Rice Stirs Chinese

A couple of days ago I was walking past the North Cathedral in Cork down towards Gerald Griffen Street where there used to be a Magdelen Laundry where women who got pregnant outside marriage were imprisoned. Today it’s a charity shop where you can probably get a second hand copy of the Da Vinci Code which suggests none too subtly that Mary Magdelen wasn’t a prostitute after all and may have given birth to the sons of the son of man.

Across the street is scrawled on one of the walls in green marker the words “all priests are pedophileses” (sic). As I was walking past this sign I saw a man of the cloth walk straight past it and not bat a an eyelid. Just 10 or 20 years ago he could have had the youth who was responsible for this mispelt half-truth sent to an industrial school like the one he’d just walked past.

Needless to mention, this made me think how bad George W Bush and all the people around him are.

If anybody wonders who I hate the Bush junta so much, it’s because they appear to me to be taking America to a place that Ireland has struggled to get away from, where the church had a virtual veto over government policy.


Bush owes his election as president to a number of factors; an accident of birth which made him the son of a former president, support from big business and the oil industry, but it appears to many that the tipping point may been support from the religious right.

In polls conducted after the election, around a quarter of the electorate cited “moral issues” as their reason for voting for Bush, as if they believed that only they knew what was right, which many of them certainly do. It’s not as if the rest of us want a government that does what’s morally wrong, just that we have a different set of values to them.

Bush’s intervention in the Terry Schiavo case has been described as “payback” to the religious right. Ted Kennedy used to say that “ya dance with them that brung ya” and it’s clear what the position of the moral majority on this issue is. Bush stated this position as follows: “err on the side of life”. It’s clear that life is sacred to him, particularly when it’s the life of a wealthy, white, American woman with health insurance. It matters less to him if people die in Iraq as a result of his foreign policy or die in Africa as a result of his trade policies, in Europe as a result of his environmental policies, or in the US because of his health care or gun law polices.

Though Bush has never been to the third world, he must know that there’s a lot of people there who go without food, yet he seems to see nothing amiss about force-feeding a woman who’s been brain-dead for many years when so many are hungry. Neither can he see the irony of the fact that so many fully conscious people die every year because so many of them can’t afford basic health care.

One ironic thing the euthanasia argument is that the man who’s been it’s biggest opponent over the last 25 years is a man who could surely do with having his life terminated soon, Karol Wojika. Yet it seems that we’re going to be greeted with the spectacle of the Pope’s slow, agonising death over a protacted period.
When I was “studying” religion in School, I was “taught” that euthanasia meant killing of disabled people as practiced by the Nazis. Oddly enough, my hysterical, hyperkinetic religion teacher insisted that we had an obligation to keep children on life support until she read in one of her religious doctrine books that this wasn’t the case. Until relatively recently, the official position of the catholic chuch was that anyone who killed himself would go to hell, though as hell is where most suicidal people are coming from, that probably wouldn’t have bothered them so much. What is that Hamlet says? “who would fardels bear,To grunt and sweat under a weary life,But that the dread of something after death,The undiscover'd country from whose bournNo traveller returns, puzzles the willAnd makes us rather bear those ills we haveThan fly to others that we know not of?"

I’m in favour of the right-to-die because I think human beings are rational, conscious beings that know when their quality of life is so poor that they feel their lives are no longer worth living. It seems odd to me that the people who oppose euthanasia are the same people who believe in an afterlife. As someone who doesn’t accept the Garden of Eden anthropocentic myth it seems bizarre that Bush is hell-bent on destroying the environment while promoting human population growth.

But here’s an ironic thing: it seems that when Bush was governor of Texas, he actually signed a bill into law that allowed doctors the right to terminate the lives of terminally ill patients. But I don’t expect this to be reported on Fox News.

Meanwhile other members of the Republican Party bid to out-do their leader for hypocrisy. Condoleeza Rice has been lecturing Europeans again, this time for selling arms to China. These are, of course, the same Europeans that Donald Rumsfeld was so dismissive of in the run-up to the Iraq war.

I don’t think that Europe should be selling arms to China either. I think arms dealers are the scum of the Earth, which is why so many of them donated money to Bush’s campaign. But just as John Kerry told Bush that being lectured by him about fiscal discipline was like being lectured by Tony Soprano on ethics, being warned by America not to sell arms to repressive regimes is like being told to behave by Bart Simpson.

Rice seems to be shocked by the notion that her cultural kin in Europe could sell arms to a country that might one day be at war with the United States. What war with China would that be, then? Obviously the one they’re preparing for by arming the governments of South Korea, Nepal, Krygistan and Uzbekistan.

What has she got against China? Fear of the so-called Red Peril runs deep in American society, as it has to a lesser extent in Europe, where we’ve hidden our fear that China has always had a more sophisticated civilisation than ours with petty rascism. Fear of China was probably a major factor in America’s descision to invade Vietnam.

So what are the issues today? Tibet is one, which is reasonable, as the US has never oppressed Indians or Blacks. Unfair trade practices is another, which is also reasonable, as they don’t subsidise their own industries to the hilt, do they?

Another is copyright issues. Here I have to take issue, as I’ve been to Vietnam and bought a crap-load of cheap CDs and DVDs which probably originate from China, and I’m not a bit ashamed of this. In fact I was kind of proud that I managed to see all those movies without giving a brass farthing to the likes of News Corp or AOL Time Warner.

Maybe the sanctimonious Ms Rice isn’t aware that the US didn’t introduce copyright protection for foreign authors until 1892, when it was already the world’s foremost economic power.

Maybe she’s unaware that Europeans became the foremost power in the world by stealing China’s invention of gunpowder.

Maybe she’s unaware that Rice comes from East Asia originally and that if she was consistent she’d change her name to “tobacco”

What the rest of us should be aware is that the US is trying to force Trade Related Intellectual Property Rights (TRIPS) on the rest of the world which could lead to things like the human genome, the basis of life itself, being patented by private companies. If the EU really wants to stick it to the US, they should take China’s lead and cease their craven acceptance of these patent laws.

But I’m not going to hold my breath, which will soon be the property of Monsanto if the US gets it’s way.

Victory for the Catholic half of Liverpool?

Lots of bad news on the TV last Night. Our old friend George Bush is sticking his nose where it doesn’t belong, this time into a sensitive right-to-die case that he has no business interfering in. In Britain, the Tory party are planning to persecute Gypsies and cut back on abortion rights, leading me to think that they’re planning to become more like the US Republicans. In Doha, a bomb goes off and Osama Bin Laden gets the blame, though Doha has a reputation for being the most boring place in the world so that ought to spice things up there a little.

But then there’s some good news, even if we had to wait until the sports section to hear it. Victory for Liverpool in the Merseyside derby. I’m sure all impartial observers will agree that this is good news for football. I know that there’s a lot of Man United fans out there who resent Liverpool for being so much more successful than their team for so long, but how many of them were really looking forward to their Tuesday and Wednesday nights being enlivened by the spectacle of David Moyes’ poisinous anti-football?

There will, of course, be some Man U fans who’ll say that it’s a bad thing for football for the same 4 teams to qualify for the champions league every year, but then you expect them to come out with stuff like that.

Those of you who know me know that I’m a Liverpool fan and have been since I was growing up in the eighties when they were the best team in Europe, playing with a style and panache that was an anomaly in the rough-and-tumble English first division of the time. For a while in the late eighties, the two best teams in the country were both from Liverpool, though Everton achieved this success with a brand of football that was dour and workmanlike by comparison.

Plus ca change, many of the people who I watched yesterdays game with in Darby O Gills in Blackpool will have been thinking, as Everton’s dreary catanaccio strategy failed and was replaced by long-ball play reminiscent of Wimbledon or Ireland in the Jack Charlton era, though, to be fair, they weren’t all that more boring than Liverpool teams from the height of the Houllier dog years.

As I’ve hinted, RTE and TV3’s viewing figures will drop dramatically if they show any Everton games next season, and in spite of their defeat, they’re probably still favourites.

The easy explanation would be that Everton are boring and that Liverpool, now that they’ve got rid of Houllier (Best £10 Million they ever spent) are exciting, and that there’s a load of Liverpool supporters still around from their 80’s glory days.

But others will argue that their must be something more. Foreign visitors to Ireland are often bemused by our obsession with the premiership, considering how much lingering resentment there is at the way the British have treated us for so long that shows no signs of going away. What many of them fail to realise is that Ireland is a country which was forced to send many of it’s sons and daughters abroad for hundreds of years and that before the era of theme-park Irish pubs had to find some way of preserving their sense of identity.

A friend of mine who teaches in Trinity in Dublin told me that when Ireland qualified for the 1990 World Cup with a predominantly English-born team, his professor went on the radio saying how this symbolised Ireland’s diaspora, though the same professor hadn’t allowed students time off to watch Ireland play in the days before they were fashionable or Landsdowne Road had floodlights.

This was nothing new as Irish identity has often been expressed through sports teams like Basketball’s Boston Celtics, Rugby’s London Irish, and Soccer’s Celtic, Man United and Liverpool.

Or so I imagined, having been brought up in an era when all of Liverpool’s midfield could have played for Ireland if they wanted to. But then my two brothers insisted that this was a relatively recent phenomenon and that Everton were traditionally the Catholic club in the city. This seemed absurd to me as at any Liverpool game there’s a host of tricolours on display and when the team start are winning (which hasn’t been nearly as often as I’d like this season) the fans start singing the fields of Athenry, which presumably isn’t to remind them of all the people who were converted to Protestantism during the famine.

When Right-Wing ponce Boris Johnson insulted the people of Liverpool for accusing them of grieving excessively for Ken Bigley, someone advised him that football was very important in the city and that Liverpool were the Catholic team and Everton Protestant. That settled it for me until I started to do some research before writing this and found out that the truth is far more complicated than I Imagined.

Needless to mention, the most lively discussion was on www.foot.ie which is an Irish Website

It seems that the protestant/catholic division is far less clear-cut in Liverpool than in Manchester or Glasgow, even though the city is far more Irish and often referred to as the real capital of Ireland, and the only place in Britain to have Orange parades.

It seems that though Everton were founded by Methodist preachers in the nineteenth century and Goodison park is in a predominantly catholic area, in the 50’s 9 of Everton’s starting 11 were Republic of Ireland internationals and they still have sponsor the youth academy of Dublin side Home Farm. It seems that a lot of Everton fans were insulted when they were accused of being protestant, and I have to admit they do have more Irish players than Liverpool at the moment, by the same margin of yesterdays victory (2-1), though they’ve appointed one dour Scots protestant manager after another.

Then I read that at Dave Watson’s testimonial Everton fans were accused of being “Fenian bastards” by visiting Rangers fans, though it does beg the question of why Everton were playing Rangers if they’re the Catholic team.

This is clearly a complex issue that there’s only one way to resolve. The city of Liverpool, a Celtic Town in an Anglo-Saxon Island will have to become part of the Irish republic. There’s clearly a precedent for this as there’s a big British enclave in North-Eastern Ireland that’s caused one or two problems over the years, and if it’s the will of the people of Liverpool then the government should respect that. It would be a little costly at first as there’s a lot of unemployment in the city and welfare benefits are particularly generous here but on the other hand we’d also start to get royalties from Beatles records and in a while the city would be a shiny happy Celtic Tiger city.

It would be a bit of an ego blow for Cork as we’d no longer be the second biggest town in the country but then Liverpool would be in the Eircom league and we’d get to see them play at least once a year.

If it works out we can take Glasgow and Kilburn as well. And Stonehenge, which clearly pre-dates the Anglo-Saxon conquest.

I’m sure this is what Luis Garcia was planning when he headed Fernando Morientes shot into the Everton net yesterday.

George Patrick Bush: making Ulster into forn frendsa freem

I can't tell you all how relieved I am that March 18th has come again and all the kerfuffle that surrounds St.Patricks Day is over for another year.

My family call me "The Grinch" because of my cynical attitude to Christmas because of my cynical attitude to that festival so it's probably just as well that I generally avoid them on Paddy's Day as I have no time for this particular excuse for a piss-up.

I generally avoid the Cork parade though I'm beginning to doubt the wisdom of this as living in a city it's impossible to avoid the festival altogether and if you don't go to the parade your memories are more likely to consist of litter, vomit, broken glass, poor singing and fights.

And kids overeating. Funnily enough the Irish Times did an editorial yesterday about childhood obesity. Maybe it's time to bring Patrick back so he can drive all the snacks from Ireland. he did a really good with the snakes. Then again, there's so much underhand activity going on in the property and banking sectors that maybe he should drive all the sneaks out of Ireland, though this might reduce our international competitiveness particularly when the Chinese economy is growing so fast.

But then, I've only ever thought about celebrating the festival when I'm out of the country and I suddenly get nostalgic for it. When I'm here, I realise what a cold, grey, miserable country it is at this time of year. Lots of other people have cottoned onto this essential truth; one American visitor expressed dissapointment at the paucity of the St.Patrick's Day parade in Cork but the whole point is to celebrate a country that exists only in our minds.

A few years ago my brother flew to Boston at this time of year and got really drunk every night and sang songs about how much he missed Ireland. To me that's the essence of Paddy's day.

John O Farrell wrote a piece yesterday about how sad it is that the British have no feast day of their own and have to approriate ours. He's not exactly wrong, yet what does it say about us that we celebrate as our national hero a Welshman who introduced a primitive form of a Western version of a middle Eastern religion to our country leading to the marginalisation of our own indiginous religions as our national feast?

I'm not going to able to settle the debate about whether Patrick arriving on our isle was a good thing or a bad thing. There are those who argue that if he hadn't, then monks on places like Skeelig Island would never have been able to preserve classical texts and thereby save Western Civilisation from barbarians like the Anglo-Saxons. On the other hand, when we converted to Christianity we gradually lost a connection to the Earth that we've never regained except and only value as a commodity to sell to tourists.

And, needless to mention, the conflcit in the North is all about different Christian sects fighting each other, though it would be naive to imagine that Celtic Tribes always got on with each other.

The odd thing is that both sides in the North lay claim to the legacy of St. Patrick, of whom Ian Paisley has a big painting on his wall. Paisley and others claim that Patrick represents a tradition of Celtic Christianity that was lost when St Augustine came to the British Isles and Didn't come back until Henry XIII wanted to chop his wives head's off and steal all the Church's property. I suppose it makes sense to him.

That the history of relgious conflict is a compicated one with subtle nuances that only insiders and scholars can really understand has never stopped George W Bush from sticking his stupid nose into religous conflicts and this is no exception.

I must say, though, it was nice of him to find time in his busy schedule to commiserate with the family of Robert McCartney, particularly when he hasn't attended a single memorial service for any of the thousand or so men and women who he's sent to die in Iraq, not to mention the 10,000 or so people who die of violent crime in the US every year.

W has pledged to do everything he can to bring the men who killed McCartney to justice, which worries me a little as he has no more respect for the norms of international engagement than the IRA do for the rule of law, and his approach to terrorism has been generally to bomb the crap out of places in the general area where terrorists might be suspected to be. He's also gone on record as saying that the IRA were wrong to offer to kill the killers of McCartney when he asked for the head of Bin Laden dead or alive a few years ago and hasn't rescinded as far as I know. Like the IRA, he doesn't think the normal rules apply to him.

Yet his sympathies are with the unionists, which isn't all that surprising as he's spent most of his life in West Texas with people of protestant Scotch-Irish stock. These are the same people who would die for the right to bear arms, yet he doesn't feel at all uncomfortable asking for the gun to be taken out of Irish politics.

It's all a part of a familiar strategy by the Republicans of demonising everywhere else in the world and ignoring the myriad faults of their own society.

Sadly, it seems to work for him, and he doesn't even need a Shamrock to explain how bad non-America is to his slow-witted supporters.

Prone to telling a few porkie pies

I don’t know about any of you, but I think Nip/Tuck is a great show. I probably think that because I’ve always had absolute contempt for cosmetic plastic surgery and probably will until I’m both old and rich, which may be never.

While most practising plastic surgeons have been men, most of their clients have been women. It’s a little akin to men mutilating women’s genitals in Muslim countries, except that women actually ask for it, although it could be argued that a society which is increasingly focussed on physical beauty might make them feel compelled.

Increasingly, though, in a more equitable world of gender relations, many men feel the pressure to be beautiful as well, and many are having operations like pectoral implants which make them look like wildly misproportioned freaks. Others have penis extensions, which aren’t really extensions at all, but a cutting away of the bone at the base of the penis which can lead to something called “hairy donut syndrome” which is better left to your imaginations.

Nip/Tuck actually leaves very little to the imagination. To me it seems replete with a Puritan belief that beauty is a reward for pain and suffering, though it’s written and performed by people with Irish-sounding names which suggest that the surgery clients have to go through what they do because of some sin they’ve commited. (It’s called Catholic Guilt)

What seems to underline the show is that cosmetic surgery is all one big lie, a lie that allows us to pretend that we are younger, or thinner, or of a different ethnicity. The characters lie to each other all the time, in particular Christian (!) who lies to get women to sleep with him, lies about who he’s slept with and keeps the fact that he’s really Matt’s father from him.

In contrast Sean is so honest that you wonder how he got into this line of work in the first place.

Plastic surgery has become so pervasive that I don’t know if I’ve ever implicitly rewarded someone for having an operation, even just by looking at them more than once when they’ve passed me on the street or dancing in a nightclub.

On the other hand, I was really shocked when my ex-girlfriend from Southern California wanted to make sure that I didn’t want her to have breast implants, as some of her ex-boyfriends had. I was so indignant that she’d even ask that I told her how many trachomioctomies could be paid for for the cost of one pair of tit implants, a trachomioctomy being an operation to give sight to an African of Asian child, and the number being around 200.

Going out with a girl who has big tits isn’t as important to me as having vision is to 200 African children, but it must be to some people. But what sort of people?

Stand up, Terry Prone, author of Confessions of a Plastic Surgery addict.

She’s head of Carr Communications, a public relations firm which is kind of neat as that’s basically another form of institutionalised deceit. She also writes for the Irish Examiner (No Comment) and recently penned a piece in the Irish Times defending Kevin Myers, which is the surest way to get on the wrong side of me.

She argues that in the 70’s and 80’s iconoclasts were welcomed in Irish society but now political correctness means that all columnists have to sing from the same hymn sheet. This reminds me of during the divorce referendum when Emily O Reilly said she suddenly knew how it felt to be out of the liberal media loop when she opposed divorce. So, she thinks abused wives should be forced to live with their husbands, but apart from that, she’s a liberal.

I’d love if what Prone said was true, that the country had been taken over by a liberal elite, or that, contrary to what we read in the history books, the Ireland of the 70’s or ‘80s was a place of diverse thought rather than a narrow, inward-looking society where many books were banned and a bookshop in Cork was burned down for selling the thoughts of Chairman Mao.

I’d love if the putative liberal elite were as ruthless in imposing their agenda as Theocrats like John Charles McQuaid were in imposing theirs, as then we might have the same laws on issues like abortion, licensing, drugs and pornography as they do in other European countries. But of course we don’t, in spite of what Prone would have us belief.

Then last week she argued that anyone who opposes incineration but travels by plane is a hypocrite. This struck me as being puzzling, as there’s so many alternatives to incineration but no environmentally friendly way to travel long distances in a short space of time, though it could be argued that some journeys are unnecessary.

Yet this Sunday I find out that Prone herself, a self-confessed plastic surgery addict, flies regularly to Florida, the home of Christian and Sean, just to have plastic surgery performed on her. And she accuses people like me of being hypocrites?

If she’s concerned about the environmental impact of flying, there’s things that she can do to offset the impact, though I doubt she does. Once the incinerator is built, there’s very little any of us can do to limit it’s impact. Prone dismisses our concerns facetiously by saying that dioxins can get arrested for looking at someone the wrong way, but offers no support for this argument. It’s an intellectually dishonest piece from a mendacious woman.

Which probably explains why she empathises with Kevin Myers so much.

But it doesn't explain why the Examiner gives a platform to this vain, self-regarding woman.

I'm sick and tired of reading things by neurotic psychotic paranoid prima-donnas

Hey Folks,

Hope you all like the new template. I thought it was appropriate that I chose a green one as that suggests eco-friendliness. It supports hyperlinks as well, which is cool. It took me fucking ages to figure out how to put them in but now that they're there feel free to log onto them.

One of these days I'll figure out how to put up photographs so those of you who aren't friends or relatives (Ha Ha) will know what I look like. It can't be that complicated, some of the neighbouring blogs like Indianans for Jesus can manage it, after all.

Most of the links I put up are for sites I've been longing onto for a while. Google News was up there automatically, not terribly surprising as blogger is owned by google.

Lies.com is one I found out about just a while ago. I wanted to write a piece about how some of today's politicians (no prizes for guessing who) are incapable of telling the truth. I googled for "rove Lies" and there it was.

Karl Rove, as you probably know, is the student of Machiavelli and one of the shadowy figures behind George Bush. While some of the complexities of Florertine Reniassance politics might be lost on Dubya, there are certainly some things he's learned indirectly from the author of the Prince.

One, of course is the doctrine of permanent fear which the republicans used with chilling effectin the run up to the last election, with Cheney warning the US people that if Kerry got elected then the US would face another strike of 9/11 proportions, and, as Michael Moore showed in Fahrenheit 9/11, playing the electorate like a violin with terror alerts, which were permanently downgraded to yellow a week after the election.

Another Machiavellian trick that the republicans use to frightening effect is that of repeating lies until people believe them. It's been said that the first casualty of War is Truth, and now that the US is engaged in a permanent war on "terror" it looks like lady verity might never rise from the ashes again.

Bush's latest lie is to is to clain that democracy is on the March as a result of his war on Iraq. Though it's obvious to anyone whose looked at the situation carefully that Iraq is a long way from being a democracy, with the US holding leverage over elections, occupying the country against the express wishes of the people and controlling the oil supply, even the supposedly liberal London Independent was moved to ask in a front page article if Bush was right all along about the spread of democracy in the middle east following demonsrations in Syria.

The truth is that Bush has been lying all along, and he shows no signs of stopping. While he made concilliatory noises on a recent visit to Europe, he was making plans to appoint the anti-UN John Bolton as US ambassador to the UN, which led SydneyBlumenthal to say that Orwells 1984 clock was ticking 13.

His lies on the subject of Syria are no less sinister. As the even more famous Seamus, Mr Milne of the Guardian points out, the people on the streets of Syria are calling for anything but democracy, as what they really want is a return to elections where a muslim can't hold the presidency.

Yet if even the Independent is flirting with the idea of joining the pro-war side, what hope for Americans who get their news from Fox?

I really shouldn't be so condescending, as many people here in Ireland believe whatever the government tell them about subjects like incineration, in spite of the vast evidence that the technology is enormously dangerous. It's easy for governments to lie to people, especially when the lies are exactly what they want to hear. The odd thing is that there seems to be so little dissent in an age of proliferating information media.

The sad truth is that most people are like Homer Simpson and don't really want to engage with serious issues and prefer to put their trust in elected legislators over issues like that rainforest thing to thinking themselves.

Another Machivellian maxim is that the bigger a lie, the more people are likely to believe it, as most people aren't that imaginitive. Many people believe the Bible must be true as all that stuff would have been so hard to make up, though earlier religous works like the Maharbata are even more outlandish (There's a virgin birth in the Maharabata, by the way)

This theory ignores the fact that people have written even more outlandish stuff which they never claimed to be true, like, off the top of my head, Tannhauser, Don Quixote, the Lord of the Rings, the Iliad and the Odyssey, and even more outlandish stuff still that was claimed to be true,like the Warren, Butler, and Hutton commision reports.

Yet when the Bush administration published their weapons of mass destruction dossier, it was so detailed and complex that people thought it counldn't have been made up, though it obviously was.

This is why lies.com is such an important site. We've got to stop electing the people who tell the slickest lies and have the best spin doctors to manipulate the truth to lead us.

Major Myers to ground control

For many of us, the Kevin Myers scandal of a few days ago has gone away to be replaced with an other news stories like the Michael Jackson trial, the sort of running story that the networks love.

For me, Kevin Myers never goes away. There he is, sitting in the far right hand corner of every other days Irish Times editorial page daring me to read his obnoxious views which are diametrically opposed to my own and expressed in his bickering, condescending tone. Like someone who passes a car crash on the way to work every morning, I can never resist, though I know it's not good for my long-term cardiological health.

Though his column is labelled "An Irishman's Diary" it's pretty clear to all concerned that Myers is at best an Anglo-Irishman with all that that implies for his attitude to what Myles Na Gopaleen referred to as the plain people of Ireland (except Myles was being ironic).

Myers' apology for his description of children born outside wedlock as "bastards" carried all the conviction of a heroin addict promising a judge that he'd kicked the habit.

Sure enough, after all the fuss had died down, he was back to his old tricks again, complaining that he wasn't able to download pornography quick enough through eircom broadband.

But Yesterday it seemed he showed a flicker of remorse by writing an unusually non-mysogynistic piece praising the women of Belfast for standing up to his old friends in Sinn Fein.

So Far, So good. Bizzarely enough, the London Independent had a two-page spread earlier in the week praising strong Irish women like Mary Robinson, Maud Gonne and Countess Markeviec, though oddly enough, Queen Maeve didn't make the cut.

Then Myers went on to say that if women were running the world, that there would be a lot less pain and suffering, as wars are all started by men.

Hmmm. It's certainly true that woman newspaper columnists never use words like bastards to describe children, as they can understand what it's like to have a child in their womb for nine months.

It's certainly true also that most of the fighting and killing in the course of history has been done by men.

At the same time most evolutionary psycholgists argue that woman always go for men with a higher status, and that up until very recently status was attained primarily through the use of violence. It might help to explain why women still often go for bad boy types instead of effete psuedo-intellectuals like Myers who can only act tough behind a typewriter.

Then it's been argued that today women make better soldiers, as the ability to multitask and co-operate is more important in modern combat than physical strength or agression, two qualities that men have in abundance. (Not everyone accepts this argument).

So what does Myers have to say in defence of his argument? Apparently, he thinks that if Margeret Thatcher and Mary Harney had been leading Britain and Ireland for the last ten years, there would have been no killings in Northern Ireland in that period.

Excuse Me? Is this the same Margeret Thatcher that Declared war on Argentina over the Falkland Islands, sold £25 Billion worth of arms to the famously feminist house of Saud, then declared war on an enemy within, which turned out to be miners who were trying to keep thier jobs? Who commisioned Polaris, a Nuclear Missile system powerful enough to kill everyone on the planet? Who let hunger strikers starve to death in the H-Block? Who kept the Ivory Trade going by allowing Hong Kong to export Ivory? Who claimed all the credit for the defeat of the Soviet Union?

As for Mary Harney, she paid €300 to listen to Henry Kissinger, the worst mass murderer of the last fifty years.

It ought to be as clear as the nose on Myers face that these women, far from being pacifists, are part of a long tradition of women who go out of their way to prove that they are tough enough to compete in a man's world. Catherine the Great, Queen Elizabeth I, Boudecia, Jeanne Alexander, and now, Condoleeza Rice all fit this mould.

But perhaps, far from over-compensating for his "lapse" the other week, Myers is perhaps, being a little sarcastic?

It would be particularly ironic if he was, and it wouldn't be at all unlike him, and Geraldine Kennedy failed to notice.

I get the impression that the stuffy old paper that is the Times thought they were making a radical departure with the appointment of a woman editor. She hasn't shaken things up at all, though, the only difference that I notice is that another bearded, right-wing nutter called Mark Steyn has been given a column to foist his weird views on us. The paper remains conservative in style and news-heavy in an age when most people seek features and nuance.

Kennedy already allowed John Waters to ask for her resignation in a column, when it might have been easier to ask her to her face.

Perhaps women might be better at multi-tasking, but the Times might have picked the wrong woman. If she took a stand and sacked Myers I might change my mind.

I swear by the Blood of Allah, I'm no terrorist

When I was preparing to travel around South East Asia a couple of years back, my family was a bit worried about me. My grandmother didn’t really know where South East Asia was, thinking it might have been somewhere near Peru, where a friend of hers was working. Then my brother told her that I was going to Vietnam, expecting her to have some frame of reference with regard to that country. When she looked blankly back at him, and he mentioned the “W” word, which left her freaking out for the whole 6 months I was away.

Then there was my mother. She told me if I didn’t cut my hair people would think I was in Al-Queda. I told her that I’d ignored similar warnings from her before and never had cause to regret it, but that was before 9/11, she told me.

September 11 might have been the day that everything changed, but only in broad geopolitical terms; and my mother’s advice was just as insane as it had ever been. There was no point in trying to tell her that fundamentalist Muslims wore their hair short with a beard, or that the westerners that have given South-East Asians the most trouble are ones with short backs and sides.

A Republic of Ireland passport is like a magical skeleton key that lets you get into anywhere, as Ireland is EU but non-NATO.

In my travels I never had any problems crossing borders. I spent about ten minutes in the airport in Bangkok, I’ve often spent more time queuing in the supermarket. The people in every embassy were as friendly as can be, except when I tried to get into the Iraqi embassy in Hanoi, which was a block away from Cambodia’s. In fact, the only time I was ever delayed at customs was back in advanced, sophisticated Europe.

Once, coming across the Austrian-German border by coach pre-Schengen, the bus was stopped for two hours because there was allegedly an irregularity with someone’s UK passport. Actually there was nothing wrong with it, he was just basically a dark-skinned person. The irony was that there were quite a few Slovakian gypsies on the bus whose papers might have at least warranted some close examination, but they were just waved through. Presumably the German border guards have a sort of colour scheme like one of those things who get from Furniture stores when looking for paint.

Then there’s the UK. O, Boy, have I had hassle there. One time boarding the ferry at Fishguard at around 3 in the morning, I was asked where I’d come from and was unwise enough to tell them I’d been to Prague.

“What’s your connection there?” they snapped back, as snappily as it’s possible for someone with a Welsh accent to snap.

I was totally mystified when they took my passport and ran it through their computer but it later turned out that they were mounting a nationwide clampdown against the IRA and were hassling Irish people on the vaguest pretext.

People become customs officials because of the enormous power it gives them. They get some sort of malign kick of delaying people’s journeys or stopping them coming into their countries altogether. It’s a job for people who either too smart or not burly enough to become Nightclub bouncers, though if you get kicked out of a nightclub you can always try and get in somewhere else whereas this isn’t always the case with nation-states.

So I’m a bit distressed to hear that police and customs officials are going to get a whole new raft of powers, though in theory at least, these will be applied mainly to Muslims. I don’t know how they are supposed to distinguish between Muslims and people of other religion or secularists or agnostics. Twenty or thirty years ago you could have detained people overnight without food and then offered them some pork scratchings, but today a lot of people are genuine vegetarians so this might not work anymore. Of course if you detain them for 24 hours they might forget where they are and then start praying towards Mecca, though this might be a bit of a giveaway.

My fear is that, in spite of Charles Clarke’s promise that very few people will be affected by this bill, it’s my fear that while most terrorists are cunning and know how to avoid being caught, a lot of people will get hassled and they won’t all be genuine Muslims, but people who are victims of whatever prejudices afflict the authority figure they’re being victimised by.

While I’m not ignoring the possibility of a terrorist attack in the UK, I’m certain that more people will be persecuted by the “justice” system than will ever be the victims of terror.

When Rudolf Heydrich, the man who organised the holocaust, was shot by two Czech freedom fighters in 1942, the Nazis responded by razing an entire Czech village of 172 people to the ground. That might seem barbaric to us but it seems like at the moment the British and Americans are trying to emalate that feat by killing that many Arabs for everyone who died on September 11. By some estimates they're a third of the way there, before you even consider the half a million that died in Iraq as a result of sanctions.

If you still think that Fundamentalist Muslims present more of a threat to the British State than vice-versa, consider the following.

Number of people killed in Britain by Muslim terrorists, ever: 0
Number of Muslims detained in Britain since September 11 (2001) 700

Naomi Klein has an excellent piece about how the American media reports deaths: one American equals two west Europeans eqauls four Eastern Europeans... you see where this is going.

The particularly sinister thing about this new legislation is that they can imprison people without charge for a fortnight, not only for crimes they have commited, but for crimes they may be about to commit. Why stop there guys? Why not arrest people not only for what they have done but what they have failed to do? Haven't we all sinned in our thoughts as well as our words?

Haven't they learned the lessons of internment from their experience in Northern Ireland, which is that if you want people to stop bombing you, the last thing you do is persecute as many of their race as you possibly can? The tragic flaw from the point of view of the British is that many people who weren't terrorists before they were detained for 14 days probably will be after they leave. I guess Tony Blair was busy with his rock'n'roll band at the time, but surely he saw In the Name of the Father?

The worrying thing from my point of view is that it's more than probable that many of the people who're victimised won't be either muslims or terrorists, but ordinary Irish guys like myself, who've been the main victims of the terror laws already in existence, particulary when the so-called peace process is going through a less-than-peaceful stage.

Once in Victoria Station I was pulled up and strip-searched by a plain-clothes detective, allegedly because "someone matching my description" was seen smoking dope on cctv. Why did he do this? Because he could. The more power you give to minor authority figures, the more they abuse it. We employ morally and intellectually uncomplicated people to be police as thier job should only be to apprehend alleged criminals, whereas they are tried by people with a more complex view of things. By giving police the power to arrest and detain people on the mere suspicion that they might be up to something, the pyramid of justice that's worked reasonably well for 800 years or so is turned on his head.

I'm scared shitless to travel through England at the moment, not that I want to visit their shitty little country anyway, but I do want to go to Greece and the cheapest way is through Gatwick.

I don't want to end up like Joy Gardner, a West Indian woman who horribly died in the custody of British immigration police.

And that was before they got the new powers that the Commons has passed and will probably go through the house of Lords as well.

Be Afraid. Be very Afraid.

All Hail King Pfizer!

Regular viewers of this blog (I’m sure there’s millions of you out there, but you’re all too shy to put up any comments ha, ha) will notice that I haven’t put up any posts in the last ten days or so. I tried to put up a piece explaining to Kevin Myers why we didn’t have the same fascistic attitude to single mothers that they do in Britain and the US, but the computer wouldn’t accept it for some reason, presumably because there’such a surfeit of Myers-baiting material on the web already that one more article would have caused a global internet crash that would have resulted in porn addicts causing riots on the streets and a global outbreak of depression from people not being able to buy generic paxil and generally the sort of thing that was predicted for the start of the millennium.

Alas, I realise that none of this was going to happen. I came across a blog-focussed search engine and typed in the names of some of my postings and got nothing. Nada, zilch. I found this terribly depressing, almost as depressing as Million Dollar Baby winning best picture Oscar, though I realise that there are around 8 million blogs out there; the same article pointed out that while some famous blogs might make money, for most of us it’ll never be more than a hobby.

Still, I’m going to soldier on, writing is, like, y’know, my metier, my dharma, man, it’s what I was put on this Earth to do.

So anyway, there I was last Sunday sitting down to watch the Simpsons on Sky like I do every other Sunday.

Those of you who watch the show with anything like the religious fervour that I do will know that it regularly satirises the sort of corporate cuddliness that has infected modern society like a really bad tumour, embodied best by Lynsney Nagel, who, for example, converted the first church of Springfield into a public-private partnership when Bart’s hamster flew a rocket into it (it makes sense when you watch it). Another time Lisa convinced Mr. Burns to open a recycling plant but it turned out he was using it to make slurry from fish he caught in with recycled six-pack holders.

There’s a not-very-subtle message here that no matter how many times corporations tell you that there’re really nice and looking out for the everyone’s best interests, there’re still basically evil. But they know that if they keep saying the same things over and over again, people will eventually believe them. It worked for Hitler, it works for George W Bush and it works for the corporations.

Or at least so they must imagine as one of them broadcast an ad just before the Simpsons on Sunday.

The wisdom of such an act is debateable to say the least. A book I got my sister for Christmas (She likes the Simpsons too) spent a lot of time asking whether the show was genuinely subversive or if it was what it’s author describes as a mere court jester in the world of corporate America. The fact that Rupert Murdoch once appeared on the show describing himself as a billionaire tyrant leads me towards the latter supposition, but there’s a more hopeful part of me that hopes that the generation brought up watching the show will have a healthy scepticism towards corporate advertising.

Like that ad for Pfizer which they showed just before last Sunday’s show. Apparently Pfizers scientists spend all there time thinking up cures for cancer and heart disease. So I guess they must have just have come up with that Viagra thing by mistake, then, as it only increases blood pressure and adds to the problems of anyone who has cardiolgical problems to begin with.

Then they tell us that the best way to maintain good health is not to take their pills but to get lots of fresh air and exercise. Gee, isn’t it great that all those smart men in white coats are working here in Ireland, as we could never have figured this out for ourselves.

The irony wont be lost on anyone who grew up in the lower Cork harbour area any time in the last quarter of a century. When I was a child growing up in Crosshaven, the smell was often so bad that we had to lock all the doors and windows of our houses. I’d often get indescribably bad migraines at the same time.

The air quality has improved somewhat in the last few years and big pharma companies like Pfizer credit incineration for this. But incineration is also a dangerous technology that affects human health in other ways, by converting chemicals into toxic compounds known as dioxins. Pfizer are among the companies sponsoring a much bigger toxic waste incinerator as well as a municipal waste incinerator that will burn toxic waste from all over Ireland with possible disastrous implications for the health of people in the area.

They’re doing this because they care not about the health of people in the areas where they build their factories but for the health of the bank accounts of their shareholders, as they are legally obliged to do. This is why they spend so much time and energy researching mythical diseases like female impotence rather than curing diseases like malaria, which mainly affects people in poorer countries.

I’m hoping that most of the people watching that particular show will remember the one a few weeks before where Homer was forced to smuggle drugs from Canada because the big pharmaceutical companies artificially keep the price high and prevent anyone from producing generics, even in third world countries where they obviously can’t afford the real thing.

It’s true that firms like Pfizer have contributed to the economic development of Ireland in a major way – the active ingredient for Viagra, made in Ringaskiddy, is worth 14 times it’s weight in gold – yet the biggest beneficiaries of this wealth have been property developers while all the poor old people of the Cork harbour area get is a big factory where they burn toxic waste.

So maybe we should all write to Pfizer and ask them to incinerate the master tapes for this mendacious ad.

But do it outside your own headquarters, if you don't mind