib Dem leadership candidates are getting too excited. Hamza's a hypocrite who cheated on his first wife with a HOOKER, despite preaching that "Every brothel is a target, everybody who endorses them is a target" . If you want to target anyone for bringing shame on Islam, start in your own house.

So yeah, that's the tenuous link with hypocrisy that I will try and hold this rant/excuse for eyefuck jokes together with. But hypocrisy wise, I'm also talking about the young fundamentalist Omar Khayam, who was so incenced by the cartoons that he dressed as a suicide bomber alongside people calling for more suicide bombings against Britain. Even when it was pointed out to him the pain his actions would have caused the families of victims of July's tube bombings, he remained unrepentant...until he realised that glorifying and inciting terrorist violence might breach his parole terms (they did, and he's since returned to prison). That's right, this man who thinks that British people should be punished under Islamic law ("DEATH TO THOSE WHO INSULT THE PROPHET!") because his god was gently mocked in Danish newspapers is a convicted crack dealer.

I think Islamic law has a pretty firm line on this kind of thing too. Iran executes thousands of drug dealers every year, alongside homosexuals, juvenile criminals, women who defend themselves against rape, political dissidents, and other such Islamosinners. Perhaps Omar might like to volunteer himself for Islamic punishment? Or is Islamic punishment only fit for non-Muslims? That's the kind of logic I'd expect from someone who thinks Brits should be beheaded because of cartoons in Danish newspapers.

His father, Taj Riffat, tried to excuse his son by claiming that it was all a Jewish conspiracy. 'Muslims are bridging the gap with the West. But because the Jewish lobby did not like that, they may have backed this. This may have been their conspiracy,' said Omar's father. While the more Macciavellian elements of the Jewish lobby - ie, most of it - are no doubt rubbing their hands with glee at the political capital they can glean from these events, I doubt they had a hand up your son's arse making him put the suicide bomber's jacket on.

The rest of London's protesters, with their chants of "WHOOOOOLALALALALALALAHH!!! DEATH TO THOSE WHO GENTLY MOCK ISLAM!!!!! ALLAH AKBAR!!! DOWN WITH LEGO AND LURPAK AND ACE OF BASE!!!! SHALALALALALALALEEE Mr Jones and me..." are laughable. Death to those who insult Islam? Gentlemen, with your rabid and hypocritical posturing you are insulting Islam far more deeply than a billion crappy Danish cartoons could ever hope to.

Mainstream Muslim leaders have also spoken out against the cartoons, despite themselves espousing far more odious views. The leader of the Muslim Council of Britain, Sir Iqbal Sacranie ("Sir" Iqbal Sacranie??? They give them out to anyone these days) has been investigated by the police for making homophobic comments in interviews, has previously given his backing to the Fatwa calling for the death of writer Salman Rushdie and last year boycotted a Holocaust memorial service. With rabid fundamentalists grabbing headlines with their ker-razy antics, you'd think mainstream Islam might be striking a more conciliatory tone.

There are also those organs who are printing cartoons mocking the Holocaust. Their point is that if freedom of speech reigns supreme, they should be allowed to mock mass genocide. This sounds like a load of shite to me. The Holocaust was a real thing that happened to real people, but Mohammed is a symbol of a made up thing called God. Religion is all a bunch of arse; it's all silly clubs for people who believe in made up stuff made. The Danish cartoons are equivalent to funny pictures of the tooth fairy. If Mohammed's that offended, I'm sure he could smite the cartoonists himself.

I'm also talking about the Danish imams who toured the Middle East whipping up religious fervour are hypocrites; disingenuously parading far more offensive caricatures (such as one of a praying Muslim being fucked by a dog) around the Middle East. They did this for personal gain; as they made the Muslim world angrier, support for the imam's fundamentalism grew. And they did this despite knowing that their fellow Muslims would surely die in the riots that would follow their furore, mainly trampled to death by each other.

We've seen this already in Palestine, where political leaders have preferred to aggravate the conflict (provoking attacks from Israel as well as engendering violent extremism from their own side) to strengthen their support (war leaders are popular leaders, eh Dubya?) when a more propitious approach would better serve the Palestinian people. But instead the leaders ignore rapprochement and wallow in the violence and pathos of military occupation. Similarly, the dictators of the Muslim countries allowed the Imams to tour with their cartoon furore, knowing that the rage and riots would deflect anger from their own oppressive regimes.

But hypocrisy is not an Islamic invention. The right wing press who, after fueling the fire by publishing and republishing the cartoons (which I would have no problem with if they were actually FUNNY), exploit the furore to attack multiculturalism. "Has multiculturalism failed?" blare right wing headlines, with scant regard for the effect that so many syllables will have on their knuckle-dragging readerships.

Has multiculturalism failed? Are these riots the inevitable consequence of allowing migrants to bring and nurture their customs and religions as they want? From my point of view, this has shown the success of British multiculturalism. Watching the riots on teevee, I experienced the bile rising in my throat as I should imagine most Londoners did. "Fuckin crazy muthafuckin Islamic nutjobs", I thought to myself, "blow the fuckers back to Afghanistan if they hate peace, democracy and non-Muslims so much". But then I walked down Blackstock Road to get some dinner and saw the happy, friendly faces of the butcher, the dude who sells baclava and the dude in the kebab shop that gives me free pop when I'm too drunk and realised that the caricature of Muslims embodied by the rioters were just a minority of idiots and most Muslims are the same as most Christians, most Buddhists and most humanist atheists. Job done, multiculturalism!

I'm not a racist, but....

Are Aussies racist? The beach riots of a few weeks ago would seem to scream "Fuck yeah!"; hordes of sunburnt white youths attacking anyone of Middle Eastern appearance (including a young Jewish girl)? But apologists have said with some justification that the catalyst for the riots was a group of Lebanese youths attacking some lifeguards (ultimate symbols of white Australia's beach culture), groups of Lebanese youths have apparently been intimidating other white beach goers, and Australians have a refreshing bluntness about them that could be mistaken for racism by politically correct ears. The recent attempted terror attacks no doubt also inflamed racial tensions.

So are Aussies racist? I live with a bunch of Aussies who are (mostly) no more racist than me (hey, no-one likes South Africans or the Welsh). But there's definitely a culture of racism in white Australia. How do I know? On more than one occasion, visiting Australians have assumed I'm racist because I'm white. For example, one bloke who was dossing with us (the mate of the boyfriend of that fugly Bobbi chick, if anyone's concerned), stated out loud that there were "too many sand-niggers and monkeys in Finsbury Park".

This was within a few hours of him meeting me and a few days of him arriving in London. Typically, racists will suss out people before openly spouting racial epithets. The fact that this bloke automatically assumed that I would be racist because I'm white strongly suggests that in Australia you can safely assume that white people are racist.

It was also in front of my girlfriend, who is herself a "sand-nigger". He no doubt thought she was Italian or something - after all, there's no way whitey would associate with brown folks, eh? Or maybe he was just too crass to hold his tongue in front of her. Unfortunately, I'd just smoked a fat one, or whatever the kids call it these days, and thought he was talking about real monkeys. By the time I'd realised what he meant, I'd remembered how much I hate confrontation with large drunk people when I'm stoned and did fuck all except shake my head. Sorry Anne Marie.

Anyway, since the Aussie beach riots of a few weeks ago, one of my Aussie flatmates and myself have been good-naturedly debating the ins and outs of the "Are Aussies racist?" debate. By which I mean she's been shrieking about how the 'Lebs' should 'rick awf' and I've been getting in her face while she's trying to watch Will and Grace, berating her in my best shrieky-self-righteous-liberal-Lisa-Simpson voice.

Then she sent me this email explaining how her mum and mates thought immigrants - or at least, immigrants darker than them - should 'rick awf' too. For my typical condescending self-righteous response, please wait til the end. I put it in bold because of my overweening sense of self importance....

Leo,

This is how Aussies feels about the riots. This email was sent from my mum

Australia- The Right to Leave

Our Country - YOU Have the right - the right to leave !

After Sydney not wanting to offend other cultures by putting up Christmas lights.

After hearing that the State of South Australia changed its opinion and let a Muslim woman have her picture on her driver's license with her face covered.

This prompted this editorial written by an Australian citizen. Published in an Australian newspaper.

Quote:

IMMIGRANTS, NOT AUSTRALIANS, MUST ADAPT.
Take It Or Leave It !
I am tired of this nation worrying about whether we are offending some individual or their culture. Since the terrorist attacks on Bali, we have experienced a surge in patriotism by the majority of Australians.

However, the dust from the attacks had barely settled when the "politically correct" crowd began complaining about the possibility that our patriotism was offending others. I am not against immigration, nor do I hold a grudge against anyone who is seeking a better life by coming to Australia.

However, there are a few things that those who have recently come to our country, and apparently some born here, need to understand.

This idea of Australia being a multicultural community has served only to dilute our sovereignty and our national identity. As Australians, we have our own culture, our own society, our own language and our own lifestyle.

This culture has been developed over two centuries of struggles, trials and victories by millions of men and women who have sought freedom.

We speak ENGLISH, not Spanish, Lebanese, Arabic, Chinese, Japanese, Russian, or any other language. Therefore, if you wish to become part of our society, Learn the language!

Christian principles, founded this nation, and this is clearly documented. It is certainly appropriate to display it on the walls of our schools. If God offends you, then I suggest you consider another part of the world as your new home, Because God is part of our culture.

If the Southern Cross offends you, or you don't like " A Fair Go", then you should seriously consider a move to another part of this planet.

We are happy with our culture and have no desire to change, And we really don't care how you did things where you came from.

This is OUR COUNTRY, OUR LAND, and OUR LIFESTYLE, and we will allow you every opportunity to enjoy all this.

But once you are done complaining, whining, and griping about Our Flag, Our Pledge, Our National Motto, or Our Way of Life, I highly encourage you take advantage of one other great Australian freedom,

"THE RIGHT TO LEAVE"

If you aren't happy here then rack off! We didn't force you to come here. You asked to be here. So accept the country YOU accepted. Pretty easy really, when you think about it.

I figure if we all keep passing this to our friends (and enemies) it will also, sooner or later get back to the complainers, lets all try, please.

No matter how many times you receive it...
please forward it to all you know.

--------------------------------------------------------
Seriously? Your mum sent you this? Do you agree with this?

Leo
---------------------------------------------------------
yes and passed it around all my mates and they agree too.

Kelly

-----------------------------------------------------

Howdy Kelly,

Luckily I count quite a few Australians among my close friends so know that you, your mum and your mates who agree with this mean minded bigotry are not representative of Australian society. Most Australians I've met are sound as a pound. But that's not going to stop me getting on my soapbox and doing a Lisa Simpson...

What century is redneck Australia living in? Maybe I shouldn't go there for my holidays in Feb - wouldn't want to offend any rednecks with my immigrant Scottish accent, my lack of Christianity, or my desire to live my life as I want to live, not how some bunch of racist w*nkers want me to tell me how to live it.

Or would I be OK because I'm white? Is it OK for whitey to be culturally different? I don't like to wear tank tops and I don't like my beer to taste like fizzy water. Will this be OK with the self-appointed guardians of the Australian Way Of Life? If I wear my culture's traditional garb - the kilt - will I get the same reception as a Sikh wearing a turban or a Muslim wearing a hijab? Will I be offered the RIGHT TO LEAVE?

You'll have noticed how people in civilised countries such as the UK are happy to have people from all over the world come and stay. Lebanese, Chinese, African, even Australian - all are welcome. We don't force people to become Christians or learn English.

In Scotland, we welcome the English, despite centuries of oppression, the Highland Clearances, post-Culloden genocide, etc etc. And your reactionary bigots are bleating about a picture on some driving licence and some PC idiots banning Christmas lights? Sweet baby jesus and the orphans. You don't know you're born. I'm sure these few immigrants won't treat you anywhere near as badly as your forefathers treated the Aborigines.

This made me laugh, though: "[Australian] culture has been developed over two centuries".

A whole two centuries, eh?

And incidentally, it's "how Aussies feel about the riots" not "how Aussies feels about the riots". If you're going to come to MY country, learn the f-ing language. If not, you have the RIGHT TO LEAVE....

I should point out that Kelly is a nice person really and isn't really a racist - she went out with a well known black Premier league footballer. So she must think black people are all right. So long as they earn £30,000 a week....

Happy New Year!

Howdy folks, hope you had a good non-denominational-winter-season-gift-exchange-period and Santa was good to you! Unless you're Muslim, Jewish, Scientologist etc, in which case I hope you enjoyed spinning your dreydels and watching other people have a good time.

I escaped the cold in London and went to marginally less cold Spain where my mum lives now. It was great - caught up with my mum, my dad, my uncle, my cousins and my cousin's boyfriend. The only person I didn't catch up with was my brother, who slept in, missed his plane, and spent the festive period in Glasgow, a long way away from his presents, some of which, thanks to my Machiavellian manipulation of my close family's emotions ("Yes Mum I THINK he told me liked his girlfriend's parents more than you and wanted to spend Christmas with them. I THINK that's what he said"), ended up in MY hands! Ha! I'm Number One Son by a good couple of lengths now!

So Santa was good to me, but he could've been better, considering how good I was this year. Mum got me 2 videos. That's video cassettes, not DVDs. As a Christmas present for her first-born son, not as a £5-limit Secret Santa for a colleague she secretly detests.

As you can imagine, I was right pissed off, and being the cunt I am, I lost no time in letting my mother know.

"Mum, I don't have a video player. Nobody's got a video player. It's not 1987."

She said, "Well if you won't watch them, leave them here and I'll watch them."

"Mum, you don't have a video player either. You've got a DVD player. A DVD player."

She didn't know there was a difference. She thought, if you bought a film, you could watch it on a machine that plays films. You've got to admire the logic.

When I asked her why the big thick video cassette box didn't raise suspicions, she said she thought the box was big and thick because "the films were really long".

I suppose I should be glad that the videos weren't Betamax.

IS THE CHRONICLES OF NARNIA TURNING YOUR KID CHRISTIAN????

The Guardian, the chronicle of choice for the public-sector-gravy-train-riding Godless enemy of the free world, recently published a scathing attack on new kids film, the Chronicles of Narnia, by bulldog-faced Polly Toynbee, right. If you haven't seen the Chronicles of Narnia yet, don't bother. I read a review that said it was "best watched through a child's eyes". So I gouged out a seven year old's eyes and put them over my eyes to watch it. I could hardly see anything, and I got blood all down my shirt. (Don't worry! It wasn't a regular seven year old. It was an Iraqi kid I bought off the internet, and we're allowed to kill them for no reason, remember? You might say I brought freedom to his eyes. MISSION ACCOMPLISHED!!!).

Anyway. "Narnia represents everything that is most hateful about religion" is the title of Toynbee's diatribe. Everything? What, exactly? Talking lions? Magic wardrobes? Plummy voiced posh kids? The things that I find most hateful about religion are things like suicide bombers, intolerance of gays, banning stem cell research, etc.

Not Polly. "Of all the elements of Christianity, the most repugnant is the notion of the Christ who took our sins upon himself and sacrificed his body in agony to save our souls. Did we ask him to?"

Actually, of all the elements of Christianity, the most repugnant is the notion that chicks shouldn't put out. Or possibly that people shouldn't masturbate. I mean, if you're not going to let us violate the chicks, at least let us rub one out thinking about it! I don't find Christ dying for my sins repugnant at all. I find it convenient. After all, he's already dead, so I've pretty much got a blank ticket to wank myself dry while eating shellfish and coveting my neighbour's ox. It won't make any difference. Being chaste and uncovetous won't bring him back.

She says her kids never understood how the lion could be resurrected. "After a long, dark night of the soul and women's weeping, the lion is suddenly alive again. Why? How?, my children asked." Perhaps she should've asked Uncle Leo round to explain to her precious cargo the exact mechanics of how a talking lion in a magic wardrobe can come back to life.

"FOR FUCK'S SAKE! IT'S ABOUT A MAGIC WARDROBE! IT'S NOT SUPPOSED TO MAKE SENSE! YOU WEREN'T GIVING IT ALL WHY? HOW? WHAT? WHEN THE LION WAS TALKING!!! THERE WAS A FUCKING HALF-MAN, HALF-GOAT A MOMENT AGO! YOU ACCEPTED THAT, DIDN'T YOU??? NOW YOU'RE HEAD'S IN A SPIN BECAUSE THE LION'S COME BACK TO LIFE?? D'YER WANT ME TO TIE YOU TO THE TIME-OUT RADIATOR, YA WEE SHITE?"

Bunt! Bunt! Bunt! (the sound of a sock full of sand repeatedly hitting a child - all the tears but no bruises!)

Toynbee - who, I might add, probably wasn't foxy when she was young, either - criticises the film for being marketed to Christians, noting that churches are holding special Narnia services. Sorry Polly, but if it was at all objectionable for films to be marketed to specific groups, it would be illegal. Many liberals stand up and scream for the rights of Muslim faith groups to subjugate their female youth by making them wear sacks on their head, but when Christian faith groups try to make religion more fun for their kids by involving talking lions, the liberals damn them to hell. I'm sure kids in Sunday schools up and down the country are applauding your efforts to remove CGI battle scenes from their sermons, Polly.

She goes on to lambast a Kent parish for "giving away £10,000 worth of film tickets to single-parent families." See, this is the kind of real world, effective, hands on charity stuff I think the church actually excels at. I'd rather give money to a local charity run by Christian volunteers than some pan-global beaurocracy run by smarmy Guardian reading graduates on £45K salaries. "Are the children of single mothers in special need of the word?" she asks. No, but as the son of a single mother, I can vouch that they're sometimes too skint to take their kids to the cinema.

"The president's brother, Jeb Bush, the governor of Florida, is organising a scheme for every child in his state to read the book." Calm down, Polly! They'll have to learn to read first.

The people who bleat about right wing Christians using Hollywood to inveigle their warped messages into our children's minds are the exact same people who scoff scornfully at right wing Christians for claiming that Spongebob Squarepants is queering up our kids or heavy metal records contain satanic messages when played backwards. It's the Same Thing.

Maybe I'm too ambivalent towards any putative threat posed by the propagation of right wing Christian values on my liberal life. But I heard recently that, because of the separation of church and state in the US, every morning American schoolchildren chant songs pledging their allegiance to the President instead of hymns. I'd rather have my kid singing hymns than being forced to worship a stuttering, belligerent loon. Liberals: be careful what you wish for.

Anyway, this film made me think about Tilda Swinton riding me with a strap on. If the makers intended to subliminally brainwash their audience with Christian values, it clearly didn't work.

Close friend has paranoid schizophrenic ‘episode’. Hilarity ensues!

One of my closest and oldest friends sent me a barrage of unsolicited texts on Friday night not only telling me that he no longer wanted to know me, but would also like me to "DIE YOU FREAK!" I wouldn’t normally blog about personal stuff because I don’t want this blog to turn into the 'Typical Blog', a monotone ramble about what my cat had for breakfast/how my hydrangeas are doing/Leo Jr learning to swim - the electronic equivalent of those badly photocopied round robin letters you get at Christmas from distant relatives that are even more pointless and enervating than a Guardian weekend magazine column.

I also wouldn’t normally publicly exploit a close friend’s fragile mental state so that people I’ve never even met can have a small, forgettably cheap laugh. Particularly as I’m not getting paid for this. But this is just too entertaining. It features death threats, hysterical drunken men, street brawls, bag-lady girlfriends, horse tranquilisers and me getting in shit for not saying thanks after dinner.

If there’s a low I won’t stoop to in search of a laugh, I haven’t seen it yet.

Anyway, the story starts with me leaving a subterranean bar somewhere in London. It’s Friday night, I’ve kicked off the night with a few ales and now I’m heading home via the kebab shop. I look at my phone and realise I’ve got two messages from my mate Craig….

18:21 Dude getting toasted

Fair enough. It’s Friday night, he’s having a few ales.

Then...

20:13 Dude fuck you. I have had enough with the lie

Woah! Where’s that come from?

20:58 Let’s just forget about everything. I do not have energy any more.

I find this message funnier if you imagine it being said in a high pitched hysterical woman’s voice. If you can’t imagine, get a menopausal relative to read it out loud to you.

21:08 Leo lets forget about everything. Do not want to know you anymore. It is end for us.

WTF? I wasn’t aware we were married. Has he found out I’ve been gallivanting around with that floozy of a secretary behind his back?

By now rightly pissed off at being sent messages comprised of bad Pat Benatar lyrics and expletives, I phoned Craig and gave him the old "PRIVATE PYLE, WHAT IS YOUR GODDAMN MAJOR MALFUNCTION YOU FUCKING COCK?" spiel. Sorry, I can’t take hysterical men seriously. Needless to say, Craig hung up, preferring to continue to discuss by thumb:

21:36 I am a fucking cock let me tell me about you! Delete my number from your phone make it easy. Too many bad times not enough good. Good to know you though.

I’m slightly disappointed that he didn’t make the last two sentences rhyme. "Love is a battlefield!"

21:47 Hang about with billy ocean.

Either a reference to the 80s soul singer or a bad pun on my friend Oisin. Craig is now at the ‘sitting at the bottom of the stairs, hoarse with sobbing’ stage. He’s about to grab my shirts from the wardrobe and throw them at me, then shove me out the door shouting “Just go! I can smell that little hussy on you! And if you think you’re going to see the kids again, you better get yourself a damn good lawyer!”

21:50 I am no idiot you treat me as such but no way.

Aw shit. Did I forget our ruby anniversary? Is Texaco open? Is it too late to get some flowers?

21:52 Die you freak. That’s it.

Oooh! Scary!

22:02 Your best mate. What an arse you are.

Yawn. At this point I phoned Craig offering to kick his tits right off. Again, he hung up quickly to continue his barrages of texts. Perhaps his battery was low.

22:09 Jesus you are so hard heard your messages never got me down in Glasgow and will never get me down.! Ha ha.

This is referring to a fight we had in Sauchiehall Street in Glasgow – one of the few times I’ve drunkenly fought in the street while a crowd gathered to watch. Flailing my limbs like an angry baboon with Parkinsons on roller skates, I don’t think I impressed anyone. Least of all my brother, who sat and smoked a rollup, shaking his head in resigned embarrassment. Or Craig’s girlfriend, who kept screaming "NOT THE FACE! NOT THE FACE!" at me as if I was putting his career as a catalogue model at risk.

Then, the day after the barrage of texts, the FINEST example of an inverted apology I have ever heard…

18:34 Man it was pretty wild last night. I will apologise for the text messages but did not send the one saying die you freak. The reason why i am so pissed right now is because of time you were up in Edinburgh. Helen went out of her way to make you welcome and there was no thanks. You left to run off to see Mike without even as much as cheers for dinner. No thanks to her for cooking food and making you comfortable. You lost her amorres perros film. If we had done that when you were with andrea probably would not have heard end of it. I fully admit i was so wrong in sending the messages but this has been festering for a while now.

Ha! This is the first time that I’ve got in trouble for not saying thanks after a meal since I was seven. I am a gracious and humble houseguest and did indeed thank Helen for her fantastic lasagne and chips. "Wow Helen this looks great" I said as she put my plate down. "Mmm Helen this is tasty" I said as I was eating it. "Cheers Helen that was delicious" I said when I was finished. "Let me wash up" I said as we finished.

"No no no, sit yourself down, I’ll need something to feel bitter about later" she might have replied. Perhaps Craig and Helen felt I wasn’t thankful enough, but it’s not in my nature to grovel cravenly in gratitude when someone makes me lasagne and chips. If someone prostrated themselves at my feet, flagellating themselves until their skin broke and tears poured from their eyes, protesting "OH THANK YOU! THANK YOU!!! THAT FISH FINGER SANDWICH WAS SUPER!" over and over and over until they were hoarse, I wouldn’t know where to look.

Besides, a few days earlier when Craig had been down staying with me in London, I had cooked for him and don’t remember any particular grandiose displays of gratitude. I do remember Craig taking the piss out of everything I cooked, though. For lunch I made lamb chops with rosemary and pasta with artichoke pesto and a tomato, fresh basil, feta, red onion and cucumber salad with a balsamic, olive oil and garlic dressing. While I made it Craig scratched his nuts and mocked the study that my friend had done for a portrait, drawing ears on it that were more to his liking. When lunch was served, he took the piss out of it because the fresh basil was "like grass" and left half the meat on his lamb chops, like a fucking six year old vegetarian girly man, because they "had fat on them". Did I wait three weeks then text him hysterical death threats? Nope. I thought it was funny.

And regardless of his occasional paranoid breakdowns, he’s the last person to be pointing the finger regarding manners. He chews with his mouth wide open, smokes while eating, says things to barmaids that would get me chucked out and regularly alludes to shagging my mum or girlfriend, or both, or one then the other, with help from farmyard animals. None of which bugs me (apart from the eating with the mouth open thing), it’s all in the great Scottish tradition of being as wide as possible. To understand how Craig can act like this and not get arrested is to understand how funny Craig is.

As for me losing the Amorres Perros film, 1) it was shite and 2) Craig, we talked about this, you owed me £18 for that Frank Black ticket I got for you so we agreed it was quits. £18 should buy enough overrated foreign movies to placate your bint.

Besides, while we’re auditing the material ebb and flow of a ten year friendship, how about my brother’s Beavis and Butthead Do America video? That disappeared into the black hole of Aberdeen, never to return. Or how about the time you turned up unannounced on mine and Andrea’s doorstep on Hogmanay, half an hour after we had got off a plane from Vancouver? We were totally jetlagged and were looking forward to chilling out, and you were both rolling drunk and we had to babysit you all night as you staggered around shouting abuse at strangers and fighting with bushes. Fuck…you should’ve seen the look Andrea gave me when Helen wheeled round and red wine arced out from the bottle she was carrying, missing Andrea’s new beige suit by a ball hair. It was the look that says "I’m suffering this because of you, Leo, and you are going to have to work hard to make it up to me".

Fuck me. That bird of yours. What she lacks in bitter drunken manipulative shit stirring she sure as hell makes up for in fugliness. I remember the first time I met her. "LOOK!!! ME TEESH ARR ALL RATTEN FRAM THE DREENK!!!" she snarled at me, putting her 4 litre bottle of supermarket cider to one side as she pulled back her lips to reveal teeth and gums that were indeed pretty ratten. Fuck me. Behind that pudding faced exterior is a bag lady trying to get out. And every evening, after her third sip of White Lightning, I’d say she does.

Even now you have to get in a dig at Andrea, years after we split up. And for what? Why did you and Helen openly hate her? Because she smelt nice? Because she took pride in her appearance instead of rolling around in the gutter? Because she had interests beyond drinking brake fluid in Kwik Save car park? Because she was warm and friendly instead of paranoid and hateful?

Craig’s been one of my best friends for years now. When Craig joined the police, I provided his reference. If I ever did anything important, like getting married, he’d probably be best man, assuming he promised not to stick his dick in the mashed potato or punch the bride’s mother in the vagina. He’s absolute comedy and a top bloke…most of the time.

But he’s always had a problem with boundless paranoia and random aggression. I remember when I was living in Penpont he wouldn’t come down to see me because he thought I’d arranged for all my friends (who he’d fallen out with by being a dick to or drunkenly attacking) to meet him off the bus and beat the crap out of him. This despite me being pretty obviously a skinny, vaguely respectably middle class kid with very little experience of organising lynch mobs.

Another time, Craig was walking back from someone’s house with his girlfriend and some friends when they walked through an underpass and he stood in some dogshit (or ‘dogeship’ as Microsoft spellchecker wants to call it). He genuinely believed that they had engineered it for him to step in it – that they had collaborated beforehand and carefully positioned themselves to steer him into it. Another time, on meeting my friend Fermer for the first time, he barked "AYE I KNOW YOUR FUCKIN’ GAME!!!" in the manner of a scary bus stop tramp. Possibly worst of all, when Craig and Helen went on holiday with a mutual friend of ours (Craig still has a bee in his bonnet about him as he refused to come meet up with this friend at the Pixies gig we all went to in Edinburgh and mentions him in his text), Craig ended up assaulting Mike – the police had to be called, etc etc. Etc.

He's never been properly diagnosed as schizophrenic. But I showed a friend who has a schizophrenic sibling the texts Craig sent me, and she said they were certainly concomitant with her brother's schizophrenia. Although "he's nowhere near as aggressive as your friend". Arf.

But underneath it all he's a great bloke and the best, most entertaining company. I miss the cunt like an internal organ. A proper vital internal organ like a liver, not a spleen or appendix. Hopefully we'll be mates again one day.

Shit stories! vol 1

Ha! I spent a good portion of my Saturday night swapping shit stories with an ex-Marine called Jeremy (yeah that's right, a whiny commie-euro-liberal was knocking back brewskis with an ex-Marine. What a wonderful example of an integrated community). Anyway, we managed to compile a list of the best stories that involve people shitting themselves in awkward situations. To kick off this series, here's one from Jeremy and a couple from me....


Holy Pigrim!
One of Jeremy's friends was travelling in India. He had a dose of the digestive problems that sabotage every third world traveller at some point. Unfortunately, he was out in the street, nowhere near a toilet. So he squatted in the gutter, dropped his kecks and let rip. The squit had hardly hit the ground when two pigs ran up behind him and started eating the liquid shit right out of his ass! Nice!

This bacon tastes like shit!
Similarly, when two friends of mine were travelling in the Far East - not sure where - they went to a cafe that had a big sloping tray you shat in (this was in the toilets, not in the cafe itself). When they looked to see where the tray sloped off to, they saw that it carried the shit out to pigs in the yard. For them to eat.

Needless to say, they quickly regretted buying the Lumberjack Slam with extra bacon, pork chops and gammon steak from that establishment. Because they're Jewish so could only eat the hash browns.

Canonball Run!
When I was 17, I was either badly bitten by a shark, or run over by a truck, depending on whether I'm telling the truth or not. Either way, my leg was pretty badly fucked up - all the flesh torn up and the bones smashed into bits. Part of putting me back together involved moving tissue in my leg around so that the smashed up bone could get a good blood supply, then grafting skin onto my calf to replace the tissue that had been moved or torn off in the shark attack/accident.

The thing with skin grafts, particularly such large and awkward ones, is that they need to be kept absolutely still while they 'take' - if the flesh under the graft moves, it can easily become separated from the graft. I was also advised to keep my leg above hip level to avoid swelling. So I was determined not to move my leg for as long as possible.

Unfortunately, going for a shit involved manouvring myself into a wheelchair, wheeling myself down the corridor and then contorting myself out of the chair and onto the toilet seat. This would be pretty hard to do without disturbing my leg. So I vowed to find a way not to shit for as long as possible.

Thankfully, a diet of morphine, lucozade and fried breakfasts, coupled with the fact that I was lying motionless the whole time, meant that this was easier than I thought. Days passed....3....5....7...no real problem. By day 8 I was feeling a bit sick. Day 9, you could actually smell shite on my breath. Day 10, I was lightheaded, short of breath, pale and sweating. Day 11, sitting up in bed was difficult and painful. Day 12, there was a noticeable brown tinge to my skin.

Day 13, some well meaning relative brought me in a bowl of grapes. Unthinking, I ate the lot. That night I was awoken by nausea and violent cramping. The soft fruit had digested in a hurry and was now looking for an excuse to leave. Unfortunately, a fortnight's worth of black pudding and crispy bacon was wedged in my colon like schpackle. Irrestible force met immovable object in the dank confines of my large intestine.

Knowing that one good cough would probably rupture my colon and result in the shit leaving my body via surgery, I decided it was time for the bog run. I pulled the wheelchair close to the bed and carefully levered myself into it. I gently wheeled myself down the corridor, gingerly navigating the bumps, and heaved my quaking body onto the pan.

We-e-e-ell. Something dearly wanted to come out, but it was too large and hard to do so. A breech birth. Any sane person would've pulled the alarm cord and asked the nurse for a caesarean. I decided to just push like a sonofab1tch. It wasn't pretty. The problem was a superdense plug of compacted shit, about the size of a small grapefruit and the consistency of coal. There was pain. There was blood. There was sphinctal stretching that would make Will Young's eyes water.

But at the end of it, a wonderful calm sense of relief. The skin graft? Absolutely fine to this day. If I didn't now have to wear adult nappies, I'd have no regrets at all.

Another instalment of shit stories coming soon, folks. Stay tuned for one involving a duck roast on a Thai island and another involving 8 pints of cider and a moshpit.

The Plame Game - Edog gets a fisking!

IS being right wing a sign of mental illness? You know this whole 'Plamegate' affair – the White House revealing the identity of a covert CIA operative to discredit her husband? Just because he was sent to Niger to get evidence of Saddam’s attempts to obtain uranium so that he could BUILD A BIG BOMB and BLOW UP AMERICA, but returned an informed critic of the Bush administrations presuppositions about Iraq WMDs? Edog, who I usually take to be one of the more reasonable voices of the right (by which I mean rightwing, which really means wrong), has got such a scarily blinkered view of Plamegate that I’m more scared than a ten year old victim of Israel’s latest hey-we-stole-your-land-but-no-hard-feelings-eh?-we-won’t-try-to-grind-you-into-the-dirt wheeze. If even smart Americans are being taken in by the Bush administration’s spin, lies and smears, what hope is there for the dumbass majority?

"The IIPA [I’m assuming the IIPA is the law governing the confidentiality of covert CIA operatives rather than the Instiitute of Incorporated Public Accountants] applies only to agents who have been undercover overseas within the last five years. Plame came home in 1997 to have twins. Clearly, the IIPA was not violated."

Clearly! Because, you see, the Bush administration revealed the covert CIA operative’s identity to the world 6 years after she came home, and it’s only technically illegal if you reveal it within 5 years of them coming home! So you see, the Bush administration really is wonderful and lawful!

It wasn’t a moral crime either according to Edog. Why...because Joe Wilson "lied about why he was chosen to go to Niger (he claimed his wife had nothing to do with it even though the Senate found documentary evidence that she recommended him), he lied about his motives (he claimed to be objective, even though he was at the time active in an anti-war group), and most importantly he lied about his findings (he claimed that he found absolutely no evidence to support the claim that Iraq was seeking uranium from Niger, yet his own report contradicts that). Even worse, Joe disseminated his own classified information in an editorial in the New York Times in which he out and out lied about his findings".

Fuck, I bet he once ran an amber light too. Of course, Edog knows much more about Wilson’s report than Wilson himself does, so can tell him when he’s contradicting himself. Edog, you think there’s some conflict in an intelligence analyst being active in an anti-war group? Why is it allowed then? And surely Joe Wilson is one of the people most qualified to hold an opinion on the war? If I was sent to gather evidence to support the case for going to war and then found that there was no such evidence, I’d be against going to war too.

But of course the facts don’t matter because "anyone in America knows what an over the top media whore Joe Wilson is". Joe Wilson may indeed be the bastard exposure hungry son of Liberace and Hairy Gelliwell but I wouldn’t know because I hadn’t actually heard of him until the Bush administration tried to discredit/punish him by revealing the identity of his covert CIA agent wife. I guess Joe engineered the whole thing to get on TV, huh? Pretty thick of the White House to play right into his hands.

As for "over the top media whore"-ing being a crime, I guess Bush would never chase fame in a shameless manner? He wouldn’t, for example, use the Hurricane Katrina catastrophe (a disaster of his own making) as an opportunity to pose with a hammer in a shameless attempt at self aggrandisement? He wouldn’t take his country into a dipshit war then land on an aircraft carrier dressed like Top Gun and pose in front of a big banner saying "MISSION ACCOMPLISHED" in that fate-tempting way?

As for "corruption, dishonesty, and nepotism in the CIA" - is the standard trial and punishment for this alleged ‘corruption’ and ‘nepotism’ for government officials to reveal the identity of the alleged offender’s covert CIA operative wife? Surely the CIA has procedures to investigate and deal with such corruption, if what Edog's saying has a shred of truth and isn’t just Rove-ing mudchucking?

This reminds me of John Kerry, a decorated war hero who risked his life for his country in Vietnam, being successfully maligned to the extent that most Americans now think that he was on the side of the Viet Cong. Meanwhile Dubya, who used his wealth and influence to ensure that he could sit out the war in Texas, never once seeing combat, is the war hero. Go figure.

If Edog’s reaction is anything to go by, the discrediting of Wilson has evidently been a roaring success too. I guess truth just doesn’t matter to Americans. They lack that healthy cynicism. This is great if you’re a door to door salesman in America, but less good if you want to trust the American people to elect and maintain an honest government.

This is a pretty straightforward scandal. The Bush administration did wrong. They went to war based on a presupposition at best, a lie at worst. When a person they tasked to trump up evidence to support their case returned with evidence that undermined it, they broke the law and put an American intelligence agent in danger to discredit them. No amount of badmouthing can change those facts.

Everyone's a critic...

The painting's got a fan! Ha!

I'm a painting!!!

I've recently joined the ranks of royalty, heads of state and 16th century landowners and been immortalized in a portrait!!! My mate Oisin painted it - it's life size and is the coolest thing ever. He used acrylic paint mixed with texturiser on canvas and varnished it afterwards so if I ever get too excited and spunk all over it - which is probably going to happen - I can just wipe it down with a damp cloth. I don't know much about what I like but I know art, and this is art, as you can see for yourself below:





This photo doesn't really do it justice. It stands about 7 feet tall. The colours are much deeper and richer in the flesh and the texture doesn't stand out in the photo. This photo shows a bit more detail and texture:





Oisin's in the process of sorting his own blawg out. Once he has he will no doubt post pictures of his other paintings, which are also cool as fuck - mainly bold, evocative, dark and intense portraits. He's a natural talent. Here's a picture of the master at work:





So now I am immortalized in canvas. When's the statue coming?

Earthquakes are Great! (If you're a right wing American...)

You might think that an earthquake devastating an impoverished area of the world right at the time that kids were in school would be a Bad Thing. You'd be wrong! According to a right wing American, the earthquake was the "f-ing hand of God" because "The quake shook the border region of Afghanistan and Pakistan, where bin Laden is believed to be hiding".

Don't get me wrong. I don't like Osama bin Laden. Unlike the CIA, I've never given him and his men vast amounts of money, arms and training (hey I'm not whining. We were fighting Soviet Communism. The CIA couldn't have known that training religious fundamentalist zealots to fight imperialist forces would end badly, or that Soviet Communism would soon collapse into inevitable democracy). I would love to see his head on a stick.

But calling an earthquake that's killed countless innocents a cause for optimism just because some bad people might have been killed in the carnage seems a little distasteful. You didn't see me blogging about how 9/11 was a good thing because some of the people who died were bound to be cunts. You don't see me now advocating the firebombing of Delaware because it's bound to take out some murderers, rapists and TV licence dodgers. Likewise, while they're still pulling kids' bodies out of the rubble of primary schools, perhaps a little compassion could be shown, even by people who don't like poor, foreign or Muslim people?

As for the earthquake being the "f-ing hand of God" slapping bin Laden where the Marines couldn't get him (rather than the "f-ing release of built up pressures caused by the movement of tectonic plates") perhaps some Christians out there could confirm for me that all the other people killed in it were definitely evil and deserved to die? Or does God not care about them because they're not famous in America?

He does move in mysterious ways, doesn't He?

Bush = Goddamned anti-American communist

Sweet baby Jesus and the orphans! What in the good name of God is going on in the US and A? First a rainstorm turns New Orleans into a George Romero film. ("Hey my feet are wet. LET'S GO LOOTIN' AN' RAPIN'!!!!". 'Dawn of the Wet', anyone?) Now President Bush has gone all green on us. He's calling on Americans to conserve gas by doing less driving, carpooling, putting off non-essential trips, using off peak electricity and even taking public transport (public fucking transport??? Did I just hear that right? Public transport? Like what they use in France????).

What sort of god-damn anti American communist shit is this? He'll be suggesting that Americans eat sensibly and exercise next. Fuck if I wanted to hear this sort of tree hugging hippy shit I would've voted for Nader.

What the good citizens of America REALLY need is further tax breaks on SUVs to help them cope with the increased price of gasoline (SUV owners are unfairly victimised by increases in the price of gas as they use so much of it). America also needs to be encouraged to use more gas as the increased tax revenues can be used to boost the economy by giving rich people tax breaks.

The problem isn't that we're using up oil too fast and aren't developing alternative energy sources. The problem is that we're not getting the last remaining bits of oil out of the ground and burning it fast enough. If we can get all the oil out of the ground quickly and burn it, our energy problems will be solved. Obvious really.

Of course, Bush knows this. He hasn't really gone green. He's using the hurricanes as a cover to push through tax breaks for his oil business buddies and relaxing rules on coastal and Arctic drilling. He's presiding over legislation that has seen the number of SUVs rocket from 3 million to 80 million while the fuel economy of the average American car has dropped for the first time in decades (in Europe and other such godless commie places fuel economy has continued to improve). So I guess we don't need to worry about Bush going green just yet...

Ladymugs vs blokemugs

At my work, next to the hot water box deely (there’s a word for it, the big white wall-mounted box that hot water for tea comes out of) there’s a laminated sign – big bold letters "CAUTION! HOT WATER MAY SCALD!". This has caused me and certain colleagues no end of hilarity and we’ve put up HILARIOUS pisstakey signs such as "CAUTION! COLD WATER MAY CHILL!" and the classic "CAUTION! FORKS MAY BE POINTY!". At my office, the fun quite literally never starts.

Oh but that I had not offended the kitchen Gods with my cavalier insolence, and that they had not seen fit to punish me in such an ironic and painful way! For you see, this morning I scalded myself on the hot water that comes out of the hot water deely. I am one of the spacked up mongoloids that my employer is so concerned about they have to put up signs telling us not to shove stationery up our noses or lick the power points.

In my defence I can only say that it was because I was making a cup of tea for a lady in one of those ladymugs that ladies like to drink their milkless, fruit scented tea from. The picture below shows why:



As you can see from the (ahem) artist’s impression, the ladymug has a high centre of gravity, a narrow base and is considerably taller than the blokemug. Also, because of its tapering width and fat handle, it is impossible to carry in the same hand as another mug. The ladymug is a selfish mug. It wants to have a hand all to itself while it is being carried and wants you to have to put a mug on the ground at every door you come to.

I meant to take the ladymug’s design flaws into account while I was brewing up this morning. But it’s Monday, I’m slightly woolly headed and I haven’t had a whole lot of experience with ladymugs. I put the teabag in the mug (it’s one of those fruity teabags on a string that girls and hippies drink – ginkgoo balboa or some shit) and stick the mug under the hot water deely and turn the tap on. Unfortunately, due to the height of the mug, the water starts sucking the teabag string into the mug as it pours in, like a cartoon character eating spaghetti. I’ve only got a split second to react and stop the string from being sucked into the mug, so I press the string against the mug to stop it moving. But because the mug has a high centre of gravity and a narrow, unstable base, the mug just tips over and my hand goes under the hot water that’s coming out of the deely. Ow! My fingers are still sore and it’s 5pm.

This fucking mug…swear to God, it’s my nemesis. A couple of weeks ago I (successfully) made a cup of coffee for the owner of this mug, but while I was walking back to the office a significant amount of liquid came out of the mug and onto my trousers. As the other mugs I was carrying held their contents with barely a ripple, I can only surmise that the slanted walls of the ladymug somehow exacerbated the motion of the liquid as it moved with my steps in a wobbly Millennium bridge way until it sloshed out. I was worried about my trousers staining so I took them to the toilet and gave them a good rinse. Then I was standing there in my underpants, trying to dry my sodden trousers under the feeble hand dryer, thinking "Shit, I didn’t really think this one through". I couldn’t really go back and sit at my desk in my underpants. It wasn’t even dress down Friday, so I didn’t want to try. So I had to squeeze myself back into soaking trousers and return to my seat. I put my jacket on so that at least half of me was warm, but it didn’t stop colleagues laughing at me.

So is there a moral to this story? Sure there fucking is – ladies, don’t buy stupid impractical mugs that men can’t operate just so you have more space up the side of your mug for flowers and horoscopes. Buy a sensible wide based, flat sided, low centre of gravitied mug instead.

21/10/05 UPDATE: Laura, the owner of the ladymug, has pointed out to me that she didn't buy it, it was given to her as a leaving present by her old work.

Me? Sleazy? NO WAY...

Just choked on my cornflakes reading this about a forthcoming Dutch reality teevee show that makes Kinga the Minga (Courtney Love - US cultural references ed) look like Delia Smith (Martha Stewart) in comparison.

Main presenter Filemon Wesselink, 26, is billed to go on a pub crawl, take heroin in the form of a pill, and try LSD at home on the sofa under the watchful eye of his mother. He will also retire into a locked room and try to establish whether oral sex is better from a man or a woman.

Well I guess it depends on whether or not you like to wake up with stubble rash on your knackers, Filemon. Fair play to his mother though - the last time I tried to do all that in an evening, my mother gave me shit for 'ruining another christmas'.

It's interesting that, despite the easy availability of drugs, permissive society and open promotion of various illegal intoxicants on dodgy teevee shows, the Netherlands have lower rates of drug abuse than the UK. I can only put this down to one thing: English people are uptight and have to deal with it by taking loads of drugs.

Which leads me less successfully than I'd hoped on to the point of this post: last night a female friend said I was 'sleazy' because I slapped arse of a girl I've got a bit of a thing going on with while she was bent over the table in front of me. Sleazy's a pretty harsh term; redolent of Peter Stringfellow, Bill Wyman and Jonathan King, all greasy hair, dirty fingernails and cupboards full of disturbing pictures of Germans crapping on each other.

Sleazy b'Christ! Me? It would've maybe been sleazy if I'd got my cock out and ran it through her hair, or cajoled her into making out with a labrador. A bit of arse slapping is perfectly valid harmless pub flirting and that's a fucking FACT. I once spent a drunken afternoon running round a music festival giggling like a schoolgirl and introducing myself to women with a healthy slap to the buttock and received only positive responses.

So why'd my friend call me sleazy? The following options are all I can think of:

1. She was joking. (Possible)
2. She's insane with jealousy that I wasn't slapping her arse. (Highly probable)
3. She's uptight and twisted like all English people and can only get her rocks off if her boyfriend dresses up like Ray Mears and pukes baked beans onto a glass coffee table while she lies underneath it barking BA Barracus' catchphrases into an inflated rubber glove "Puke beans on the table, crazy fool!". (Most likely)
4. At that particular juncture in the evening, it perhaps was not apposite to be spanging pert flesh and she felt comfortable enough with me to point out my faults. (What are you, nuts? No way!!!)

If anyone has any better ideas, back of a postcard to the usual address...

Al Qaeda Cocaine Mayhem Plan - time to put the fun back in fundamentalism!

According to reliable sources (well my flatmate says someone in the pub told her about it), Al Qaeda recently tried to buy a big load of cocaine from a Columbian drugs baron with the aim of poisoning it before smuggling it to the West and releasing it onto the market. Whatever your politics, you can't help but admire this plan. Thousands of junkies, whores, politicians, bankers, Shoreditch twats, Sogo media bunnies, inbred poshos, loudmouth wankers, premiership footballers, pretentious rock twats, minor celebrities and Daniella Westbrook would all collapse in the toilets at Chinawhites/on a dustbin in Soho/in a bank boardroom, coughing a heady concoction of blood, nasal tissue and Anthrax all over their similarly deserving mates as they choke their last miserable breaths.

Well that's how it happens in my head anyway. There would be a delicious poetic irony in these people meeting a sticky end at the hand of international terrorism - they have all for years been funding terrorism, instability, misery and landmines in South America, not to mention crime and social decay in their own countries, through their funding of the cocaine industry. They are also people that society could get by without (minor celebrities, stockbrokers, Daniella Westbrook) or function a little better without (everyone else).

Al Qaeda, in effect, would make their huge statement - mass destruction, killing the most infidelicious of the infidels, garnering shock and huge headlines - but without the revulsion caused by the utterly cunty massacring of innocents, such as happened on 7/11. Which got me to thinking - are there other targets that would satisfy Al Qaeda's need to cause a big nasty fuss and get on telly, while at the same time perhaps not actively making everybody hate them? They won’t get many of us wishing we lived in a fundamentalist Islamic caliphate if we just associate it with impressive facial hair and bombs on public transport, but if people also associated it with, say, public executions of godless former Big Brother contestants, some of us might see an upside. So here, in no particular order, is a list of targets that Al Qaeda would be wise to go for instead of blowing up perfectly decent innocents on our public transport:

1. The Royal Family!!!!! We somehow neglected to rid ourselves of these leeching inbred anachronisms while other European countries were sensibly doing so. And ever since we've had to put up with their pointlessness, petty racism, endorsement of the class system, boorishness and unrepresentational political influence AND had to pay handsomely for the privilege. The only people in Britain who persist in blindly betrothing their devotion to the upper echelons of our class system are posh people, football hooligans, BBC news commissioners and working class Londoners. And according to royal accountants, if Al Qaeda nuked the royals, every man, woman and child in Britain would be able to afford an extra loaf of bread each year! I think I'd toast mine and put nutella on it. And eat it off my Charles n’ Di crockery, laughing my head off.

2. Posh people, football hooligans, BBC news commissioners and working class Londoners. Just for supporting the royals.

3. Especially football hooligans!!! Nobody likes football hooligans except for their mums. They would be an easy target. There's a Red Lion or British Bulldog pub filled with hooligans in EVERY foreign town. There's probably one in Falluja. Just get the bomb in there before they get drunk and go outside to chuck white plastic chairs around and piss in the fountain in Falluja town square.

4. Bankers!!! Nobody likes bankers. Not even their mums. It's not for nothing that God made them rhyme with 'wankers'. Banks and bankers don't produce anything - they just shift money around, and money's just a cipher, a form of practical barter that lets me swap my ten minutes of intelligence analysis for your pint of beer. There's no inherent value to money, it's just information. However, banks and bankers exploit the fact that they are responsible for handling this information by skimming amounts from us that are completely out of proportion with the service they provide. (I just found out that hedge fund managers can make $50 million a year! Hedge funds! How much fucking money can there be in topiary?). Pretty soon computer programmes (Zoba, for example) should replace fund managers, lenders and investors and allow people to live without banks. In the meantime, Al Qaeda could take out a few of the posh bastards for us. Lacing cocaine with anthrax would do the job.

5. Fat people!!! Fat people suck. They look bad, they smell bad, they take up too much room, they use beer to trick me into having sex with them (I’ve never gone to bed with a fat bird, but I’ve woken up with one or two) they self-centredly eat their way into illnesses then expect healthy society to take up the slack (THEY get sickpay while WE work to cover their time at home with a ‘sore back’) and pay for them to be treated (via the taxpayer funded national health service). You're going to need a bigger bomb than usual, though - blubber has incredible shock absorbent properties, as anyone who has whaled on a chubster for shits and giggles will confirm. It may be more effective to use the leftover smallpox from the cocaine in a consignment of Ben and Jerry's.

6. Old people! I’m waiting for a knee operation at the moment, but I’ve got to wait months because our healthcare system is clogged with old people getting new hips. New hips for what? You can watch Murder She Wrote sitting down, granddad. When I was in hospital getting patched up after my shark attack, I was the only person on the ward who didn’t have a bus pass or ear hair. Everyone else was a demented old codger who spent their days shitting where they lay and yelling at the nurses because they were black or wouldn’t let them smoke in bed or wouldn’t wank them off (often all three at once), and spent their nights moaning and wailing so that people who were there to GET BETTER (instead of rot for a bit before dying, their decrepit bodies propped up far beyond their natural expiry date with cocktails of expensive drugs) couldn’t get any sleep. If they were dogs, you’d put them down. For pity’s sake, and the sake of the UK taxpayer, let’s help old people die with some dignity!

7. Animal rights protesters!!!!! These hysterical harpies are using terror and intimidation to slow down the development of treatments for illnesses that are killing and causing suffering to millions of people right now. Apparently it’s wrong for us to use rodents in a tightly regulated way that minimises suffering to the animal to develop these treatments, even though the overwhelming majority scientific and medical communities concur that animal testing is necessary as it offers knowledge that can’t be gained by cell cultures or computer models. Wound these woolly jumpered freakshows, then deny them any treatment that was developed using animal testing. See how well their self righteousness protects them compared to properly researched and developed science and medicine. Poetic justice.

8. Hillary Clinton!!! If Al Qaeda take her out, the Democrats will ride a tidal wave of sympathy to victory in the next election. (The Federal Emergency Management Agency note: it’s a metaphorical tidal wave. Not that you’d be able to do anything anyway. What sort of emergencies CAN you deal with? Cats in trees? A lack of matching socks? Changing lightbulbs?). And Hillary would no longer irritate Americans with her determination, intelligence and political skill. Admirable qualities in a man, perhaps, but what do you think America is? Some sort of enlightened, forward thinking land of the free? Shyeah!!! Get back in the kitchen, bitch!

9. Anybody involved in the making of Will and Grace, or any of those other shit-shows-that-men-have-to-watch-because-their-girlfriends-want-to-watch-even-though-they-can’t-possibly-be-enjoying-it. In fact, here’s a tip for any budding sitcom creators out there: just because someone’s talking in a really irritatingly squeaky voice doesn’t make up for a lack of jokes or amusing situations. See also: Ally McBeal, Hollyoaks, This Life, Smack The Pony, Three Non Blondes, The Catherine Tate Show, etc etc…..

10. OK, I’m starting to scrape the barrel here. I feel like I’ve got to make it to ten, but I’m such a sweet natured, un-embittered person that I’m finding it hard to think up more people I’d like Al Qaeda to take out. I guess I’m just too nice a person. So here’s a joke instead. How do you kill a circus? Go for the juggler! Pretty good huh?

Normal services will shortly resume...

I haven't posted in a while because I'm away on a 2 week training course. Which is great for me (no work, buffet lunches and 3 course dinners EVERY DAY, clean sheets and fresh towels for the first time since I left home) but shit for my blog as I can't really get to it. Which is a shame as there is so much bloggable stuff happening right now:

1. Hurricane Katrina and how the disaster was exacerbated by the Bush regime's post-Enlightenment ignorance of science and reason
2. Scotland drawing with Italy, one of the world's greatest footballing nations, then BEATING Norway, who are pretty shit hot too, in the same week as England get HUMPED by Northern Ireland, a team of postmen and plumbers
3. The pissing Loyalist wankers in Belfast rioting and shooting at the police. Get a load of this you Orange tossers - NORTHERN IRELAND STILL BELONGS TO THE FRIGGING QUEEN. What's your problem? You want Eire, France and Belgium to come under the cudgel of the Union too?
4. How TERRIBLE it is that Palestinians have been burning the wood and brick buildings, sorry, holy religious synagogues of special religious holiness, left behind by departing Israelis. Honestly, what's the world coming to if you can't keep people under an illegal military occupation for four decades, destroying their buildings, infrastructure and economy and subject them to brutal violence, curfews, checkpoints that prevent the injured from getting to hospital and force pregnant women to strip, without them taking out some of that four decade's worth of anger on the symbols of occupation? Interesting that the departing Israeli forces demolished many homes but left the synagogues standing - almost as if they were fishing for that PR image of Palestinians burning down synagogues that would play so well on Western media for the Zionist lobby. Meh.
5. Animal rights nutjobs claiming new 'success' (successes for extremism and idiocy perhaps, but dark days for science, medicine and human life) with the closing of a guinea pig farm after an 8 year campaign of terror and harassment.

Suicide bombs v F-15s: which one is it OK to kill civilians with? (Panorama)

Panorama (a BBC current affairs programme) last night examined whether the Muslim community in Britain was doing enough to condemn and root out extremism and suicide bombers. Unfortunately the July bombs were as much a result of the ineptitude of our security services as British Muslim indifference to potential terror in their name (two years ago, the extremism of one of the bombers was reported to the police by leaders at a South London mosque. Sadly, the police were too busy shooting Scotsmen who were guilty of sounding a bit Irish and busting people for eating mushrooms to do anything about it).

John Ware, the bloke making the documentary, must have known this as he barely mentioned the London bombs in his questioning of Sir Iqbal Sacranie, the Secretary General of the Muslim Council of Britain. Instead, he repeatedly grilled him over his refusal to condemn suicide bombings by Palestinians against Israelis. This is disingenuous: suicide bombs in Israel cannot be equated with the suicide bombs in London. Attacks by Al Qaeda and their sympathisers do not have a political purpose (unless you count the nonsensical desire for a hardcore Islamic caliphate encompassing Western Europe), they are an attack on our liberal, democratic values - 'punishment' for our perceived degeneracy. The terrorist attacks by Palestinian militants have a specific and limited political purpose and take place in the context of a conflict where terror is dished out liberally by each side - only one side is rich and powerful enough to use tanks and missiles instead of suicide bombs.

Israel has killed hundreds of innocent Palestinian civilians with its highly advanced military which is armed and funded by the West. Last night’s Panorama glossed over the fact that Israel is the aggressor and gave the impression that killing innocent civilians by suicide bombing is worse than killing innocent civilians using modern tanks and missiles. Perhaps John Ware would find the deaths of Israeli civilians more palatable if they were killed using such high tech weaponry instead of by suicide bombings which, in Palestine's case, are the weapon of the desperate and hopeless?

I’m an atheist Scot, not a raving Islamic fundamentalist, but even I can see that suicide bombings in Israel are used as a weapon against an illegal military aggressor which has caused death, terror and impoverishment on a larger scale . If you want to see an end to Palestinian suicide bombings, give them some of the F-15s, nuclear weapons, tanks and missiles that are gifted to Israel. Or (and this solution is slightly preferable) get Israel to comply with the numerous UN resolutions (and the wishes of George Bush and Tony Blair) calling for it to stop screwing the Palestinians over.

Incidentally, what always cracks me up about the Nicedoggie right wing American attitude to the problems of Israel and Palestine is that while they all think that a man has the right to defend his home (ie shoot burglars and rapists who break in), Palestinians don’t have the right to defend THEIR homes against an aggressor that has stolen their land, knocked down their houses and shot their kids. Palestinian resistance seems to me to be completely in keeping with right wing American ideals.

Slap Rik!!! Fun Flash Game!!!

I've made a Flash game specially for YOU which involves slapping morbidly obese, self loving Pop Idol reject Rik Waller. There's a high score board so you can see how well you've done. I just need to tweak the highscores so that they display in order of height.

Just click here to open it: http://leo.huan.co.uk/flash/rik/rikslap.html

Doddery auld sassenach doss cunt slags bonnie hame toon!

My home town, Thornhill, got a slating at the weekend in the Guardian, Britain’s rag for faux socialists, liberal apoligistas and social workers. It’s not often that the Guardian’s weekend columnists, with their socio-cultural deconstructions of hat colours and worthless "You’ll never believe what my cat had for breakfast!" inanities move me to anything more remarkable than boredom. But Alexander Chancellor’s surprise that the reality of rural Scotland doesn’t quite fit with his kailyard fantasy of what it should be like made me laugh out loud.

Labouring under the notion that ‘country people’ are all desperate to present a carefully groomed image of rural idyll and civility to visiting urbanites, he took great delight in exposing that had he - shock! - found an empty vodka bottle in a church yard and - gasp! - somebody had committed suicide near Dumfries. His most shocking revelation, however, cuts right to the cold heart of the rural dystopia that lurks, Blue Velvet style, behind the rictus smiles and forced "how d’you do marm"s of rural Scotland’s visage. An old man - and I urge you to sit down, for this truly is shocking - had a go at our columnist because he thought he was jumping the queue!!!

Sorry Mr Chancellor, but Whisky Galore and Local Hero were fiction, not documentary. Perhaps if English government hadn’t crushed Scottish manufacturing and coal mining, callously using high unemployment as a balance to the rampant inflation caused by wealth creation in the south of England, Scotland would suffer less from poverty and its attendant ills of drug abuse, suicides and cranky minimart queue monitors.

As for his irritation at Scot’s "crabbed provincialism and chippy resentment of England’s generosity and indulgence towards them", perhaps he’d like to return our North Sea oil revenues? And without Scotland, where would Britain find its best politicians, writers, scientists, musicians, policemen, soldiers, engineers, comedians and academics? Where would the Government try out ill advised schemes such as the Poll Tax, or put nuclear power stations? Perhaps there is some benefit to England in holding power over Scotland other than a chance to exercise that famous English "generosity and indulgence". If Scotland is such a burden, surely England could give Scotland their much clamoured for independence?

The Scots tend to be canny judges of character. I think Mr Chancellor may be assuming that Scottish animosity directed specifically towards pompous English arseholes such as himself equates to a general antipathy against the English. Outside of football, such antipathy comes only from small minded ignorami. I wonder what the apparently well educated and informed Mr Chancellor’s excuse is for such bigotry?

Magic Numbers: fans of a good cream puff in every sense!

This made me larf. According to the Guardian, new band The Magic Numbers were due to make their debut appearance on Top of the Pops, but stormed off in a big cream puff after presenter Richard Bacon said the band had been put in a "fat melting pot of talent" during rehearsals. The Magic Numbers, for those of you unacquainted with them, are a popular beat combo consisting of two brother/sister sets. Their unique selling point is that they are fat, hairy and look like they smell. In fact, they look like they’d leave a stain on your couch if they sat down for a moment. This didn’t stop them taking group umbrage at sharp eyed Richard, who’d noticed the band’s big bones and cracked a little quip about them:

"Due to derogatory, unfunny remarks made during the guest presenter's introduction to our performance, we felt we had to make a stand and leave," Romeo and Michele Stoddard and Angela and Sean Gannon said in a statement. "It was an important day for us and should have been special. We didn't take this decision lightly but we stand by it."

I’d be pissed off too if a boss eyed, sub-Cheggers telly goon like Richard Bacon poked fun at my appearance. But then again, I’m not an international pop star – my looks are all I have to further myself (I’m planning on marrying in to money) so if someone mocks them, it hurts. The Magic Numbers chose a career in the public eye so they are fair targets for ridicule. The band even suggest that their appearance is part of their appeal: "I think people love the fact that we're natural”. Somewhat akin to a fat chick saying their appearance is a boon because it means that men will like them for the real person inside. Anyway, their confidence has been rewarded with a top ten album and an acclaimed performance at the Glastonbury festival (What – greasy hairy hippy types popular at Glasto? You’ll be telling me that uptight religious types are popular at Republican conventions next).

Anyway, if Jennifer Lopez returned from vacation weighing 250 pounds, swaddled in sack cloth, sporting a rat’s nest style barnet and stinking like a Turkish prison, the event would not pass unremarked. I see no reason why the Magic Numbers should get special treatment. Particularly as they’re just fat and smelly because they’re lazy and eat too much. If they don’t want people to point and laugh, they should stop eating the pies and maybe take the stairs instead of waiting for the lift.

The Common Agricultural Policy – it’s obsolete protectionism that’s stifling economic development in Africa and costing us far too much money, but...

I know, I know - I don’t post anything for WEEKS then I come back with some chinstroking crap about EU rebates. Sorry folks, this un’s a long slog and may feel like reading the most small print of the back pages of some European trade journal. But this rankles with me and, like a big angry zit, I won’t be happy until I’ve given this issue a good squeezing…

Britain and ‘old’ Europe (France and Germany) recently fell out in spectacular style over the annual rebate that Britain receives from the EU. France’s president, Jacques Chirac, demanded that Britain give up its annual rebate as a “gesture of European solidarity”. Blair said the EU budget was "not fit for purpose in the 21st century". Chirac accused Britain of lacking “European spirit”. Blair said, “Europe isn’t owned by anybody”. Chirac accused Blair of “egoism”. Blair said “Chirac’s mum is a slag” and gave Chirac a wedgie. Well, nearly…

Britain receives its rebate – about £3bn – because other EU members, particularly France, extract far more from the EU funds in the form of farming subsidies than Britain does. Effectively, Britain pays about two and a half times as much into the EU budget as France. The rebate goes some way towards balancing this. Chirac wants Britain to sacrifice its rebate. Blair is prepared to do this, but only if the Common Agricultural Policy (CAP) that feeds France so many subsidies is reformed.

At present, the CAP means that a whopping 40% of the EU’s budget is spent on farm subsidies. This is seven times as much is spent on skills, education and innovation. One of the original purposes of the CAP was to ensure that Europe had a surplus of food and could sustain itself should supplies from outside Europe dry up. In the post war years of its inception, with their food shortages and rationing, this was a valuable goal. In today’s stable global marketplace there’s no need for such us to spend so much money on paranoid hoarding and self sufficiency, particularly when the money would benefit Europe’s economy better if it were spent in other ways.

But more than cost the European taxpayer money and suck up research money, the CAP also screws over farmers in the developing world. Because they are propped up by subsidies, European farmers can sell their produce at lower prices than unsubsidised farmers from developing countries. Even though it’s twice as expensive to produce sugar from English sugar beets than it is from Caribbean sugar cane, the subsidies mean that English farmers can undercut Caribbean prices. The situation is so ridiculous that you can find tinned Italian tomatoes on shelves in Ghana. The CAP means that it is cheaper for the Ghanaian shop to import tomatoes from Europe than buy locally produce. When African farmers can sell their produce on the world market, the prices are often artificially depressed as their European competitors can cut their prices.

Africa’s share of global exports has dropped from 6% to 2% in the past 25 years. Africa has little manufacturing industry – one of its main sources of foreign exchange is farming. Unless it’s allowed to compete fairly with Western producers, it will be unable to realise its economic potential, and remain dependent on handouts from the West. Long term, allowing Africa to achieve economic parity with the West will improve our economy too – there will be more customers for our products. Looking at the broader picture, healthy economies will help stifle terrorism by removing the inequities and exploitation that generate anger towards the West.

For all the good intentions behind Live 8 and G8, it’ll all be huff and puff unless Africa is allowed to compete fairly with Western producers. Extra aid isn’t always best for Africa – aid is short term, usually comes with conditions (much US AIDS aid has to spent on abstinence programs rather than more effective safe sex programs), is too easily misappropriated by corrupt officials and can damage the already ailing economy. For example, providing free corn to Africans runs the risk of putting the markets and farmers who usually sell the corn out of business. And when the emergency is over and the aid dries up, people will need these supply chains to be functioning in able to buy corn.

However, unfair though the CAP may be, these arguments overlook what would happen to the European countryside if subsidies were not available. The subsidies really address the imbalance caused by the West’s economic superiority. Of course it’s going to cost more to grow crops in the West as wages are higher, regulations more rigorous and land more expensive than in developing countries. While economic sense decrees that apples should be grown in Africa then stored close to 0 in nitrogen (which leaches the vitamins and flavour out of them) while they are transported to European stores (which burns fossil fuels and stores up hidden costs), this is the same economic sense that decreed that in Depression era California, oranges should be burnt while people starved (to maintain prices).

Common sense suggests that it would be more rational for food to be grow as close to the consumer as possible. Not only does this allow the food to get from field to mouth in as short a time as possible (limiting carbon emissions and allowing food to be naturally fresh rather than preserved), in an era of transmissible diseases such as foot and mouth and food scares such as the recent carcinogenic red dye that originated in India, it is safer to eat easily traceable local food.

More importantly, British (and European) farming supports communities, skills and environments that will be lost if we buy all our food from overseas. Rural workers have seen their salaries fall in comparison to their urban peers for decades now, while living costs have risen. For example, the depopulation of rural areas has resulted in more expensive services, while the burgeoning wealth of the urban classes has resulted in thousands of rural houses being bought as holiday homes, pricing locals out of the property market.

The British rural landscape – patchworks of fields, hedgerows, wooded copses and moorland - supports a plethora of plants and animals and is enjoyed by tourists and urbanites. Much of what we consider to be wilderness is in fact a carefully managed system that needs to be able to sell its product – meat, fish, crops or hunting – to pay for its upkeep. Without subsidies, it may be uneconomic to continue working the land and it will be used for the next most lucrative use – whether that be blanket forestry that chokes and acidifies the land, or golf courses that replace rare indigenous fauna with fat men in bad cardigans and require tonnes of pesticides to maintain their sanitised, unnatural landscapes. Without subsidies, small producers will be bought up by huge agribusinesses who will knock down hedgerows and woodland and turn the countryside into a production line, pumping out homogenised food for the supermarkets.

So while the Common Agricultural Policy needs to be reformed to allow African farmers to gain more of a foothold in the European market, there is still a place for it.

Fuck me. Can you believe I wrote all that for fun? I really do need to get out more. I’m going to the pub now, so I’ll write a proper conclusion tomorrow. Stand by for more from the exciting world of european animal husbandry disputes!

ARF!

The perils of acting like a suicide bomber...

Recently the police have been criticised for their shoot to kill policy following the killing of a man at Stockwell tube station. The shooting ties in with worries about a societal and regulatory backlash against the wider Muslim and Asian community – the victim was non-white, he didn’t have a valid work visa, he was shot while running from the police and the ‘shoot to kill’ tactic used was developed by Israel. The victim was also innocent of any involvement in the London bombings.

All this suggests to distrustful minds that the police are nervy, prejudiced and trigger-happy. The Observer’s front page yesterday screamed, "Man shot in terror hunt was innocent young Brazilian". My neighbourhood hosted Europe’s biggest gay festival yesterday – as I walked past it, trying my hardest to project a nonchalant air of "Gay? Me? No way, I just live here", a woman offered me a newsletter complaining about the "police murdering an unarmed Asian". The Brazilian government says it is "shocked and perplexed" by the events and is demanding an explanation. The man’s family is planning to sue.

But the situation needs to be put into context. The previous day, only luck prevented four would-be suicide bombers from carrying out an identical attack to that which killed or maimed hundreds a fortnight before. It quickly became apparent that the bombings of 7/11 were not a one off. They could be the start of a systematic bombing campaign. The police were in an impossible situation – a moment’s hesitation to allow for searching or questioning could allow a potential bomber time to detonate his hidden explosives and kill dozens of people.

The man emerged from a building that the police had been monitoring in connection with the bombings, wearing a bulky overcoat on a warm summer day. When challenged by police, he gave chase, refusing to stop despite their warnings. He headed into a tube station and vaulted the gates, ran down the escalator, along the platform, finally stumbling onto a busy tube carriage. At this point, police bundled him to the ground and killed him by shooting him several times in the head.

The Brazilian government should be less pissed off about this. Judging the circumstances on their merits, the Metropolitan Police may have done the Brazilian gene pool a favour. Who in their right mind - 1) wears a big bomb-belt concealing overcoat 2) doesn’t stop for armed police and 3) vaults a tube barrier and runs onto a busy tube carriage - the day after FOUR people try to blow themselves up on public transport? What you want to do is NOT act like a suicide bomber around public transport hubs and STOP for the police when they ask you to. While this loss is regrettable, it’s unlikely to be a particularly heavy blow to the Brazilian institutions of rocket-science or brain surgery. Who wears a heavy overcoat on the tube in the middle of summer anyway? If the police didn’t shoot him, he would’ve suffered a lingering death by heat stroke.

Sorry, I’m being flippant. It’s a terrible tragedy. But things could’ve been so much worse. They could’ve shot one of those Brazilian birds with the nice arses.

What's Aramaic for D'oh?

Sirens wailing outside, policemen running up and down the corridor stuffing donuts into their batbelts...yes folks, breaking news is just coming in about MORE bombs on London buses and tubes. Except, this time, they've failed to do much more than blow the side pockets off the rucksacks that housed them. Apparently the bombs didn't really go off properly - the detonators went off, but the bombs remained very much unexploded.

Current theories suggest that perhaps the people who knew how to assemble the bombs blew themselves up a fortnight ago. Didn't plan that one too well! Should've left some diagrams for your mates!! Or maybe they just aren't the sharpest tools in the box. Remember Richard Reid, the shoe bomber? He tried to bring down a plane with his exploding disco shoes. Except....he'd been walking round Paris in the rain all day, so he had a little trouble lighting his fuse. Most likely, however, is that the suicide bombers weren't that keen on the idea really, and took advantage of the opportunity to disconnect the detonators from the explosives when nobody was looking.

There's a cracking eyewitness account on the Sky News website (our offshoot of Faux News):

"He told me he had seen a man carrying a rucksack which suddenly exploded. It was a minor explosion but enough to blow open his rucksack. Everyone rushed from the carriage. People evacuated very quickly. There was no panic.
"I didn't see anyone injured but there was shock and fright.
"There was a smell of smoke."
"The man who was holding the rucksack looked extremely dismayed."

Yeah, looking extremely dismayed. But inwardly thinking "I'll be in jail for, ooh, 25 years? They've got cable in jail and more gentleman's magazines than you can shake a goat at. That beats being blown to mush and scraped off the walls. Hope the other guys aren't mad at me".

Can't wait til they all get the news that their other ostensible suicide bombing compadres all chickened out as well! Can you imagine the sheepish grins... "Aw dude, you mean you weren't really that much into the fundamentalist Islam thing either? Shucks!"

There have been some quality eye witness statements, too:

"I was in the carriage and we smelt smoke - it was like something was burning"

Yeah and in other news, water is wet and dogs eat dog food.

This incident has shaken me out completely and I am afraid to say I have lost my calm.

Try looking down the back of the couch, love.

Faaaaaaark. Maybe we're all doomed anyway. Nobody seems to be getting any smarter.

London bomb mayhem - the dust settles

It’s interesting seeing the effects that the bombing has had on people in London. Well, the people who weren't actually blown up, that is. Thursday night we had an impromptu mini street party, sank some beers and had a laugh with the neighbours. Friday night we smashed up some furniture and had a bonfire in the back yard. It’s stupid to say, but it was a kind of wake up call – you take so much for granted, trudging on in life. The bombings really made me feel alive and want to have fun with my friends. I’ve heard from so many people I’d lost touch with too – dozens of emails saying "Hey dude are you all right? By the way, do you have that twenty quid you owe me?" So touching.

What’s also been impressive is that there hasn’t been a dumb-ass, knee jerk anti-Muslim reaction over here, despite the *spit* BNP’s cynical attempt to exploit the bombings. One of the notable things about these bomb attacks is that they’ve targeted regular Muslims. Two of the tube bomb sites – Edgware Road and Aldgate – are in Muslim areas. The bus bomb was on the no 30, which brings people into the centre of London from my stomping ground of Finsbury Park, another Muslim area. Why did they do this? Fundamentalist Muslims hate regular Muslims even more than they hate us Christian infidels. The vast majority of Muslims here in the West live pretty liberal Western lives – they have enjoyable sex, vote and watch Big Brother. Fundamentalist Muslims hate this heretic betrayal. If you cast your mind back to the rise of Islamic fundamentalism in places such as Algeria and Iran, you can see that these were becoming increasingly liberal countries – changes that the fundamentalists abhorred.

Personally, I don’t like any religion. Every religion I’ve looked at seems to be a daft club; an excuse for creepy men to wear dresses and hang around with young boys while at the same time telling their flock what to do, making them feel ashamed of getting a boner and charging them for the privilege. But at the same time, people who are borne into such cultures tend to carry their values and routines into adulthood. While the end goal of a sane population of humanists is attractive to me, the Stalinesque mass re-education this would require doesn’t sit well with my ideals of personal freedom. So I say; let people be religious – it’s mostly harmless and having their Sundays and their sex lives ruined is surely punishment enough.

While Londoners haven’t rounded on Muslims, others who claim solidarity with us have. Emperor Darth Misha I responded to reports of Mosques being vandalised on the right-wing NiceDoggie website.

He counters the statement "But it is wrong to target the Muslim community here in retaliation" with:

"It is? Is it as wrong as targeting commuters in London in retaliation for the ass-whupping that their muslim terrorist brethrens are receiving in Iraq?"
Hmmmmm.

He then claims that the Muslim population of New Zealand are "guilty until proven innocent. They've done nothing to deserve anything better than that."
Hmmmmmmmm.

He then claims that other vandalism was perpetrated "deliberately by the very same people who are claiming to be innocent "victims" of hatred."
Hmmmmmmmmm.

The post degenerates into puerile abuse regarding Qurans, bacon grease and running out of toilet paper.

Get bent, Misha. We don’t need your ‘solidarity’. Don't try to cynically exploit the atrocities here to whip up anti-Muslim fervour. Dickmunch. Muslims died in the bombings too.

Of course I’d love to see those responsible for the bombings and their sympathisers dragged naked through the streets of London so that they can be pelted with broken bottles and salt and vinegar crisps. But there isn’t a thread of logic that suggests that the wider Muslim community share responsibility for the atrocities, any more than my Christian grandparents were responsible for massacres at Sabra and Shatila. Racist, boneheaded aggression such as that spouting from the NiceDoggies doesn’t increase harmony; it divides people and as such plays right into the hands of the terrorists. I don’t want my Halal butcher to be afraid of me, and I don’t want him to jerk off in the lamb he sells to whitey, either.

Anyway, I’ve prattled on enough. Now I’m off to look for wallets and fingers with rings on them...

Aw it’s fucking CAVALIER HUMOUR!!! Even the Queen said she was proud of Londoners for having a laugh about it!!!

Tube blast mayhem!

My arm was blown off but I savloned it and dragged myself into work. Still got shit for being late...

Naw only joking everyone! I'm FINE! Only just though - I get the Metropolitan line into work - if I got up half an hour earlier they'd be scraping me off the walls right now and shoveling me into a plastic bucket to present to my parents. Fortunately though, Allah spared me because I got up late. In His infinite wisdom, He spares the lazy...

Tell you what though, these terrorist attacks on my countryfolk have made me right pissed off...I have a righteous seething fury inside me....want to know why? Some of my workmates phoned in to say they had just made it off the tube or whatever and were told to go home if they were closer to home. I couldn't get through on my mobile and consequently have to sit in the office working all day instead of arsing about at home playing Halo and drinking chocolate milk. The horror of this situation cannot be expressed in words alone...

Seriously though, it's all a bit mental. When I left the flat at 9 this morning, the news was talking about delays to tube lines. I got on the Victoria line at Finsbury Park and it was mobbed as the Piccadilly line wasn't running. We got to Kings Cross and were told that the station was closed. So we sat at the platform for a good 15 minutes with the doors closed - the driver said he couldn't open them as the station was closed. People were fainting and it was really hot, so we forced the doors.

I headed up out of the station and it was mayhem on Euston Road - fire engines, ambulances, police running around. There was no chance of getting a bus as there were so many people on them, so I walked down Euston Road then Marylebone Road to Council House, stopping on the way to buy some deodorant as I was MINGING from being stuck on a hot sticky tube train. Then we had to wait anxiously for everyone from work to let us know they were OK before we could start cracking jokes about it.

On a more positive note, we're getting to go home early, AND getting tomorrow off! Wahey! Let's hear it for international terrorism! Now I've just got to get from Westminster to Finsbury Park without tubes, trains or buses.....

On a serious note, my heart goes out to anyone seriously affected by this. Don't be offended by my cavalier humour...it's like the Blitz, laughing in the face of Gerry, everyone pulling together, doodlebugs and Vera Lynne! Makes you proud to be British!

Trust-fund twats deserve state-sponsored kicking

Myself and my flatmates were going to head up to G8 at the weekend to show our support for Blair and Brown's push for a fair deal for Africa. We didn't in the end, partly because the girls' tent was mudlogged from Glastonbury, and partly because we couldn't really be arsed. Myself, I have had reservations about the type of people who go along to this type of thing ever since I went to an Iraq rally in Trafalgar Square and had some bean muncher wailing in my ear about how animal medical testing (to, y'know, FIND CURES FOR DISEASES THAT KILL CHILDREN 'n that) was, like, really fucking evil man and I was a pervert for suggesting that a few rats could be sacrificed on the altar of medical knowledge if it meant that people could be saved from terminal illness.

My reservations have been rewarded in abundance. Despite Blair and Brown pretty much pledging to do everything that could reasonably be expected of them regarding aid, debt cancellation and persuading other leaders to act similarly, a bunch of anarchist students, doleys and trust funders dressed up as clowns/UDF members have been raising merry hell in Edinburgh and Stirling. Despite handling the carefully orchestrated anarcho-twattery with care and sensitivity, the police have been lambasted by left-wingers everywhere who seem to still think the police are the same organisation they were 20 years ago. Such as Victor S, who wrote:

"Police are nothing but illiterate, racist thugs. Far from there being a few 'bad apples', they are systematically brutal. On the contrary, it is the rare officer indeed that does not have a near-lycanthropic bloodlust.

We would be far better off without such neanderthals"

I'll be round to kick your door in and nick your stereo in the morning, Victor. I'm sure you wouldn't trust our 'neanderthal' police to sort me out. Anarchy rules!

Seriously though, don't all those rag week clowns and hooray Henriettas who were poncing about chucking soil (!) at the police realise that if it wasn't for capitalism, Mummy and Daddy wouldn't have been able to afford to buy their little darlings tickets to the G8 rally? Couldn't the Home Office have rushed through emergency powers to allow the police to crack clown domes with impunity, on the grounds that these trust fund crusties are just too twatty for our society?

On the one hand, they criticise the police for brutality, when the police have acted pretty commendably. On the other, they hold up totalitarian regimes such as Cuba, where the police really do whale on protesters, as paragons of virtue. You want socialism? Look at what Blair/Brown have done! A decent minimum wage, a million British kids lifted out of poverty, record low unemployment, excellent(ish) public services...we might not have Gulags, but the proles are doing better than Marx could ever hope for...

PARKLUNCH!

Haven't posted anything in yonks because I've been so busy with work so here's a picture of me and a colleague enjoying a parklunch in a shoddy effort to make it look like I'm still posting...

Money talks, paedos (moon) walk....

Cancer-kid raping, Earth Song recording, gold-lamé-industry-supporting race traitor Michael "I Love You All!" Jackson has been found innocent of about, ooh, forty counts of kiddie beasting and related charges such as plying kids with Jesus Juice in order to facilitate their beasting.

Despite the overwhelming evidence that pointed to Jackson's guilt, the jury was apparently swayed by the demeanor of Janet Arvizo (mother of the abused):

"I disliked it intensely when she snapped her fingers at us," said one juror.

Another juror said: "She never took her eyes off us. I was uncomfortable with that."

And another was concerned that a mother could allow her child to sleep in another adult's bed, "What mother in her right mind would allow that to happen?"

In other words, Jacko got off because Gavin's mum is an arse. It's true that she is a serial litigator, a grifter who makes a living from engineering situations that she can sue for (she previously won a big payout after being manhandled by a security guard). But this doesn't make Jacko innocent - surely the fact that Mrs Arvizo was so keen on her son sleeping with Jacko implies that Jacko was molesting him? And if Mrs Arviso is a serial litigator, Jacko is a serial paedophilia defendant, having previously paid out sums of $22.5 million and $2.5 million to buy his way out of such trouble.

Even more disturbing is the way the media have turned on Gavin Arvizo, the little boy who suffered cancer, then being molested by a scary-headed freak, then having his case collapse because the jurors don't like his mother. The Sun, Britain's right wing gutter tabloid, condemned "muscular" Gavin as a "conniving liar" and published a picture of him cycling to school with the word "LIAR" printed next to his head, in big red letters, as if to say "the authorities won't let us tattoo LIAR on his forehead, so here's the next best thing".

What sort of message does this trial send out? One: it's ok to shag little kids if you're rich enough to buy your way out of it. Two: if you've been abused, you better be from a family of saints, because otherwise nobody will believe your story. In fact don't even countenance bringing the case to court because as well as the public humiliation and pain of having the sordid event replayed in front of the world, if you lose the case you'll be publicly condemned.

You might be wondering how I can be so sure that Jacko is in fact a child molester. Here's how. He's built a big funpark to lure them in. He gives their parents money and gifts to look the other way, befriends them and then guilt-trips them into sleeping with him (this was in the Bashir documentary). He's built huge factories that just churn out chocolates, boxes of puppies and Ford Cortinas to stake out playgrounds. He doesn't shag women or men of his own age, so his sexual urges must be going somewhere. But most condemningly, he actually likes hanging around with kids.

I have a normal attitude to kids. When friends leave me to look after their kids, I chain them to a hot radiator and throw shoes at them if they squawk while I'm watching Celebrity Love Island. When friends give me their babies to hold, I make sure that their unsupported head lolls back dangerously so that the baby is quickly taken off me and never foisted upon me again. When precocious brats intrude on their parent's dinner party, I send them scuttling back off to bed with a splash of hot fondue and a sharp jab from a fork. Like most normal men, I see kids as an irritation, a bother, a right royal pain in the ass. I certainly don't want them hanging around, bogarting my booze and getting my porn collection all out of order.

Put simply, if Jacko wasn't a paedo, he'd have sex with wo/men of his own age and wouldn't sleep with boys. It really is that simple.

Woman, know your place!

Yesterday's post was bollocks, so I'm in a hurry to bury it...

Ever noticed how right wingers rightly (by which I mean correctly) abhor the misogyny of fundamentalist Islam and the restrictions placed on women by such regimes (no education, no job, wearing a sack over their head etc) but seem to equally abhor women in their own country who get an education, get a job and act in a manner other than that of subservience to a husband? Witness, for example, the vitriol directed at powerful, outspoken women such as Hillary Clinton and Teresa "Beanz Meanz" Heinz Kerry, while pretty, demure Laura Bush is lauded for standing to the side and slightly behind her husband while he attempts to string sentences together, smiling admiringly at him and saying things to reporters such as "Chocolate chips are an essential ingredient in chocolate chip cookies" , "I like puppies, but really I prefer kittens, although I love them all really, hahaha!" and "Perhaps the US was misguided in its support of a murderous totalitarian regime in Uzbekistan in return for strategically important military bases and influence in an important oil producing region as it belied our claims to be spreading freedom and democracy in the world, and also gave the Uzbek regime carte blanche to silence peaceful pro-democratic demonstrations with extreme violence".

Eh? I mean, what’s up with that? Eh? Eh?

America the tightwad!

Tony Blair had talks with Dubya last night in an effort to get chimpy to pay him back for his suppport over the Iraq war by pledging to cancel some African debt so that, y'know, children wouldn't have to starve to death n’that. Of course, just as when he was asked to give Tony some payback for Iraq by helping to bring peace to Israel/Palestine or signing up to carbon emissions protocols, Dubya told Tony to go fuck himself – this time, by reaching deep into his pocket and pulling out £370 million. Which was remarkably tight on two counts - not only is it a pittance for the world’s richest country (and one that grew wealthy from the exploitation of Africa and Africans), it's also money that had already been pledged for overseas aid.

Which is probably giving Dubya an idea - pledge the same chunk of cash a couple hundred more times and you'll reach the internationally agreed target of 0.7% of each rich country's Gross Domestic Product (GDP) that should be spent on aid. Looking at what countries give most, we can see that Norway gives most with 0.87% of its GDP being spent on foreign aid. Luxembourg, Denmark, Sweden and the Netherlands all give more than the 0.7% target. Britain gives a relatively measly 0.42%, but it's still way more than double the piffling 0.16% of GDP that the US hands over each year.

Which is bizarre. I always thought America was a wealthy country. I thought the people were warm and generous. When I lived in America, most of the people I met were warm and generous to a fault, even though I was a door to door salesman, a profession not noted for bringing out the best in people. It appears that either America isn't that wealthy and can't spare the cash, or its citizens are in fact right miserly bastards.

Of course, right wingers will probably say that it's no good just throwing money at the problem - we also need to loot their oil and natural resources, stop them using contraception, sell their dodgy dictators some weapons, then invade them. If you're a right winger, you're probably thinking, "Why the hell should I help foreign brown people? I don't even like brown people. Why can't everybody be a white Christian right winger like me? Besides, I believe in God, so if God sees fit to punish these people with Aids, famine and war, who am I to stop him? He does, after all, work in some very mysterious ways. I can't find Africa on the map. In fact, I can't find my arse with both hands, even though there isn't a mirror big enough to fit in both cheeks at once. Does Africa even exist? I've heard of places outide America, but can never tell if they're real or just in movies. Like that lanky feller who came to the door and Jedi mid-tricked me into buying some overpriced tat for my next garage sale - he swore he was from the place in Braveheart called North Britain and assured me that yes, they did have electricity and houses and soap and no, it was not a communist state, but then again he also said my wife would LOVE this aerial photograph of our neighbourhood, and she dang near ripped me a new a-hole for spending our donut money on something that wasn't fried in hydrogenated sugar. Besides, it'll just be full of them beardy brown fellers - Islamic Iraqis or what not so the money'll go to buying them yellowcake BMWs off the French ready to scorch Pittsburgh...etc".

Still, what better way to confirm your commitment to a 'culture of life' than to chuck £370 million at Africa, while spending £105 BILLION - and rising fast - on a war that's going tits up faster than a drunk stripper on marbles...

Guantanamo: a new Maze?

There's recently been a predictable backlash in the right-wing community (sorry, not a community, that sounds like communism...let's call it a collection of like minded individuals) against Amnesty International's blatantly commEUnistani/terror loving/troop hating claims that holding people without trial at Gitmo/Abu Ghraib/etc and torturing them might possibly not be that great, you know, human rights-wise (human rights of course being a term that was invented by left wingers to help them hate America better). However, perhaps these right wingers might like to look back at recent history to see how - gasp! - Amnesty might possibly be right...

During the 80s, when Britain was subject to terrorist attacks by Irish Rebublican groups (Catholic religious extremists, would you believe - religion of peace? Funded largely by America, would you believe - spreading freem'n'demoxy?), British law enforcement locked up a great many innocent men and women and tortured - sorry, stress-positioned them - into signing confessions. Needless to say, this did not help us to defeat terrorism, win support or catch the real terrorists. Instead, it provided us with useless intelligence that obfuscated the situation, made real evidential intelligence inadmissible in court, was a rallying point for the Irish Republican cause, provided fodder for loads of Hollywood movies about plucky Oirish freedom fighters, and generally made British law enforcement look like a bit of a cunt.

With Guantanamo, Abu Ghraib and the other countless detainment centres in Afghanistan and Iraq, and the interrogation/torture that is 'farmed out' to various dubious US allies such as Uzbekistan, the US is making the exact same mistakes but on a much larger scale.

A great many people held in Gitmo are likely to be innocent. I know this because none of them have been brought to trial. I also know this because of the way that the prisoners were caught. The Northern Alliance (a collection of anti-Taliban warlords) were paid $5,000 for every member of the Taliban they delivered to the US. What with $5,000 being a staggering sum of money for your average Northern Alliance bloke, they were sure to deliver an awful lot of 'Taliban' to the safe keeping of the US military. But catching Taliban takes time and is dangerous. So in many cases, the Northern Alliance just grabbed people who looked like they might pass as Taliban. You know the kind of thing - big beard, wrapped in bedsheets, copy of the Koran hanging out the back pocket. Not too hard to find in Afghanistan, believe it or not.

I've also heard the continued detention of prisoners being justified because 'prisoners of war are detained until that war is resolved'. But with a war on such a broadly defined term as terror, when will that day come? And why aren't prisoners taken in the 'war on drugs' held until that war is resolved? Or the 'war on poverty'?

In short, it's in America's best interests to treat these prisoners properly. Don't torture them, give them proper trials and let them return to their families (don't use this as an excuse to hand them over to your dodgy allies for a bit of 'farmed out' torture, Uzbek style). Really, right-wingers, criticism shouldn't be smothered and shouted down when it can be used to point out heinous holes in your system (and heinous assholes in your system too, no doubt).

Cowboy dentists

I recently had to go to the dentist for a root canal jobby. You're probably aware that in this country we have the National Health Service, which (depending whether I've just broken my leg or filed my tax return) is either the most fair and equitable way of providing healthcare to our society, or a way of getting healthy, hardworking people such as myself to pay for the treatment of the self inflicted ailments of the fat, the lazy and the stupid. Either way, it means that if something goes wrong with people here, they can get it treated for free.

But as you've probably worked out from the catastrophic state of the British smile, this system does not extend to dental care. This is unfortunate for me, because several years back I received a blow to the mouth. Fuck knows how - I mean it's not as if I get into heated drunken arguments with neckless herberts in pubs much. This resulted in the nerve inside my tooth dying and going rotten. I've had 2 root canal jobbies to sort it so far, neither of which has been successful.

Due to the fact that this is the last chance this tooth will get to be fixed before I give up on it and have it pulled, I decided to go private as my dentist assured me that he would "use better materials and take more time over the procedure". If this is the case, then he must treat his NHS patients in 38 seconds, using a bent paperclip and builder's putty to fix their mouths up. He actually took less time to treat me than my last root canal, which cost less than half as much.

The question is: have I been had? I know naff all about teeth except that they are white and bitey and don't respond well to being brushed with maple syrup. I know about as much about teeth as I do about gas boilers - teeth bite food, boilers heat water. If a plumber says the manifold sprockets are knackered and he needs to re-route the flux capacitors, I have no option but to trust him and pay him £1,200. Similarly, if my dentist says there is a possibility my tooth can be saved but to increase chances I should go private, I have no option but to concur.

Which brings me back to the core benefit of the National Health Service. More than the fact that it's efficient (America spends 2.5 times more per head on healthcare, despite tens of millions having none) and equitable (everybody has access to medical treatment, even dirty povs), I like nationalised health care because I would prefer to be treated as a patient than as a source of revenue. I think this outweighs the fact that a certain portion of the British public unjustly increases the burden on the NHS by making absolutely naff-all effort to be fit and healthy, safe in the knowledge that the NHS will put them back together for free.

In fact, given my recent experience, I think a case could be made for applying this system to dentistry too....

(I know folks, it's not very interesting, controversial or likely to induce floods of vitriol from our right wing pals. But don't worry! I've got loads more spodge coming out about George Galloway, free trade and how girls are hurtling us towards climate change mayhem and an early depletion of our fossil fuel reserves due to their insistence that either the heating or the air conditioning has to be on full blast all the feckin time....)

Kingdom of Kevin

Saw that Kingdom of Heaven at the weekend. What a load of shite. Even my dining companion (I had a tube of Smarties) didn't like it, and she's usually responsive to foppish actors with their shirts off. For those of you that don't know, it's all about the Crusades and the fight between Muslims and Christians for the holy city of Jerusalem, where Moses begat Jesus unto Santa Claus, or somesuch.

The film was actually toss enough for people to walk out of the cinema. Endless shots of horses riding in dusty slo-mo failed to stir the spirits and Orlando Bloom's simpering calls for his army to "Come on chaps" were about as rousing as Cliff Richard's calls for his mates to play tennis with him. The film also completely ignored the fact that the Christian crusaders were benevolent heroes bringing freem'n'demoxy to the oppressed A-rabs. This will no doubt be seen by a certain segment of the American population (ie everyone in America who isn't a member of an al'Qaeda sleeper cell) as completely unpatriotic, showing director Ridley Scott to be a dangerous Al’EUnichistani communist and probable drug using sodomite who is trying to hypnotise four year olds into Islam and twisting the knife in the back of our brave squaddies. Which means that Americans are unlikely to go see it. Which is lucky for them because it's shite.

What really bugged me about this movie was how it tried to tell a story of conflict in the Middle East from ages ago, when a film about the conflict now would be something people could relate to. Plucky Israeli snipers taking out evil Palistinian stone throwing 11 year olds! Brave Israeli tank commanders demolishing evil Palestinian houses! Courageous Israeli fighter pilots firing missiles into evil Palestinian refugee camps! Fearless Ariel Sharon combining forces with cheeky Lebanese Christian militia to indiscriminately slaughter Palestinian women and children! Wisecracking Israeli gunmen shooting journalists, then blaming their deaths on the poor medical treatment they receive back in Britain!

Yep, I'd pay a dollar to see that. Maybe it'll happen - the commEUnist director left the option for a sequel open by saying at the end that Jerusalem is still a place of conflict...

Animal Crackers!

Ho ho. Just discovered a post on my old site at leo.huan.co.uk from an excitable young bellamy called Haz, who took great umbrage at my championing of monkeys in space and PG Tips adverts:

---

The following was posted on leo.huan.co.uk at 21/04/2005 by Haz
Phone number: not necessary
Email: globalrising@hotmail.co.uk
Message: Youre website is so ridiculously stupid. Are you so arrogant that you justify the use of monkeys in the most pathetic way. These monkeys were ripped from their mothers at a very young age, (their mother probably being killed for bushmeat)these monkeys are then trained by being beaten and whipped. The 'clothes' that the media equips them with ruins their body posture over time, often leading to crippled feet and hands. The least you can do is erase all that rubbish, or people, like me, will continuously think that you are an uneducated and ignorant idiot. Thank you.

---

Well gee Haz, that’s just terrible. I would hate for ‘people like you’ to think I’m an uneducated and ignorant idiot. I prefer to be thought of as a highly educated and informed idiot. I shall remove all quasi-ironic references to mid-70s tea adverts forthwith, and run home to flagellate myself with a bunch of daffodils.

Thank you for enlightening me about the process of "ripping" monkeys from their mothers. I assume this is because of some sort of primitive simian velcro between mother and monkey. I see that sustained ripping would cause the velcro, like blu-tac, to lose its fixative powers, upsetting the monkeys. I was however aware that monkeys are ‘beaten and whipped’. Sadly, this is necessary as they tend to be disrespectful, slovenly workers. Did you know they got through 14 orangutans when filming ‘Every Which Way But Loose’ because Clint Eastwood kept having to beat them to death because they couldn’t be bothered to learn their lines? All they wanted to do was smoke cigarettes and play cards. But many apes actually prefer the violent world of monkey showbiz to being eaten by lions, which is what happens in the jungle (where monkeys come from).

I am also disturbed to hear that the ‘clothes that the media equips them with ruins their posture’ (damn you to hell, Fox News, and your monkey equipping!), ‘often leading to crippled feet and hands’. This explains why my own monkey butler, Burrell, broke so many plates. I used to think it was because he didn’t stand straight. "Damn your insolence, Burrell!" I used to yell, waving my cigar in his face, "Do you want me to burn you up good this time?". Then I’d tighten his cute little butler outfit so that he would stand straighter. But the clumsy little shit kept breaking plates, so I had to shoot him.

Oh but just ONE THING, Haz. If it wasn’t for monkeys being sent into space we would have fallen behind in the space race with the Communists and would currently be goose-stepping to a polka beat and queuing up for 3 days to buy pickled beets. Do you think Stalin would give a shit about your pro-apism? Be glad you live in a society where you can voice your opinions, you priapism. A society that was founded, incidentally, on the twin bastions of tea and firing monkeys into space.

"The least you can do is erase all that rubbish". Ha ha ha. Fucking make me, Moby.

Tory HQ, oi theenk Skeeppy's troying to till yow samtheeng

Last week the Tories (Britain's equivalent of the Republicans, with all of the odiousness but none of the guile) failed to capitalise on the British public's widespread (and misplaced) disillusionment with the Labour Party (our equivalent of the Democrats, although thankfully lacking the pissupinabrewery inability to win elections) and win a much larger portion of the vote than they did last time. The seats that they did gain were more due to an overall swing to the Liberal Democrats which split the centre-left vote.

This shouldn't be significant - after all, the Tories are used to eating shit come election time. However, this time it was different. They had a semi-credible leader. They had a burgeoning upper-middle class to milk (rich people love to vote Tory, even if they're only rich because of Labour's economic policies). But most importantly, they had imported a campaign director, Lynton Crosby, from Australia where he had steered John Howard's right-wing government to several easy victories.

However, this trump card in their election campaign proved to be their undoing. The Tory's campaign focused relentlessly on immigration, as Crosby's Australian campaigns had done. The Tories tag line was "ARE YOU THINKING WHAT WE'RE THINKING?" - a snide wink to the xenophobe the Tories hoped was at the heart of every Englishman. This was coupled with statements that stank of "I'm not a racist but....", such as "IT'S NOT RACIST TO WANT TO LIMIT THE NUMBERS OF IMMIGRANTS". Who said it was racist? Tory, you doth protest too much.

Why did these tactics work in Australia but not in Britain? The answer is, of course, that all white Australians are utterly racist. You might think it's racist of me to make such a sweeping generalisation, but I assure you that if I ever meet a white Australian who isn't all "BLADDY SIND NIGGAS IND MANKEYS! LITS TOI THEES DEHTY ABOW TO THA YUTE IND DRIG HIM ALAWNG A DEHT TRICK TOW TOICH HIM UH LISSUN", then I will eat my corked hat. Of course, I'm joking. Except I'm not - all white Australians are racist as hell.

Even nice Australians are racist. This was driven home to me a couple of weeks back when my Australian friend, who is as nice and decent a person as you could hope to meet, mentioned that he was "going to write a letter to John Howard [the Aussie premiere] because too much immigration is a really bad thing for society". When I asked him what the hoo-hey he was on about he said, "Down at Finsbury Park you wouldn't even know you were in England".

I was a bit confused, and burbled something about criminality being linked to societal factors rather than ethnicity. But when I thought about it for a bit, an Australian thinking it was bad that Finsbury Park isn't some sort of Aryan wonderland and doesn't match the stereotype of England as a land of bumbling, middle class pasty-faced toffs seemed daft to me. You might see more dark faces than white when you walk to the shops, but that's because London is a multi-cultural city. And Finsbury Park might be a bit rough and ready, but that's because it's a poor area of inner-city London, not because it's ethnically mixed.

Ironically, the people that my Aussie pal takes such umbrage at will in most cases be second, third or fourth generation Britons, while he has barely been in the country long enough for his suntan to fade. It's hilarious that an Australian should be commenting about the people we let into our country, when he himself is not only an immigrant, but an immigrant from as far away from Britain as it is possible to get without a spaceship. The fact that he is white doesn't change this fact.

The desperate men who stow away in the back of lorries to escape dismal circumstances in their home countries and earn a living over here don't steal our land, put us in camps, or take our children off us to be raised in their idea of a proper society. But this is what white Australians did to its indigenous peoples when they originally settled Down Under. Perhaps Aussies are worried that this is how all immigrants wish to behave.

The vast majority of Britons, be they white, black, or any shade inbetween, are very happy to enjoy the benefits of a multicultural society, such as spicy food and jangly music. We are also happy to enjoy the benefits of an immigration policy which has swelled the ranks of much needed doctors, dentists (you know how desperately we need them) and other skilled professionals, while allowing refugees to escape persecution and driving the economy by filling the shit, low paid jobs that Britons don't want to do. If any Aussies are upset that the realities of modern Britain don't match whatever stereotypes they have concocted from Hugh Grant movies, they can eff off back to their land of racial intolerance and bigotry. Send the buggers back, I say.

The final irony of the Tory's anti-immigration campaign is that, while being fair to refugees, Labour's immigration policy has been tightly constructed and implemented. Asylum applications have been cut by 68 per cent since October 2002. More than double the proportion of illegal immigrants are being removed from Britain than when Labour took over from the Tories. Britain is also in the middle of the European league table of per capita asylum applications. Hardly a country with open borders, then, and hardly an asylum system in disarray.

Anyway, I hope my Aussie mate or my Aussie flatmates don't read this because they'll think I'm slagging them off, which I'm not really. It's all a load of hyperbolic hyper bollocks - I know LOADS of Aussies (including my flatmates) who are sound as a pound AND aren't white supremacists. My Aussie mates have also pointed out to me, quite rightly, that Aussies are often assumed to be racist because they can have such a raw, bullshit-free attitude, which grates against some Briton's politically correct sensitivities. However, I must have a point - otherwise the dark days of Conservative rule would be back again.

Animal rights nutjobs volume 1

Animal rights nutjobs make me laugh. Not content with trying to stop scientists develop cures for cancer because some mice get squished, and trying to stop seal culls because seals are soooo much cuter than other animals that are killed for their skins (personally I think moo-cows are cuter you leather shoe wearing MURDERERS!), they're also trying to stop people from shooting grouse because it's mean and nasty to shoot wild animals.

A lot of people seem to agree with this simple "shooting stuff=bad" equation. Just the other day a friend mentioned, in between mouthfuls of chicken that had no doubt willingly hurled itself onto the butcher's blade, that she thought that shooting animals was "sick, cruel and should be banned". However, giving in to gut reactions regarding stuff like this completely overlooks the facts about grouse shooting.

Grouse cannot be reared on farms and then released on to the moor as other game birds such as pheasant and partridge are. To ensure that there are enough grouse to provide a seasons worth of sport on the moor, gamekeepers therefore have to carefully manage the moor so that it provides the optimum environment for the grouse to live, breed and raise young.

Managing the moor is not simply a case of sitting back and letting nature take its course. The gamekeepers burn areas of the heather so that the grouse have new growth heather to eat and long heather to nest in. They control grazing on the moors, working symbiotically with sheepfarmers. They control bracken, a carcinogenic weed that can clog the moors, and also control animals that prey on ground nesting birds (though not, it should be added, the protected raptors they share the moors with).

As well as being the perfect habitat for grouse, a well managed moor is the perfect habitat for a plethora of flora and fauna, much of it endangered. Ground nesting birds such as ptarmigan, curlew, lapwing and plover thrive alongside hares, water voles and equally valuable but slightly less interesting insect and plant life. More than two-thirds of England’s grouse moors are designated as Sites of Special Scientific Interest.

What the animal rights nutjobs who protest against grouse shooting may not realise is what will happen to the moors if their wishes are realised and grouse shooting is banned. The land would be used for the next most lucrative use, which in most cases is blanket coniferous forestry. The conifers used are not indigenous to Britain and are grown intensively. They raise the acidity of the soil and rivers downstream, affecting trout and salmon. The trees are farmed intensively, forming a fast growing "blanket" that stifles out virtually all other plant life and results in plummeting biodiversity in virtually all native flora and fauna.

But the benefits of grouse shooting go beyond the environment. Grouse shooting also provides revenue to the local communities. When I worked on the moors as a beater, most of the other beaters were young men from the deprived communities around the moors who were on the dole. Grouse beating got them out of the house, gave them a hard days work as part of a team and a bit of extra cash to top up their giro. As well as seasonal work for beaters and loaders, skilled local workers are employed year round and local businesses such as hotels and restaurants also benefit. Huge amounts of regeneration cash have been pumped into these communities to offset the decline of farming, the end of coalmining and the devastation of foot and mouth, but grouse shooting does a far better job of generating jobs and wealth in these isolated areas than government hand outs could ever hope to.

Of course, the persistent animal rights nutcase could insist that, despite the irreplaceable good that grouse shooting does to the environment and disadvantaged communities, it's still inherently cruel. It does, after all, revolve around blasting small animals out of the sky. But compared to factory farmed animals such as chickens, which lead a short, unpleasant life in unnatural conditions, eating food made from a heady mix of antibiotics, growth hormones and other animal's shit which is then mixed with their own shit on the concrete floor of the shed they're raised in before they're strapped up by the feet to a conveyor belt of a machine that (hopefully) electrocutes them then boils and plucks them, grouse lead an enviably pleasant and natural life.

The grouse, on the other hand, live as nature intended on the moors, eating wild heather, free to roam and nest wherever they please. Some are then killed quickly and painlessly and eaten. If grouse shooting is cruel, then it is clearly at the lower end of the range of cruelty deemed acceptable in today's society. Unless animal rights activists are going to force us all to become vegan and live in bio-sustainable teepees, they have no right to stop people shooting grouse.

At the end of the day, the people who say "grouse shooting should be banned because it's cruel" are putting ideology before practicality; fantasy before reality; and their own twisted moral values before the welfare of the environment and their fellow man.

Paula Radcliffe - disgrace to the nation!

I got a written warning last week for pissing about on the t'internet during work hours (this is worrying as it comes so soon after my tribunal for running in the corridor with scissors), so my postings have been a little non existent while I adjust to the radical idea of pissing about on the t'internet in my own time. Anyway, just one more arse related post before I return to the more serious business of slating celebrity paedophiles and getting into arguments with fascistic gun loving chubsters:

The London Marathon was held at the weekend. Women’s champion Paula Radcliffe stopped halfway through the race to shit her guts out by the side of the road after they cramped up. According to Paula, she would have lost too much time if she'd battled through the crowd to a portaloo, so she found a quiet spot to strain her potatoes - just her, a screaming crowd of onlookers, and a BBC TV crew to beam the moment to millions of homes across the world.

Apparently she had to dispose of the white gloves she was wearing because they were covered in shit. Nice. I only hope that they were disposed of properly so that the Michael Jackson prosecution doesn't try to use them as evidence.

This is just the latest in a line of incidents that have made Paula a disgrace to the nation - a kind of British Courtney Love. Brazenly flouting our laws by befouling a public highway live on national teevee is just the latest in a long line of at least two shameful incidents. Who could forget her shameful display at the Olympics in Athens, when she made Britain a laughing stock by breaking down in tears halfway through the marathon. A letter to popular grin-mag, Viz summed it up:

"The last time I collapsed in a tearful heap by the side of a road in Athens I’d had a dodgy lamb kebab and half a pint of Ouzo. If this is how Paula prepared for the marathon then she’s only got herself to blame."

Amen.

Doo doo doo doo doo-dooo....I'm lovin' it (well my gastroentorologist is anyway - I'm putting his kids through college)

Complimentary commuter rag Metro contained loads of McDonalds vouchers yesterday. Being the cheapskate I am, and seeing as the canteen here had an unusually poor selection of stodge, I skipped down to Baker Street to avail myself of two Big Macs for the price of one. It's a burger, I thought. Safe option. Chuck meat, salad and bun. How badly can they fuck it up?

Pretty badly, it transpired. For a start, Big Mac is a complete misnomer. Anything that fits comfortably in the palm of my hand cannot really be called 'big'. But never mind, I had two of them. I picked one up, and brought it to my face. The spongy, pappy bun squished down to nothing as straggles of tired, watery lettuce dripped out of the side. A burger flopped out the side like an old man's tongue, making my Mac look like Andrew Lloyd Webber (left). On closer inspection the limp, grey patty did indeed have the texture of finely minced cow ears, lips and arseholes.

Man, this was one ugly burger. But I figured McDonalds have teams of scientists whose sole purpose is to make this crap taste nice, so how bad could it be? Pretty fucking bad as it happens. It was like eating baby food - each bite just disintegrated in my mouth, requiring little mastication (although judging by the texture of the mayonnaise, production of the burger required a little masturbation). The only part that wasn't immolated to mush by my mouth was the rubbery processed cheese that topped each patty. This stuck to the roof of my mouth like a melted carrier bag. It's still there now.

Anyhoo, it can't have been all that bad because I polished them both off. I felt kind of rough though. But it wasn't til I got home that my problems started. My guts felt like they were full of shaving foam and were gurgling like a Calcutta sewer. Trouble was on the way. It wasn't long before I broke the seal with a horrific fart. It may have been tiny, but it was hotter than the surface of the Sun, and smelt like a cat had died in the bins behind McDonalds. As the evening progressed, my gastapular emissions grew in both violence and volume. Needless to say, Anne Marie was less than delighted, particularly as it soon became clear that my gutrotular marshgassery had impregnated her bedding with a hum akin to a beached whale in August, putting it far beyond the rescue of Febreze and meaning that in the morning she would have to drag her mattress, duvet and sheets down to the garden and burn them. It goes without saying that I didn't get any action last night.

I can't pretend that I didn't enjoy creating merry brown mayhem with my arse and everybody knows that McDonalds food is shite, so it's a bit of a non issue. But it rankles with me that so many people here equate McDonalds with American food and even American cultural imperialism - crap food foisted upon us by Yankee overlords. Some of my most transcendent meals have been in America and have involved plump, juicy patties of grilled chuck steak sandwiched between hearty slabs of bread. McDonalds is as representative of the American burger as Fray Bentos is of the great British steak and kidney pie.

King of the Kiddie Fiddlers

Wonk-faced child rape enthusiast Jonathan King (shown above 'smiling' apparently - I'd hate to see what he'd do if you asked him to pull a face) was let out of jail today after serving less than half his seven year sentence for beasting young boys. You might expect someone disgraced in this way to have a low key return to society, and if pressed, to show humility and regret for his victims, and perhaps promise to never shag kids up the arse again. You probably wouldn't expect him to compare himself to Elvis, the Beatles and Oscar Wilde, before vowing to fight on for other victims of the cruel British justice system. But this is exactly what the 60 year old pederast has done:

"I'm not that important. Think of the people who have been locked up for crimes they did not commit, some of whom have killed themselves. They're the people I care for and will crusade for."

Just when Satpal Ram thought things couldn't get any worse, eh?

King then took the opportunity of having the press around him to garner some publicity for his new record, although on the advice of his lawyers, he didn't have a champagne reception outside the prison gates. (The bloke who said there's no such thing as bad publicity probably never envisaged an ugly 60 year old trying to relaunch his pop career on the back of a jail sentence for paedophilia). The record sleeve notes make for interesting reading:

"If you don't play Elvis Presley because he slept with a 14-year-old girl ... or the Beatles because they had criminal records or read the work of Oscar Wilde because he liked underage boys or look at Michelangelo statues because he was a homosexual ... then you should go no further than the sleeve of Jonathan King's 'My Love, My Life'.

Ah yes....some of the Beatles had petty criminal records for smoking pot or whatever in between recording some of the best pop music ever...and Michelangelo was gay and created some of the most incredible art.....I can see the connection with a FUCKING CHILD MOLESTER who recorded shite like "UNA PALOMA BLANCO" there....

There's more, of course:

"Don't review it or purchase it or download it or programme it. According to the tabloids, the man's a 'vile pervert'."

The tabloids? Was it the tabloids who convicted you at the Old Bailey in September 2001 of sexually abusing five youngsters aged 13 to 15, Jonathon? Do you think that broadsheet editors wanted you to walk free? Could you fill a phone booth with people from this country who wouldn't send you back down for another 7 years, preferably sharing a cell with a 30 stone bull rapist called Rambo who'd bully-ram your sphincter back to the stone age? I think not.

Jonathon, the criminal justice system in this country deems you a sufficiently low risk to be allowed to return to your home. Be very grateful for that, and stop trying to identify yourself with miscarriages of justice, or 'persecuted' groups such as gays, or great artists (you recorded a song called "The Night I Chased The Women With An Eel", for fuck's sake, you didn't paint the Sistine Chapel). Before, we hated you for being a crap pop star. Now we hate you for being a crap pop star and a paedophile.

Time to stay home and count your blessings, methinks.

How thick do you have to be to be a right-wing pundit?

Just read an unintentionally hilarious opinion piece in the Washington Post by Charles Krauthammer, who lives up to his name by stomping all over the hot topics of the day like a big fat German who eats dogroll for breakfast but still thinks he's the master race. This guy isn't just a bit thick, he's so brain dead that Bush and the Pope would be climbing over each other to yank out his feeding tube.

The whole crux of his piece is that the Left, particularly the European Left (that's me) should be ASHAMED of ourselves because Bush and pals are bringing DEMOCSY an' FREE'UM to the A-rabs, as is evidenced by:

1. the unparalleled success of the invasion of Iraq, which is now such a stable democracy that it barely needs 175,000 troops to keep the peace
2. the steps towards democracy in Egypt and Saudi Arabia, which are REAL and GENUINE and certainly not just a bit of window dressing to make the dictators in those countries look a bit better
3. the protests in Lebanon by people who want to kick out the Syrian army

and instead of saluting Dubya for spreading freedom, we criticise his and his pal's regimes (Israel, Saudi Arabia) for human rights violations, while supporting other regimes (Iran, Syria) that have equally poor human rights records. In fact, Krauthammer thinks that I only support human rights as a means to criticise America and its allies:

"The international left's concern for human rights turns out to be nothing more than a useful weapon for its anti-Americanism."

"After the Cold War, the hypocrisy continues. For which Arab people do European hearts burn? The Palestinians. Why? Because that permits the vilification of Israel -- an outpost of Western democracy and, even worse, a staunch U.S. ally."

Yeah, like our Euro hearts burn for Tibetans because that permits the vilification of China, eh?

"Yet for the victims of contemporary monsters still actively killing and oppressing -- Khomeini and his successors, the Assads of Syria and, until yesterday, Hussein and his sons -- nothing. No sympathy. No action. Indeed, virulent hostility to America's courageous and dangerous attempt at rescue."

This idea that us on the left are wheedling anti-Americans with no interest in human rights except when we can use it as a lever to attack America, while those on the right are striving idealistically for peace and democracy for all, is so patently false it beggars belief.

The facts run contrary to Krauthammer's stereotype. George Galloway, for example, has possibly taken more flack than anyone for being an apologist for monstrous dictators - he recently won a libel case against the dirty stinking Telegraph which accused him of being in the pay of Saddam.

I remember George Galloway, a this so-called supporter of Saddam, visiting Iraq in the 1980s to persuade Saddam to improve his human rights. This was at the same time that right wing governments in the US and UK were selling Saddam chemical weapons to use in his genocide against Kurds and marsh arabs.

Krauthammer also finds fault in the left for saluting the arrest of General Pinochet, under whose rule Chileans suffered mass exterminations, torture, rape, murder and other human rights violations on a huge scale:

"A leftist judge in Spain orders the arrest of a pathetic, near-senile Gen. Augusto Pinochet eight years after he's left office, and becomes a human rights hero -- a classic example of the left morally grandstanding in the name of victims of dictatorships long gone."

Krauthammer seems to have forgotten that the only reason that Pinochet took so long to bring to justice was because of protection and obfuscation by his right-wing allies in Western government - specifically, British prime minister Margaret Thatcher. And what's Kraut's point anyway? That after ten years, people should be forgiven their heinous crimes?

Krauthammer also claims that Europeans oppose democracy in Lebanon. Who sponsored UN resolution 1559 (the resolution calling for Syria to get out of Lebanon)??? FRANCE!! As in France, Europe. Not Paris, Texas.

Here's a quote from Chirac, just to spell it out:

"We have only one objective here: Lebanon’s independence, sovereignty and integrity".

Hardly the "Euro-snobbery" or "moral and intellectual Euro-pretense" Krautwanker talks about.

This is what I don't like about these right-wingers - they ignore the facts and instead fabricate falsities to support their pre-formed opinions and dogma. Frankly, I'm amazed that a mainstream paper like the Washington Post printed this crap.

Krauthammer is typical of the right-winger in thinking that any questioning of America's foreign policy and human rights, or argument about its prosecution, or desire for international consensus, is equivalent to uber communist Amerihating. This is nonsense. Questioning and argument are always essential to informed decision making. This is why we have courts and parliaments. It's not democratic to shout down dissenting voices just because they don't echo your own ideology.

However, I don't mind watching right-wingers enjoying their chest beating moment of "success" - if nothing else, I find their exaggeration of success (where they see democracy flowering in Lebanon, others see a return to civil war) lack of magnanimity in the face of tens of thousands of corpses quite telling.

It's a shame really - I was all ready to write about how the ultra-left Greens in this country incensed me at the Trafalgar Square war rally by allying themselves with the lunatic animal rights movement but then, as always, a right-wing nutcase has to pique my ire even more. Maybe next week.

Spodgey header!

Made a new animated header for the blog using Flash, which you can see above. It's a shameless rip off of the Chorley FM slogan "Coming in your ears!" but it sums up the way I feel about my blog - there are words on the screen which spurt through the air and into your eyes. I also like to feel that my blog - ever the gentleman - then hands you a tissue and hints that the £12 in pound coins in the ashtray is for you.

If any of you get itchy, swollen eyelids while reading this blog, just rub some Savlon in and go to sleep with swimming goggles on...

Why Ben Elton is a panhead

Edog von Winter recently made a slight dig at the British tradition of titter-ye-not oo-er missuss Matron! nudge-nudge wink-wink Ooh! Saucy! bet-you-don't-get-many-of-them-to-the-pound-darlin' humour, despite having a name from a Carry On movie about saucy goings on in a German prisoner of war camp. This reminded me of the great injustice that was done one of our favourite grin merchants only a few years back, culminating in cold hearted MURDER....

Speccy moon-faced twat Ben Elton, along with other right-on Islington mocha chocca locha wankas, hounded much loved comic Benny Hill for his alleged sexism in the 80s, culminating in his teevee series being dropped from ITV's schedules at the height of its success. Ben Elton made great mileage of the fact that he himself treated wimmin with all the respect that only an unlayable tofu-munching sociology student like himself could muster, and criticised Benny Hill for daring to show his admiration for the female form by presenting speeded up lovelies chasing a balding, cheeky man through a variety of humorous locations.

The void this televisual cull created was filled by new, modern comedy that the chattering classes approved of - crap like The Smell of Reeves and Mortimer ("What's on the end of the stick, Vic?" Hilarious - if you're a fucking student) and the Vicar of Dibley (quite frankly, I find Dawn French with her clothes on more offensive than Hill's Angels with their clothes off). Actually, these two shows weren't too bad, I just can't bring to mind the names of the individual comedic turds that made up the tidal wave of right-on unfunny sludge that Ben Elton and his champagne socialist chums foisted upon us in the name of laughter.

Worse yet, the relentless hounding of Benny Hill UNDOUBTEDLY led to his premature death. Yes it DID. Which makes Benny Fucking Elton a MURDERER. Yes it DOES.

At the end of the day, Benny Hill was actually funnay, and much loved by the British people. Benny Elton was/is not. A fact that is unlikely to bother the so called socialist as he rolls about on his bed of freshly laundered £50 notes, courtesy of the BBC gravy train.

Storm the Bastille!

Hello? HELLOOOO? (echooooo....) Apologies for not posting in so long. I got in trouble at work for spending too long pissing about on the t'internet when I should've been working. Now we'll see if posts written in my free time are much cop...

One thing that makes me disgusted to be British - apart from the weather, the food and the dental care - is the fact that I am, technically, a subject of the Queen rather than a citizen of a republic. Of course, this isn't Saudi Arabia - the royal family here don't have much real political power. Nowadays the royals are a publicly funded circus act to sell copies of the Daily Mail and attract American tourists who are looking for culture in the wrong place.

Publicly funded. This effectively means that I pay for unelected Germanic buffoons to swan around in period costume, looking down their noses at people like me who actually work for a living. One of my favourite braying Krauts is Her High'n'Mighty Holiness the Princess Michael of Kent, AKA Lady Muck, who seems to have taken over the role of No. 1 Impressively Bigoted Medieval Throwback from Prince "bloody spearchuckers" Phillip, AKA Mister Queen.

Last year she proved a wonderful ambassador for modern Britain by telling a table of black diners in a posh restaurant in New York that they should "go back to the colonies". She later 'made amends' with the most condescending apology possible, claiming that she found blacks to be "absolutely adorable people," adding, "I even pretended years ago to be an African, a half-caste African, but because of my light eyes I did not get away with it, but I dyed my hair black". Christ. Please shut her up before she mentions "natural rhythm".

Well guess what folks - she's only just gone and done it again! As you might expect from a British Royal, she's about as British as dental polish - she was born Marie-Christine von Reibnitz, daughter of an Austrian father with connections to the Nazi party. However, this hasn't prevented her from attacking Brits for not "breeding" properly:

"The English take the breeding of their horses and dogs more seriously than they
do their children," she told German newspaper Welt am Sonntag. "God forbid that
the wrong drop of blood should get into their labrador. But their children marry
everywhere."

Yes, the English aristocracy seem to ignore the strict breeding rules they apply to pedigree dogs and let their children marry any Tom, Dick or Harrietta. This makes no sense. How are the upper echelons of our class system going to continue to grow their noses and ears in inverse proportion to their IQ's if they are not marrying their cousins? How are they going to develop extra digits and webbed extremities if the gene pool is expanded? Come on aristos - take your breeding seriously, or we may never see a blue-blooded Brit winning the coveted "Most Mis-shapen Retarded Inbred Alsatian" category at Crufts. And that would not just be a shame for you, it would be a shame for the cap-doffing proles who for some reason put up with you instead of turning you into dogfood.

Princess Michael of Kent and her husband, Prince Michael of Kent (does it not get confusing both being called Michael?), have also drawn flack over all the taxpayer-funded freebies they receive, such as a rent free apartment in Kensington Palace, despite not performing any public duties. To assuage the flack-throwers, the Queen has subsidised their rent. But wait a minute...where does the Queen's money come from? It wouldn't be from the taxpayer-funded civil list, would it? Well it's either that or her paper round.

The Royals continually justify the civil list by saying what great value it is - each year it only costs each subject the same as a pint of milk or loaf of bread (it's actually quite a bit more than that, suggesting that the Queen shops at Waitrose rather than Lidl). Personally, I'd rather have a loaf of bread than have my money go to pay for these nits to travel the world insulting people and making my country look like some racist, parochial backwater. I can do that on my own.

Prince Charles wishes that we in Britain took a French approach to our architecture - as our stately buildings are dwarfed by shiny new skyscrapers, France's historic constructs stand proud against the skyline thanks to rules that demand new buildings are no higher than four feet. He's almost right - it's time we took a French approach to our aristocracy.

Trainspotting midget in crap film shocker!

My mate's got this broadband teevee deely that lets you watch movies on demand. We gave it a go last night and watched the Station Agent because it's had good reviews (9/10 in the Guardian) and people have said it's good. It's not. It's officially the worst film I have ever seen (and yes, I have seen State and Main and the Big Lebowski) . A miserable, taciturn trainspotting dwarf strikes up an unconvincing friendship with two cliched characters - the artsy, hippyish middle aged woman and the garrulous, carefree young bloke. The three of them sit around doing exciting stuff like reading books, or watching trains, or reading some more books.

And that's it. Nothing at all of any consequence happens at any point. Worse, there isn't even any sparkling dialogue as they sit around doing nothing - when they do talk they spout inane platitudes that make Dawson's Creek look like Shakespeare. (There is one unintentionally funny bit where the midget has a beer in a pub and every time the camera cuts to a different angle, the beer in his glass goes up or down.) What makes it worse is that the film clearly believes itself to be some sort of high-art character driven alternative to Hollywood blockbusters (which at least entertain, something this film doesn't even try to do). If you want to be charmed and moved by an understated, hilarious film about characters you give a damn about, go see Sideways instead. The Station Agent is toss on toast.

I'm going to spend the morning submitting my own user rating of 0/10 over and over again on the Guardian's website to bring the average user rating down from 9/10 to a more realistic rating. I've got it down to 8.5 already! How much of a twat am I?

Brittany getting too Britainy?

Breton nationalists in Brittany have apparently been demonstrating against the influx of British expats who are moving over there, pushing up house prices, not learning the language and not making efforts to integrate with the local culture.

This reminds me of the Settler Watch bullshit that happened in Scotland about a decade ago. Scottish nationalists were incensed that toffee nosed English ponces were buying houses out from under the feet of local Scots, using their fiscal superiority to push up house prices to levels that the underfunded Scottish proletariat couldn't reach (well, once they'd spunked their giro on satellite teevee and tramp-strength lager).

To a certain segment of the Scottish population, already aggrieved at our status as a province of England and worked up into a nationalistic fervor by Brave Heart, this echoed an earlier period in Scotland's history - the Highland Clearances. The Clearances happened ages ago when evil English landowners, highly pissed off at the amount of cool stuff the Scots were inventing, used the old "I could make more money if I sent you all to America and replaced you with sheep" excuse to, um, send loads of Scots to America and replace them with sheep.

Seeing the new influx as a new "Clearance", with the English using money rather than power to evict the Scots, Settler Watch was born to encourage grumbling, griping, and occasional firebombing. In a particularly hilarious incident, a local shopkeeper appeared on the news beefing about the English invasion and how great Settler Watch was.

Unfortunately for said shopkeeper, he was making good money from the Sassenach arrivees who bought his overpriced groceries and imported ponce foods - Parma ham, sun dried tomatoes, artichokes etc. (Us locals wouldn't shop there, as we knew how he let his incontinent labrador wander around the shop, licking packets of digestive biscuits and leaving hairs in the fig rolls.) Once his Southern customers got wind of his hatred of them, they all hauled their Chelsea tractors into Dumfries to go to the Tescos instead, and he went bust.

I'm not one to make grand, sweeping judgements, but Settler Watch was all a load of shite. The influx of monied southerners meant investment and jobs for Scots and, despite the miserable misanthropy displayed by some Scots, the incomers have integrated with their communities, rather than living behind gates.

Ironically, the English very rarely complain that English towns and cities are awash with Scots, sitting in every shop doorway or bus shelter in a pool of their own fetid urine, matted ginger hair sprouting from every orifice on their tracksuit, drinking a warm can of Spesh, alternately looking confused and angry, stamping on invisible spiders, singing popular show tunes, and aggressively haranguing passers-by with demands for money:

"Awreet there ya fuggin bampot, gies thirteen quid for a mocha chocca latte"

So, small minded nationalists and sour, envious peasants everywhere, don't get pissed off just because South East England's economic superiority means that even a penniless shit scrubber here is a millionaire where you are and can buy your homes out from under your feet on a whim, then leave their new house empty the whole year except for two short weeks in the summer when they take time out from their timetable of short stays in other homes they own in the world's other economic backwaters to come and sit in your restaurants shouting "Oi! Garcon!" at the waitress, ordering food by pointing at the menu and shouting "Le bacony fuckiny sandwichio, Pedro" before getting skulled on wheat beer, throwing some plastic chairs into the town fountain and writing "Millwall Wrekking Krew 4-eva" in piss up the wall of a local monastery.

If you really want to amend things, boost your economy by opening some microchip factories or casinos, then come buy our houses.

(Of course, reading the article it becomes abundantly clear that the good folks of Brittany are actually welcoming Brits with open arms and the "demonstration" consisted of only around 60 people, hardly any of them local, most of them no doubt the equivalent of Daily Mail readers who travel the length and breadth of France protesting against anything. But I couldn't let that get in the way of a rant.)

Anyway, what was my point? Oh yeah; I haven't posted anything in a few days so thought I better get something up. That's the trouble with blogspot - it lets you save drafts, so I've got about 15 unfinished rants about everything from the Royal family - she must never be queen! never! - to rightwingness being a mental illness, sitting in my draft box waiting to be posted.

IS SPONGEBOB TURNING YOUR KID FRUITY???

Arf! Just found out that kids cartoon character Spongebob Squarepants is soaking up condemnation from right-wing Christian organisations who reckon he's gaying our kids up!

Apparently Focus on the Family, a leading Christian 'family values' pressure group, have taken umbrage at Spongebob's appearance in a video encouraging tolerance and understanding of different people. Apparently the video commits the heinous crime of not just encouraging tolerance of a narrow band of types of people as determined by Focus on the Family (straight, about 60 pounds overweight, last smiled in 1967, believe that quiche can only be eaten by women), but also tolerance of different races, shapes, religions and - gasp - possibly even sexualities!!!

But Dr James "one husband - four wives - nineteen assault rifles - no federal taxes" Dobson, the founder of Focus on the Family,isn't just some backwoods preacher, barking his bigotry at a handful of neckless inbreeds. He raised the issue at a black-tie dinner in Washington for members of Congress (actually, handful of neckless inbreeds isn't too wide of the mark).

According to them the video is even more disturbing because there is no reference to sexuality in the video - so they must be using Jedi mind tricks to turn our kids bufftie!!! Paul "they can control your mind with radio waves, man...that's why I'm wearing this foil helmet" Batura, an assistant of Dr Dobson, reaffirmed the accusations:

"We see the video as an insidious means by which the organization is manipulating and potentially brainwashing kids. It's a classic bait and switch."

"Classic bait and switch"!!!! I'm not making this up, folks. I'm surprised they haven't claimed that if you listen to the Spongebob soundtracks backwards you get exhortations to worship Satan, take drugs, or vote Democrat.

The Family Research Council also finds the Spongebob video guilty of kiddy-queering, as their senior director Peter "they put special gas in the subway to make you agree with Hilary Clinton" Sprigg asserts:

"If you look at the website, it becomes pretty clear that a part of the agenda is to change the definition of family to include virtually anyone who chooses to be called a family, including homosexual couples and homosexual couples raising children.

Much of what they have is coded language that is regularly used by the pro-homosexual movement such as 'tolerance' and 'diversity.' Ultimately, we feel that this is being used as propaganda to indoctrinate very small children to accept a different definition of family."

Why are these uptight right-wing Christians so intolerant of tolerance? The only possible explanation for this is the uptight right-wingers are themselves desperately trying to keep a lid on their own gayness, which is so brimming and ready to burst out in a glittery shower of rainbows, sparkly red shoes and show tunes that they are constantly fighting to keep it in check. They find this struggle so difficult that even a glimpse of a slightly effete cartoon yellow sponge giving the seal of approval to same sex relationships by holding hands with a cartoon starfish is enough to make the right-winger inadvertently sing out "I'm FREE!"and try to hump the nearest manchap until he be a-bleeding from the a-hole.

They then project their fears onto society around them, assuming that the rest of us have the same inner battle with sexuality that they have. But most people don't share their views. Most people know that another person's sexuality is only going to affect you if you are going to have sex with that person. When dealing with another bloke, I couldn't give a toss if they're straight, gay, bisexual or bestial as I know we're not going to start a conga line of buggery because - get a load of this - I'm secure in my heterosexuality. If I was one of these right-wing Christian repressed homosexuals I might think otherwise.

The links between religion (particularly the Catholic Church) and un-Biblical sexual practices are well documented. Let's face it - if you reckon you're a paedophile, would you live a life where unwanted questions would be raised about your lack of female partners and your relationships with young boys, or would you enter the priesthood, where lack of female partners is a must and hanging around with young boys wearing white dresses is actively encouraged?

I think a similar precept applies to right-wing Christians. Can you really see any of these stiff, humourless planks having a healthy bout of hide the sausage with the missus? I don't mean anything that requires a glass coffee table, pair of marigolds, yard of plastic tubing and a half pint of vaseline - just some good old fashioned rampant shagging, with the lights on and making noises and everything. Probably not. Because they're all repressed homosexuals.

Next week: Homer Simpson in hot water over allegations that he allowed Lisa to be educated, and Fred Flintstone answers accusations from the Happy Families Christian Movement that he doesn't make Wilma walk 10 paces behind him.

The boy who cried anti-Semitism...

Anti-Semitism is a term that is used without restraint these days, whether by the Tory campaign HQ looking to score cheap points against Labour by claiming to see the most tenuous elements of anti-Semitism in their campaign posters, or by Zionists who have no other way of beating down the arguments that support a peaceful two-state solution to the Israel/Palestine problem.

Responding to a bitter rant on bitterrants.blogspot.com that claimed the usual redneck bullshit (Muslims are like Nazis; all Arabs hate Jews; the Palestinian Authority systematically dehumanises Jews, same old hate-fuelled right-wing babbling ad infinitum), I suggested to the authour, TNS, that the only way peace and justice can be brought to Israel and the Occupied Territories is if there is a peaceful 2-state solution.

I'm not alone in thinking this; the UN, many Jews, many Israelis and even President Bush think so too. This is a situation that finally looks as though it might be realised with the softening of Ariel Sharon's right-wing stance and Abu Mazen replacing the corrupt and militant Yasser Arafat as Palestinian leader.

Of course, I was instantly labelled "anti-Semitic".

I then pointed out that as the term "Semites" refers to the Semitic-speaking peoples of the Near-East and Northern Africa - including the Arabs, Arameans, Babylonians, Carthaginians, Ethiopians, Hebrews, and Phoenicians - he was being anti-Semitic, as he proposed genocide against Palestinians and Arabs.

Of course TNS didn't like some smart arsed condescending over-educated Euro-liberal weenie pointing out holes in his argument you could drive an armour-plated bulldozer through, so I was banned from his blog for "patent anti-Semitism" (apparently I should "know which Semites I'm referring to, dickbreath"), as well as being a "typical EUridiot Islamist-sympathizer".

But by crying "anti-Semitism!" so freely at anyone that doesn't share his narrow, racist views on the Israel/Palestine problem, TNS and others like him are devaluing the term and doing a great disservice to those who are victims of genuine anti-Semitism, which is sadly on the rise in many parts of the world. "Anti-Semitic" is in danger of coming to denote "someone who does not agree with my ultra-right wing Zionist arguments".

In an ironic twist, TNS has even nabbed a picture of me from my site and stuck it on his site under the heading "Another Foolish European Anti-Semitic Dhimmi", with the caption, "Son of Groundskeeper Willie (L), what appears to be a Yorkshire sow (R)". Unfortunately for TNS, the "Yorkshire sow" I'm dining with is a Jew. Perhaps not the best way to illustrate my alleged "patent anti-Semitism".

So, just to recap: according to TNS I'm anti-Semitic because I believe in a peaceful 2-state solution to the Israel/Palestine problem, don't support his racist views that apartheid and genocide against Semites is justified, and have Jewish friends.

TNS, on the other hand, claims not to be anti-Semitic because he believes in apartheid and genocide against Semites and compares Jewish women to "Yorkshire sows".

Gasted? My flabber? Surely not...

Mind you, he also claims that the US "will be liberating Saudi Arabia soon". Mmm-hmm. Sometimes it's better to let these redneck chumps discredit their own arguments by
running their mouths off. Give 'em enough rope...

TNS also calls me "twinkle toes". Am I being 'groomed' here?

Way beyond parody...

You couldn't make this up, folks. A couple of posts back, I put up a 'cute' picture of a cat that had climbed into a toilet. I thought that a picture of a kitten at play might placate the humourless hearts of the right-wing nutjobs who got in such a tizzy when I suggested that, hey, the fact that there are 373 times more gun related deaths in the US compared to the UK might possibly maybe mean that our gun laws are better in a "fewer people dying" kind of way.

Then I get this gem of a posting:

Leo, you're completely unhinged.

Throwing a kitten in a toilet. This
is your idea of an intelligent response to criticism of your views?!

What a complete and utter wanker.

Never mind calling the New
York Times to report you for copyright infringement; we're calling the
ASPCA.

Need I say anything? I think not. Here is another seditious, provocative picture of small animals at play to incense right-wingers everywhere and no doubt act as a catalyst for some sort of "BAN THIS FILTH" type campaign involving the ASPCA and the New York Times copyright department:



Before you get too irate, I should really point out:

The puppies were not forced into the basket at gunpoint

The puppies are not affiliated with any political or religious organisation

This picture probably isn't anti-Semitic, unless you're the Tory campaign manager

The puppies aren't, in fact, real puppies at all. It's a picture of a ceramic model.

From the Leo Kearse litigation management department

I do have time to take the piss out of this, though, from my number one buddy TNS:


"And by the way, you'll be chaging the header on your site--I've notified the New York Times of your copyright infringement.



"All The News Tha's Fit to Print" is a registered trademark, dimwit.



I await the letter from the New York Times legal department with great anticipation! Coz I'm sure they don't have better things to do than to threaten unheard of bloggers, who spend their free time winding up rednecks, with legal action.



Here are some more trademark infringements so that you can notify more legal departments of these gross transgressions of corporate law:

JAAAAST WAAAAN COOOORRNETTOOOOOO, GEEEEEV EEEET TOOO MEEEEEEEEE!

So clean you could eat your dinner off it!

I feel like chicken tonight! Like chicken tonight!



Incidentally, TNS, I patented breathing out. So now you've got to keep breathing in til you pop.



Just in case there's any doubt, I'll state it out loud for you: I am having a laugh on this site. I am not being entirely serious. I'm playing devil's advocate and exaggerating to emphasise points. I am jerking your chain. It's a lot better than fomenting racism and hatred as TNS does on his site (Nice Doggie is exempt as it is also a wind-up site, and funny as fuck, ifyerdon'tmindmesayingso...)

Hot under the collar...

It would appear that my recent posting asserting that because:

in 2002 (the most recent year I could get stats for), there were 30,242 firearms-related deaths in the US,

while

last year there were 81 firearms-related deaths in the UK.



might suggest that the gun laws in the UK are a bit better than gun laws in the US (if by "better" you mean "far, far fewer people getting shot") aggrieved a few of my redneck pals.



I don't have the time right now to piss all over their arguments that try to suggest that it's somehow better when 30,242 die than when 81 people die. Until then, here's a picture of a kitten in a toilet to look at:





That should calm the rednecks down a bit. This shit is like hydrocortisone to rednecks.



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Guns don't kill people, right-wing nutjobs do

My flabber is regularly gasted by the ability of right-wing nutjobs, whether they be Mullahs in Iran or rednecks in Utah, to completely ignore things like "facts" and "reason" and instead base their views on fear, ideology and stereotype.



Gun laws in the US compared to more liberal countries such as here in the UK is a perfect example of this. A vocal, influential minority of Americans successfully lobby to ensure that the gun laws in America stay lax enough for pretty much anyone to own pretty much any kind of gun. To this end, they make crazy inferences from isolated stories, typically regarding things such as “Intruder dies after scuffle with 79-year-old man during break-in”, a story dissected by pro-gunners on the rabidly amusing right-wing Nice Doggie website:






It's a good thing this happened in the good ol' U. S. of A. instead of somewhere like England, where there is no right of self-defense. The headline would have looked something like this:



"79-year Old Charged With Pistol-whipping Murder of Drug-addled Visitor"



That could be the headline here too, if we do not jealously guard our 2nd Amendment rights and right to protect ourselves and our families. Just something to think about this morning...



There you’ve got the fear, the ideology and the stereotype.



The fear that your community is crawling with intruders. The ideology that the “right to bear arms” is written in stone. The stereotype that guns are only ever used to successfully tackle intruders, and in countries with tighter gun control people are not only completely at the mercy of intruders, but will also be criminalised if they use any force to oppose the intruder.



Never mind the facts, eh?

In America, the gun you own is far more likely to be used to kill a member of your own family than to kill an intruder.

The idea that in Britain you are not allowed to protect your home is a myth; only 11 householders have been prosecuted in the past 15 years, of whom five were convicted. (One of these shot a 15 year old in the back - with an illegal gun - as he ran away; another had lain in wait for a burglar, beat him up, thrown him in a pit and set him on fire).

In 2002 (the most recent year I could get stats for), there were 30,242 firearms-related deaths in the US.

Last year there were 81 firearms-related deaths in the UK.

In the UK, the risk of being a victim of violent crime is at its lowest for nearly 25 years.



In other words, guns are shit for keeping you safe (it’s safer NOT to own a gun) and there are more than 350 times as many firearm related deaths in the US than in the UK, where gun ownership is tightly regulated.




Regardless of the cold hard facts, the right to keep anti-tank weaponry in suburban bungalows is fiercely defended by redneck Americans as they believe they are exercising their 2nd Amendment “right to bear arms”.



But the right to bear arms in the US constitution may well be a spelling error and actually refer to the right of Americans to wear T-shirts in public (“right to bare arms”) rather than to own depleted-uranium-shell-firing assault weaponry. Or it could be a simple misunderstanding and refer to the right of Americans to own the forelimbs of a bear.



Regardless, the 2nd Amendment is exactly that – an amendment and could easily be amended to something else such as “ok you’re allowed shotguns and rifles for hunting but we’re going to regulate it pretty tightly to make sure the country is not awash with automatic weapons and hand guns”.



That’s the thing about right-wing people – they’re dead set against abortion or euthanasia of any type, but can’t get enough of killing people via wars, executions or bonkers gun laws that let any nutjob own a gun.



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A grave travesty

Was browsing Amazon earlier when I got the shock of my life. I accidentally stumbled onto the Semisonic page and saw that the Amazon 'review' (aka the record company press release) mentioned them in the same breath as such luminaries as the Replacements, Posies, Fountains of Wayne and Wilco. I don't normally slag off god-awful tripe like Semisonic - I let it condemn itself - but since such a grave slur had been made against Wilco and other great artists, I thought I'd correct this.



Semisonic are terrible. Their whiny, wheedling, indy-mindy virginal college boy mince-rock should be condemned. Semisonic records, along with the band and their fans, should be gathered together in a stadium and burnt in a big pile, Christian-right-against-heavy-metal style. Listen to how they strive to sound emotionally climactic on "Closing Time" when the singer thinks he's finally going to get to cop off with a dumpy social studies fresher - "I KNOW WHO I WANT TO TAKE ME HOME!". Marvel at the reed thin quality of his whiny nasal voice on "Secret Smile", quite probably an ode to a rubber masturbation aid.



If Keane is bed-wetting music, this is bed-crapping music. Avoid. If you're feeling in need of tender, heartfelt music, do yourself a favour and buy Yankee Hotel Foxtrot by Wilco, or Ease Down The Road by Bonnie "Prince" Billy instead.


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Scottish Inventions

Here's a list of things invented by Scots, for no reason at all (I mean the list is for no reason, most of the inventions probably had a purpose):




The alpha chip

Anaesthesia

Ante-natal clinics

Antiseptics

Artificial ice

Blue lasers

The Bank of England

The bowling green

The bus

Capitalism

Colour photographs

Curling

The decimal point

Documentary films

Dolly, the cloned sheep

Electric light

Encyclopaedia Britannica

The fax machine

Finger-printing

The fountain pen

Gardenias

The gas mask

The gravitating compass

Geology

Golf

Helium

The hypodermic syringe

Insulin

Interferon (that's a medical treatment by the way, NOT what Michael Jackson does with pre-teens)

The kaleidoscope

Kerr Lens Modelocking techniques

The lawnmower

The locomotive

Logarithms

The Mackintosh (aka raincoats)

Marmalade

Morphine

Neon

The overdraft

The pedal bicycle

The photocopier

The pneumatic tyre

Penicillin

Postcards

Radar

Sherlock Holmes

Shinty

Street lighting

Suspenders

The steam engine

The telegraph

The telephone

Tarmacadam (the modern road surface)

Television

Tennis courts

The thermometer

The thermos flask

The threshing machine

The traffic cone

Theory of combustion

Video

Writing paper



Fantastic! It would appear that Scotland invented absolutely fucking everything. We're Daddy Number 1! Remember that next time you're watching a documentary about ante-natal clinics, or injecting marmalade into your thermos flask.



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Islamic fundamentalism for Right Wing Americans Simpletons

In my time trawling the world of blogs, I've noticed a few common misconceptions about Islamic fundamentalism repeated over and over again until they are now seen as "The Truth". These misconceptions include:

Islamic Fundamentalism's a new thing

They only want to attack the West, particularly America

The Middle East is 'swarming' with crazy fundamentalists

Most Muslims support them

Al Qaeda is still something to be scared of

Etc




So here's a very brief potted history of Islamic fundamentalism, in an easy to assimilate form, for those people who are quick to jump to conclusions, believe what politicians say and can't be arsed reading big books.



The rise of modern Islamic fundamentalism has its roots in Afghanistan, where it was actively encouraged by America (with money, weaponry and training) to fight the Soviet occupying forces. I'm not blaming America for what happened - we were fighting Communism which at the time was a greater evil. I'm just saying what happened.



Afghanistan became a breeding ground for Islamic fundamentalism. With no Soviets to fight, the mental mullahs looked to other Islamic countries, such as Algeria, Egypt and Iran, where the government and society was actually becoming significantly more liberal and western-style.



This increasing liberalisation pissed off the Islamic fundamentalists (just as Christian fundamentalists got pissed off at a brief flash of Janet Jackson's pap on TV).



So the Islamic fundamentalists started fighting what they saw as the decay of moral values (ie women could work, wear trousers etc!).



They gained power in Iran and other countries, while in places like Algeria and Egypt they committed terrorist attacks on the government and the (mainly Muslim) populace, which horrified the mainstream Muslim populations of these countries.



(In Afghanistan, the Taliban was fostered into power by the west to provide stability to the region and clamp down on heroin production. Their aim was to set up the world's most comically pure Islamic state, banning frivolities like television, music and education for women.)



They then started attacking western tourists (eg the Luxor attacks) and foreign embassies (the US embassy bombing in Nairobi). Finally, they attacked America on 9/11.



Since then, the west has gone to great lengths to kill or jail anyone who might possibly have been linked to Al Qaeda and cut off support and funding for Islamic fundamentalists. Just to be sure, we've locked up plenty of people who are foreign/have facial hair, and deposed a dictator who had nothing to do with Al Qaeda.



Now, Al Qaeda - which was never a particularly cohesive or powerful group - is pretty much completely out of commission. Which is a Good Thing! So you can all stop referring to Al Qaeda as if they are this massive force who, if it wasn't for valiant efforts by Bush, would be running amok in America, killing God fearin' Christians and making women wear duvet covers. It ain't gonna happen! They're shit! You're safe!


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Why American liberals make me wanna puke

In America I think a lot of people are closet liberals who find it hard to identify with the liberal mainstream. I'm an avowed European liberal (I read the Guardian, I vote LibDem, I believe in welfare, open society, minority rights, personal freedom, alternative comedy, hemp clothing) but there's a certain type of liberal common to America (you get them here too) who turns me into a cross between Rush Limbaugh and Ted Nugent.


You know the kind of liberal I'm talking about - here's a breakdown:

1. They make a point of not owning a television
   
2. They're reactionary (basing their opinions more on what right-wingers don't like than reasoned rational argument)
   
3. They listen to avant-garde freeform jazz (which scientists have actually proven to be SHITE) and pretend to enjoy it just so everyone knows how intellectual and cultured they are
   
4. They think competitive sports are evil. They think competition is evil. This manifests itself in so many gold star stickers being given out to retards at school that half of America's trade deficit is due to the importation of gold stickers from China, and the leading cause of death in America, after chronic fat-assedness and stupidity, is cancer caused my the glue in these gold stickers. Honestly liberals, retarded kids will have to find out that they're an unlovable burden on society at some point.
   
5. They don't go on holiday to get beered up and chase women, they go "searching for the Orca" or on a sponsored bicycle trip through Cambodia, usually to raise money for some posh disease like bulimia that the occupants of the country hosting their sponsored trip would love to have the luxury to suffer instead of dying in alarming numbers from common diseases like diarhoea that can be cured for a few dollars.
   
6. They plaster their walls with incredibly profound and deeply moving Native American proverbs. None of these Native American proverbs mention casinos or liquor store opening hours, strangely enough.
   
7. They say 'Wife Swap' is reality teevee rubbish but watch 'I Love Lucy' because it's "classic". Of course, when 'I Love Lucy' was first on teevee, they called it teevee rubbish and watched a fucking zoetrope of a horse galloping because it's 'classic'.
   
8. They say testing medical treatments on animals is wrong but would be first in the queue for insulin or chemotherapy if they needed it.
   
9. They say hunting is wrong but eat meat. They ignore the environmental benefits
   
10. They make sure you know how gay their "gay friends" are (I've got friends who are gay, but I don't patronisingly pigeonhole them as my "gay friends" and wave a (metaphorical) flag so that everyone knows exactly how gay they are and thus how proportionally right on I am. They're just friends who like a bit of same sex action).
    
11. They get that self righteous shriek in their voices when someone disagrees with them.
    
12. They can hear the words "Hillary Clinton" without groaning or retching.
    

Worst of all, American liberals have such a condescending, supercilious attitude to others. It's the same kind of unshakeable belief in their own blinkered worldview that is usually displayed by right-wingers. But conservatives have an excuse for their bonkers views - they're thick as pigshit and have been indoctrinated with nonsense from day 1. Liberals have no such excuse.



I've had the pleasure of working in Indiana, Illinois and Minnesota and I have to say that, bar the odd racist, the people I met were generally the most generous, friendly and open-hearted I have ever met. A bit too patriotic maybe, and you had to explain jokes to them several times, but salt of the earth nonetheless.


I know that if the people I met were in Britain, they'd be liberals. It's just the overweening, contemulious American liberals make it very difficult for a regular person to identify with them or their cause.


So come on liberals, stop being such a bunch of hectoring right-onners and you might find more people agree with you than you thought.



I could go on, and probably will when I think of some more reasons to be irritated by liberals who aren't me.



Are you an irritating whiny American liberal? Do you disagree with me and want to tell me all about it? Perhaps you're a big fat right winger and want to tell us all how Jesus appeared to you in a deep fried peanut butter sandwich. Why don't you share your views on my comments page?
Or you could just fuck off.

Top mineral related toilet humour!

There's a fantastic page on the website of the National Geoscience Database of Iran about Arsenite - no it's nothing to do with drinks promotions at your local gay bar, it's a metallic mineral which is only accidentally named after the funniest part of the human body.


Despite having nothing to do with actual arses, the page still refers to the mineral's "Cleavage" which is apparently "Excelent - incorrolation with /0001/surface". Not being a geologist, I couldn't tell you if that's enough cleavage to park your bike in some arsenite.


"Jizman" is also mentioned, and the "streak" is also referred to - I guess that's what happens if you don't wipe your arsenite properly. Arf.

Proof the Iraq Invasion is Great!!!

One of the joys of my job is spending vast swathes of time trawling the web looking at people's blogs (only joking, boss!). Like presidents, the most entertaining blogs are usually full of bonkers right wing bullshit. Like this one, the "Louisiana Conservative". Get a load of this:


"Just a reminder if liberals are right about Iraq, that it just was not worth just over 1,000 casualties [to liberate the Iraqi people] then...

the 4,435 lives lost freeing the American people was not worth rushing to war.

The 558,052 lives lost freeing African Americans was not worth rushing to war.

The 407,316 lives lost ending the holocaust was not worth rushing to war."



That's right folks - the Iraq war is great because less Americans have died in it than in some other wars!


Unfortunately for our right wing chum, his argument hinges on a few key facts:

Lives have no inherent value, but they can be used as counting beans to decide which war is better.
You'll notice that the people who hold this attitude to life are usually far, far away from any danger themselves - much like Blanco here, or President Bush himself.

American lives are worth something; other nationalities are worthless.
Blanco makes no mention of the Iraqi lives lost in the invasion - the only thorough research into this, by the Lancet, estimates around 100,000 Iraqi casualties.

'Freedom' is another word for 'governed by an American puppet regime'.
Personally, if America invaded Scotland to 'liberate' us, stuck some guy called Chip in a kilt and told us he was our new leader, then said, 'oh and by the way, your mother and brother were killed by accident and your dad's in a cage in Cuba, and the hefty cost of invading and rebuilding your country will be paid for by your North Sea oil', I'd be pretty pissed off. If I was still alive.

Liberals only oppose the Iraqi invasion because they're opposed to force being used to liberate Iraq.
Personally, I'm more pissed off at the ham-fisted fuck-up America has made of this whole Iraqi invasion. They could have kept the existing security structure intact and gently eased the country into a new era of American provincialism. Unfortunately, they completely dismantled the security apparatus in the country and tried to rebuild it from scratch. They've just created more problems that will be around for years to come. New Northern Ireland, anyone? Or rather, new Northern Ireland with added bonkers fundamentalist suicide bombers?

Public healthcare

In the US, it seems that public healthcare is something that the majority don't want. I also have reservations about public healthcare. For some people in this country (the UK), it seems to encourage them to be ill - they take no exercise and eat crap food because they know that if they get ill, they get paid sick leave and free medical treatment. Perhaps if they had to pay for it they'd try a little harder to be healthy.



However, despite a third of its population having no healthcare cover, more than twice as much is spent (per head of population) on healthcare in the US than in Britain. The capitalist system isn't a perfect framework for delivering healthcare - my cousin is a doctor and she's worked at private cancer clinics here where expensive treatments are offered to terminally ill clients when it would be in their best interests to give them palliative care to make their last days more comfortable, instead of preying on their last shreds of desperate hope to claw more money from them.



The overwhelming benefit of public healthcare is that its main focus is curing patients, rather than generating revenue. Following a nasty bike accident I've been on the receiving end of our public healthcare system many times. Not being a rich man, had I been in America I would have been unable to afford the operations and might be in a wheelchair right now.



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My Fun Day With The British Journal Of Syntactical Over-Complication

It's a dank, miserable Tuesday. I've just had food poisoning. I've got a cold. I have a shocking hangover that has left me feeling greasy and violated as well as shameful, directionlessly guilty and slightly confused about what happened last night. In short, I feel shite. So you can imagine my joy at being given this fascinating chapter to read in the British Journal of Criminology: "Experience and Expression - Social and Cultural Significance in the Fear of Crime".


Actually I might find ordinarily enjoy it but right now my head is a little bunged with shit to absorb passages such as thus:


"This study has two aims. The first is to draw this contrast between bottom-up and top-down more sharply in the quantitative research literature by systematically developing theory regarding social and cultural significance in the fear of crime"


Phew. It continues...


"In the process, this study seeks to expand on the subjective environmental interpretations that shape assessments of risk and vulnerability and consequently worry about crime. That public perceptions are explicably rooted in subjective inferences, vulnerability and representations of risk and of criminal events calls into question the usefulness of judging perceptions as irrational according to official risk estimates".


And so it continues, in a similar vein, for a good few too many more pages than is humane. I can't help but feel that it could be worded in a more simple, easy to assimilate fashion. But perhaps the authors are worried that people might realise that crime analysis isn't that difficult.

Christmas cards

Hey if you haven't yet received a christmas card from me, don't be put out: it's not just because you're a complete stranger who found this page by Googling for "extended family of inbred Germans", it's also because this year I haven't sent any. I just feel like it's such a waste to swell card company coffers by purchasing overpriced tat that, like a butterfly, briefly dazzles on the mantelpiece before being consigned to the bin and going on to clog up landfill sites in picturesque parts of the provinces with glitter and cartoon reindeer. So this year, I took the noble and what I consider to be forward thinking decision to give the money I usually spend on cards to charity. I'm sure, now that you understand the reasons for this decision, you will not be offended, and might even do the same yourself next year.


Unfortunately for charity (but good for my Christmas alcopops budget) I don't usually spend any money on christmas cards.

I got a letter published in Metro!

Hey I got a letter printed in the Metro! I always told my mum that one day I'd amount to something and here I am; name up in lights, a published writer, a man of letters (page).



The letter was an abbreviation of Friday's post (below) about animal rights etc. One thing I did notice - the Metro saw fit to add some grammatically incorrect punctuation, which is a bit weird - they could have just pasted my letter in and it would have been fine.



I suppose I do feel like a bit of a pedantic tit getting so worked up about a cartoon in a free newspaper. But it is symptomatic of a growing misinformed opposition to vivisection in the public at large that's leading to increased support for animal rights extremists and an equivalent increase in harassment and attacks on scientists and doctors.



But hey! I got a letter published in a paper!

Animal Shights

It was refreshing to wake up this morning and see a national newspaper advocating violence against doctors and scientists who experiment on animals (Nemi explaining to a mouse how to hit a scientist with a baseball bat on the cartoon page of flimsy commuting rag, Metro). Apparently it's "International Animal Rights Day" so we should all be assaulting vivisectors.


Quite right too - who needs cures for diseases? I'm sure animal rights activists are protected from diabetes, dementia and cancer by a forcefield of self-righteousness. It's about time we started listening to the emotive arguments of misinformed cartoon characters instead of doctors and scientists.


You might think I'm being curmudeonly, a bit ba-humbug, taking such umbrage at the schoolgirl views of a little read cartoon in a little respected newspaper. The fact is, violence against vivisectors is a real and growing concern. Workers at labs where medical tests are done - and their families - are increasingly subjected to threats, physical violence and slurs. Rape alarms are thrown on their roofs at night, acid is poured over their cars, they're beaten with clubs, criminal records are falsified calling them paedophiles and sex criminals and distributed throughout their community - nothing is below the animal rights protesters. They even dug up the grave of the mother of a man who supplied guinea pigs to the labs. Bonkers doctor Jeremy Vlasak has encouraged activists to kill vivisectors as "one death would save millions of animals".


The protesters say animal testing is wrong because it's scientifically useless and ethically wrong. But who do you trust to make decisions regarding the efficacy of medical testing - the scientists and doctors who know most about it, or a bunch of hysterical beardy hairy Marys? Clearly the scientists doing the testing don't do it for fun - where possible, alternative methods such as computer models are used - if there was a nicer way to do it that didn't involve inflicting pain or killing animals they would surely jump at it, if only to reduce their dry cleaning bills.


And how can they say it's ethically wrong to use animals to develop cures for diseases - if you or your relative had cancer, diabetes or needed an organ transplant would you be happy for them to forgo the treatment and die? (The animal rights protesters I spoke to on Oxford Street wouldn't skip treatment - although they are happy to deny other people treatments by hindering the progress of medical research).


At the end of the day, perhaps I wouldn't be so worked up if there wasn't a growing misinformed normalisation of violent opposition to animal testing, as typified by Nemi. Or if Nemi ever did what a comic strip is supposed to do, and made me laugh. Unfortunately Nemi is shite.



Are you an animal rights nutjob? Do you disagree with me and want to tell me all about it? Perhaps you read Nemi in the Metro and think it's not shite. Why don't you email me with your views?
Or you could just fuck off.

Pixies on the radio

Sitting at work, listening to XFM, they say they're going to play a Pixies tune....ooh I'm thinking, what a treat, this has perked up an otherwise flat and lifeless afternoon, wonder what they'll play? What do they play? No. 13 Baby, Dig for Fire, Bird Dream of the Olympus Mons perhaps? Nah, GIGANTIC! Why are people so wanky about the Pixies - every time there's an article about them in a magazine or whatever (and there's been a few, this being the year of their world-conquering return) I read the same shit about "Come On Pilgrim and Surfer Rosa are heartrending works of searing genius, but after that they lost it a bit"....the best of's and DVDs don't do much to correct this, being as they are heavy on the early songs and the early footage...this is a LOAD OF SHITE! Pilgrim and Surfer are brilliant albums by anyone's standards, but the Pixies really hit their stride with Doolittle, Bossanova and Trompe Le Monde. All these people are trying to look cool by saying they like the "early inaccessible stuff" best. Twats. XFM - you shoulda played Motorway to Roswell.

George Galloway wins libel action!

Maverick Scottish MP George Galloway has won his libel action against the Telegraph, who alleged he was paid by Saddam Hussein in return for campaigning against the war. One in the eye for the Tory crooks at the Telegraph! And it won't stop here, because if anyone can cook up an indignant self-righteous stink at the expense of his detractors, it's Gorgeous George!



Perhaps the owners of the Telegraph should go back to what they know best - embezzlement, xenophobia and petty antiquated classism - and stop trying to quiet dissenting voices with spurious allegations.



As a result of the ruling, the Telegraph will have to pay Gorgeous George (so called because he shagged a bunch of women while away at a conference in Greece) £150,000 plus expenses totalling £1.1million. Hohoho! That's £1.25 million Conrad Black (or whatever crook runs the Telegraph now) won't have to spunk up the wall on stretch limos and sparkly tat for his pugly wife, Barbara Amiel. Result!


Click here for the full story as reported in th Guardian.

I pay for dictator's tanks? Eh?

Tell me what's wrong with this picture - the Government OK'd a sale of 100 tanks to the Suharto regime who hold Indonesia in their violent grip while they siphon off its wealth to their own pockets. The tanks were, of course, to be used for suppressing rebellions and demonstrators (you might have seen the "Free East Timor" T-shirts on the backs of hateable student types) despite assurances from the Indonesian government that they would only be used for holding down really, really big pieces of paper and repelling Martian invasions and NOT for massacring oppressed workers armed with sticks (claims that were shown as rather obviously false at the time by the fact that the Suharto officials couldn't stop poking each other's ribs and giggling).


So far, so bad, but nothing out of the usual. Since the Tory government thought it would be a good idea to demolish all British manufacturing except for the arms industry, an incident of Britain selling arms to any Tom, Dick or Saddam has hardly been newsworthy. Another UK arms manufacturer, BAE, has sold loads of fighter jets to Indonesia (to be used for scaring sparrows from Indonesias famous allotments, according to one smirking Suharto bigwig).


But here's where the story takes a little departure from the norm. The 100 tanks were sold to Indonesia for £160 million. Unfortunately, the government there ran into financial problems (probably not helped by rampant corruption, massive spending on tanks, jets and guns, or by killing so many men of working age) and when the bill dropped onto the doormat at the Suharto residence, it was stuck in the drawer under the phone and ignored. Too bad, you might think. A British arms manufacturer loses loads of money, its investors who previously profited from blowing people up also lose loads of money - seems fair to you? Well it would be, but unfortunately the government here had an agreement whereby the British taxpayer had to foot the bill instead, to the tune of £93 million.


In other words, the government took loads of my hard earned taxes and used them to buy tanks for a vicious corrupt regime to kill innocent people with. Uh....?


Click here to read the story.

Guardian pro Bush campaign

The Guardian, Britains most respected organ for fake socialists, has run a very entertaining campaign to get its readership to write to people in the swing state Ohio (swing meaning might vote for either presidential candidate, rather than shite music from the 40s that your mum likes).


Most entertaining have been the responses from our chubby colonial chums, who, as might be expected, have not taken too kindly to a bunch of overbearing, wonky toothed pinkos telling them, in the style of a frustrated school teacher explaining something to a slow pupil, why they should vote for Kerry and not vote for Bush.


This has, as you might expect, backfired completely. Americans might be thick, but they don't know that, and the last thing they want is some arrogant pacifist over-educated European commie telling them what they are doing wrong and what they should do to make geography teachers in Surbiton happy. Your average American doesn't know that Dubya has screwed up the economy, squandered the surplus, given tax cuts to the rich and screwed everyone else, made enemies around the world, encouraged terrorism, made a total cock-up of an already illegal invasion, shat on the environment, and squeezed welfare and healthcare and all the good stuff that stops society going down the shitter. And even if they did know, they wouldn't give a fuck, so long as they have a leader who can act like some down home straight talkin' homeboy who loves his Mom, fears God and would be a good fishing companion. And if some supercillious intellectual English ponce tells them otherwise, it's just going to make them like the cowboy more.



So are the Guardian folks thick if their campaign is just going to make people vote for Bush? No! While the Guardian campaign is ostensibly against Bush, it is actually a cunning way of rallying Americans behind him. The Guardian (and Michael Moore and Al Qaeda) are all praying that Dubya gets back in. For one, it gives us all that wonderful warm bath (or Ba'ath) feeling of superiority over our redneck yankee cousins. Every time their pigshit-thick leader comes on teevee, mangling words and trying to spell his own name while 30 stone blobs of flag waving adipose tissue sit around and whoop him up, we smile condescendingly and think how lucky we are to live in a country where the elected leaders might not be honest, but at least do not need help tying their shoelaces. Four more years of Bush would also mean that the Guardian, Moore and Al Qaeda would also become more powerful, as people opposed to Bush's belligerence and ineptitude would support those who oppose him and his America.



So come on America, vote Bush and give us Europeans four more years of comedy!