Famous Seamus

Seven Sins of England? Is that All?

2007-05-09T18:00:00.000+01:00

Way back when I was a pretentious teen in the late eighties there was a show on bbc2 called “three minute culture”.

It’s thesis was that our attention spans had shrunk to 3 minutes as that was how often we changed the channel on the TV. And that was back when the majority of people only had 4 channels, imagine how short they are now?

‘Scuse me, I’ve got to go play second life for a while.

Sorry, where was I?

Oh yeah, I was saying that I never really took the thesis of that programme all that seriously. Everyone watches TV, but if medical students only had a 3 minute attention span it’s hard to see how they could remember those 15 million words of text they’re supposed to learn (according to a movie I once saw).

The makers of this programme including the smug Canadian presenter Michael Ignatieff might have looked at the research more positively and seen channel-hopping as a sign of intellectual curiousity rather than laziness. It could be argued that globalisation has made our lives into one big channel-surf where we don’t know where we’ll end up next. Who’d have thought Gay Byrne would end up as road safety commissioner? There’s a Black Swan for you.

Hang on, I’ve got to check my hotornot score.

7.9. Not Bad.

Anyway, as I was saying, channel hopping may not be a bad thing. I was doing it last night, and came across some fascinating juxtapositions. I started watching a show called The 7 sins of England which posited a theory that the drunkenness and rascism that blights England right now is nothing new. This wasn’t any news to an Irishman like myself, we were being bludgeoned to death by English thugs centuries before they went on cheap flights to Bratislava. Even though the show which juxtaposed (I like that word) quotes from the past about working-class English loutishness with erm, scenes of contemporary English loutishness was well done enough, it seemed to miss a fundamental point, which is that the violence of the English working-class was utilised for hundreds of years to build a massive empire, only to be turned in upon the country itself over the last 60 years.

It might come as news to those colonel blimp types who’ve been complaining that those hostages in Iran were soft that the English working classes are still ‘ard. They’re well fuckin’ ‘ard. And some of them aren’t shy about showing it. One yob said the difference between English people and the rest of humanity is that they speak their minds more freely. Qué?

While the ads were on (one of those 7 sins is consumerism, ironically enough) I turned over, first to RTE1 where Paul Durkan was talking about his own drink problem, which oddly enough led to him writing poetry rather than smashin’ peoples fuckin’ ‘eads in. Then I surfed over to BBC2 where another legacy of Britain’s imperial past was being discussed.

It’s always amazed me that the Brits seem to think the problems in Northern Ireland are the fault of “The Irish” as if they had nothing to do with it. One home secretary described the principality as a bloody awful country, and he was right, but it was a bloody awful country they created by forcing so many Scottish mountain thugs to live there. They served their British masters well by building the ships they needed to conquer the world, but as soon as the empire was under threat they were ready to give the 6 counties back in return for an abandonment of our neutrality. We’ve since sold that to George Bush, but that’s by the by.

It didn’t stop the unionists from tattooing union jacks to their heads or shouting abuse at the pope (Nice man? Are u serious, TB?) for most of the time since, even after a Guardian poll showed most people in Britain didn’t want the north in their country any more.

Right now, though, it seems the unionists have finally realised which way the wind is blowing and that the anachronism known as the UK is finally going the way of the Habsburg and Ottoman empires. It’s really unrealistic to imagine a rump state of northern Ireland clinging on to the UK with a tiny loyalist minority while Scotalnd tries to break it’s umbilicus with England.

Nevertheless, it’s going to be causing England a few problems for a while, looking for half a billion quid to get it back on it’s feet, much to the consternation of Paxman.

Me, I just shrug my shoulders and wonder why they got involved in Ulster in the first place, as with Iraq today.

Tennyson once said that he wished Ireland could move into the Atlantic. Well, Al, much as I like the Lotus Eaters I think we’re a bit unfortunate to live next to the most rapacious thugs on Earth as well. That their anger is now turned in upon themselves is a matter of huge relief to me.

Mr. Hobson goes to the Polls

2007-05-08T16:54:00.000+01:00

In my last post I criticised the Irish media for being too supine in it’s response to the very plausible accusation that our benevolent leader may be the son of a cop-killer.

It would have made interesting reading for the Taoiseach if he was on to pay attention to anything my family had to say.

Apparently Red Ahern was at a function to honour the composer of the Fields of Athenry a few years ago, ironically as it’s sung by supporters of his least favourite soccer team, the one appearing in the Champions League Final for the 7^th time, though that’s by the by. Anyway, my great-uncle, who taught the composer at school, was also there, and it turns out he comes from the same area of the country as Dirty Bertie.

My Uncle did some extensive genealogical research into the then finance ministers ancestry yet found himself cruelly snubbed by Ahern, who decided the person on the other side of him would be more help on his way up the greasy pole.

Unlike many of the things Bertie has done this was neither illegal nor greatly damaging in the greater scheme of things. My uncle is hardly the only older person to be shafted by this administration. Yet the incident does demonstrate in microcosm the colossal arrogance of Bertie and his coterie. He may like to present himself in heavily photo-shopped posters as someone in touch with ordinary people and in soft-focus interviews as someone who likes nothing more than to go out with his mates from Drumcondra.

But politicians have a different concept of friendship to the rest of us. All of us are really there for our friends when we need them, but very few of us would choose our friends as coldly and as ruthlessly on the basis of what they can do for us as the likes of Bertie. Call me a cynic if you like, but it seems like a bit too much of a coincidence that all of Berties friends from a rough area of Dublin all seem to be able to lay their hands on a big wad of cash whenever he needs it, which seems to be alarmingly often.

It’s true that the figures involved are fairly small compared to what Haughey received though that hardly makes it okay, I never heard Idi Amin defend himself by saying that he only killed a twentieth as many people as Hitler. It’s also true that someone with Ahern’s street smarts could have made a lot more money drug-dealing (for example). But then power has an attraction all of it’s own, Ken Livingstone said that he was only paid £6,000 a year for running the GLC but he didn’t care as he was the most powerful man in London.

But Livingstone was certainly someone who believed in something at some stage, whereas it’s hard to make that statement with any certainty about Ahern. It’s true that in many democracies the dominant party attracts the most ambitious people regardless of ideology, but here the two main parties have traditionally been so non-ideological that the only reason for joining either of them could be personal ambition. The lack of any major ideological difference between the blueshirts and the soldiers of destiny has suited Ahern down to the ground until now, in a vapid beauty contest against the likes of John Bruton or Baldy Noonan there was only going to be one winner. But it seems people have finally woken up to what a phoney he is and how our money has been wasted, how many promises have been broken. To take one example, we were told that by this election we’d be spending .7% of our GDP on foreign aid, though it still languishes at .42%. This may seem minor, in fact it almost certainly does seem minor to Bertie, as Fianna Fail aren’t putting up any candidates in Tanzania, but it’s a big issue for people who depend on us to provide them with food and medicine.

In a recent interview with Hot Press, Enda Kenny recycled this promise. I think we should take him at his word… What other choice do we have? Much of the rest of the interview was disappointing. He’s against liberalising drug laws as it could lead to drug tourism. Would that be such a disaster? It might give someone in the tourist offices in places like Portlaoise something to do. But seriously, it’s a misjudgement on his part as many younger voters know how out of synch we are with the rest of Europe and his traditional supporters aren’t going to defect to the crowd who killed their parents during the civil war.

And what of Micheal McDowell, the man who promised us he’d keep a leash on Bertie but has been like a little lamb (except fatter and balder) on the issue of Bertie’s corruption (I don’t see any point in using the word “alleged” anymore) while he’s been tearing into Trevor Sergeant for having the temerity to disagree with McDowell on some of the major issues. Then the PDs issued a statement saying that a vote for them is a vote on Fatty Harney’s record as minister for obesity. Do they actually want to lose?

The answer, surprisingly, could be yes, as the PDs and the ideological soul mates in FF might want the Rainbow to get in narrowly, have to deal with the coming house price crash and be condemned to opposition for another generation.

So will I be voting for Fianna Fail to make their plan backfire?

Um….NO.

Gettin' jiggy with Dirty Bertie

2007-04-24T16:27:00.000+01:00

Haven’t posted anything on this blog for a while, I’m thinking that if my blog was as popular as as bloggorah or slugger o toole then rumours would be abounding around the internet that I was dead.

Well, I’m not, and like Lisa Simpson, neither is my sense of moral indignation.

In case you are wondering where I was, I was in Africa. People were telling me that I should set up a travel blog, but I did like our ancestors used to do before the new-fangled days of web 2.0 and sent emails.

In one of them I was telling people that when I crossed the border from Kenya to Uganda I was asked for $30 but was given it back when I found out that I was Irish.

That was because Uganda is one of our biggest recipients of foreign aid. Bertie Ahern has visited the country, and afterwards had the brass balls to accuse the Fine Gael/Labour coalition of the eighties as leading a third world country, to which we would return in “jig time” if the opposition were re-elected. It’s a disgusting thing for someone who’s been to the real third world to have said, though no doubt he’s said the opposite on record since.

Since I came back, I found out that Ireland had suspended direct aid to Uganda as their president, Yoweri Museveni , wasn’t quite the “responsible” leader that Bill Clinton and others had made him out to be.

The sad thing from Africa’s point of view is that even after turning a blind eye to Tutsi attacks on Rwanda from Uganda, then getting together with the new Tutsi leadership in Rwanda to invade Congo-Kinshasa, steal their gold and diamonds and then use it to buy stuff to sell back to the Congolese at a profit, changing the constitution so that he can run again and cutting down much of the country’s natural rainforest to grow palm oil plantations, he remains one of the better leaders on the continent.

But then, who are we to judge?

In the past our great leader has been called the Teflon taioseach as dirt never stuck to him. I’m beginning to think that this reflects better on the dirt than it does on Bert.

It’s surprised me how little attention the revelations Sunday’s Turbine about Bertie’s father being a suspected cop-killer have received. There are those who argue that what happened in the past doesn’t have any bearing on current events, which is why the 90^th anniversary of 1916 passed without a murmur last year. It’s not as leaders are elected on the basis of who their fathers are, just ask Liam Cosgrave or George W Bush.

But there’s something deeply sinister about the fact the Bertie used his exclusive privilege to prevent the report on the death of Garda Fallon from being published. If he was too old to have anything to do with it, as Bertie insists, then what has he to hide?

In any case, isn’t it a tiny bit scary that his father was one of the Usual Suspects any time a cop was killed in this country? And it’s not like this is the only stain on his record. The rumours that Bertie’s first wife/partner left him haven’t gone away, they just aren’t being published because the media in this country is still so fucking supine.

In the eighties an extramarital affair by a TD was so widely reported in the UK that it gave a new term “horizontal jogging” to the English language, but it wasn’t even reported here.

It seems that while we may not be as deferent to the Church or the Gardai as we used to be, we’re still so insecure about our new-found wealth that we’re afraid to topple the person who takes all the credit for bringing it to us.

This doesn’t reflect well on us. After what happened in Virginia last week, our papers were full of stories about America’s gun culture and moral malaise. Yet there’s every possibility that our own leader is a corrupt, wife-beating cop-killers son.

Another irony is that in Uganda there’s a free press… the book where I read of Museveni’s invasion of the Congo was actually published in Kampala, and that was only after about 20 years of democracy. At the same stage in Irish democracy we were still banning books like Ulysess and even in the sixties someone’s shop was burned down for selling the thoughts of Chairman Mao.

So maybe it’s the people of Uganda who should really decide if they want to keep making this Faustian bargain with us. Do they really want to keep accepting dirty money from a country led by such a reprobate? Or should they withhold tea and palm oil exports to us until we show that we can govern ourselves responsibly?

Purgatory on the N8

2006-09-06T17:40:00.000+01:00

Haven’t been able to contribute so much to my blog lately as like the pods in Invasion of the body snatchers, the Harneyites have got me working for them now, working being the operative word as work is what they want everyone to be either doing, on their way to, or spending the proceeds from.

It does mean that I’ve got even more money to spend than when I was on the dole, though I was hardly starving to death back then. I even had enough money to go to electric picnic, although, come to think of it, I was there last year as well.

I once read somewhere about Ko Pha Ngan that people want to stay there forever but end up going back to there boring jobs and I feel the same way about the picnic, and the job, which, involving as it does putting computers in boxes, is about as boring as it gets.

There are those who would argue that life can’t be like electric picnic all the time as the artists don’t come out of the kindness of their hearts and you don’t get food for free either (far from it!)

On the other hand, a lot of the stuff I saw going on there is stuff that in a more open society people could do for free any time they wanted, like sitting on the grass doing weed or mushies, playing Frisbee or listening to live, acoustic music. Or just fucking, like neither the birds nor the bees have to pay to do.

Such has been the commodification of pleasure that’s happened in the last 25 years that we now have to pay just to do stuff like this, or at least we are made to feel we do. At the same time it was nice to see how life could be all the time if there wasn’t such pressure to make money and spend it all the time.

Coming back from this to the real world was always going to be a bit of a shock, particularly when you have to pass through parts of the real world like Portlaoise.

I got stuck in this miserable, stygian, god-forsaken hell-hole for almost 4 hours. It might not have seemed quite so awful if it wasn’t raining all the time, though it’s hard to see why the sun would want to shine on somewhere so dismal, with it’s Austwich-watchtower of a church steeple and it’s brutally utilitarian shopping centre.

I went into the tourist office to find out how I could get out of this armpit of the universe, only to find that everyone else was doing the same, and I couldn’t imagine why anyone would go there for any other reason.

As my bus wasn’t going to come for another 2 hours, I decided to try to hitch, though needless to mention, nobody gave me a spin as heartlessness seems to be a sine qua non for people living in the Celtic Tiger era.

As I was forlornly making my way back to the “town”, I noticed something that brought home to me some of the realities of living in Celtic Tiger Ireland. Between the GAA pitch and the N8 from Dublin to Cork is a new housing “development”, the first phase of which was sold out within an hour.

I’ve seen some strange shit in my life, cows with extra legs growing out of their necks, napalm victims with a big scar where their noses ought to be, and the Liverpool team under Graham Souness, but I’m still shocked that people would be that eager to live in a hole cut out of the side of the side of the Laois GAA pitch.

There’s hardly a day goes by without someone on the radio telling us how insane the housing market is, but it all seems a bit abstract until you see something like this. There’s an old and not very funny joke that you shouldn’t tell politicians to go to hell as they’re building it for us. Well, this is the hell that Red Ahern and Fatty Harney are building for their subjects, a hell where they have to drive an hour and half to get home from work and then listen to everyone who’s working nightshift drive to work, while Bertie’s property speculator friends buy up the whole Bulgarian coast with all the money they’re making.

Shamefully, our tiny island has become one of the most car-dependent countries in the world, and it’s all because the government are doing so little to dampen the housing market. Tragically, most people who are forced to live in hell-holes like Portlaoise aren’t going to realize what a dreadful mistake they’ve made until house prices crash and they’re trapped in a spiral of negative equity and fuel prices go through the roof.

People look at Easter Island ask what people were thinking when they were cutting down the last tree, and people will ask the same when they’re looking at the aftermath of the property boom. We’ll be asking what sort of psychosis possessed us to super-size places like Portlaoise and god-knows how many other towns in the Dublin area. We’ll ask ourselves how we were naïve enough to listen to idiots like Bertie, Harney and David McWilliams who told us that the good times would go on as long as we kept voting for them.

I’ll be devastated if Fianna Fail get back into government after encouraging such a profligate, unsustainable way of life for the last 10 years. Yet I fear that the nation is still in the grip of the psychosis they’ve generated.

Trouble at the Raunch?

2006-07-10T15:21:00.000+01:00

There’s a theory that’s still prevalent in some of the higher echelons of academia about the “death of the author”
As I understand it, mainly from reading an essay by David Foster Wallace on the subject, the theory posits the notion that authors are basically a conduit for the broader social and political concerns of their time.
But after going through the all the theories on the subject in some detail he ends the essay with the Occamian, no-bullshit line, “the damn books don’t write themselves.”
I thought about this a little when I finally got round to reading Fat Land last week and realised that I’d read almost all the arguments before, as I felt I had when I read the highly-regarded Silent Takeover by Noreena Heertz a few years back.
Likewise I felt able to comment on the god-awful book by David McWilliams which I never bothered reading beyond the first line as was obviously bereft of any new ideas and written in prose that would have made me throw up and have to pay the library to get a new one.

I feel much the same way about Female Chauvinist Pigs: Women and the Rise of Raunch Culture by the wonderfully named Ariel Levy, who’s obviously pointed the right way to pick up current trends. Maybe if you got up on the roof and turned her around she’d write a book about global warming or obesity, but faced the way she is she’s managed to write a book about something everything columnist has already spent their 2 cents on, and that adds up to quite a few euros in this age of information overload.
Her startlingly unoriginal thesis is that women are co-operating in their own oppression by confusing “raunchiness” with liberation, wearing playboy T-shirts in much the same way the global corporations market the image of Che Guevara.

I’m really grateful that we have observant authors who’re able to read the signatures of all things in ways that mere bloggers like myself aren’t able to. Me, I’d never have noticed that young girls walk around in t-shirts with pornstar written on them or wear tight tanktops and skirts that barely cover their asses because I’m not really attuned to that sort of thing but even if I was I wouldn’t be able to interpret the broader trends behind all of this because I’m just a blogger.
It seems that she thinks that women have been fooled into thinking that they’ve achieved equality and that’s why they can parade their sexuality with aplomb. But she warns, as many feminazis do, that the sex war isn’t over yet as women in the most highly paid jobs can get paid as much as 15% less than their male counterparts. To me, the issue is not that female executives don’t get paid enough, but get paid too much, while their male counterparts get paid way too much.

Chuck Palinhuk wrote that we can’t start talking about equality until men can have kids and he has a point: What man on the top end of the pay scale wouldn’t take a 15% pay cut in return for being able to retire and have kids any time he wants?
Even though the doubtless lovely-but-not-in-slutty-way Ms. Levy may think she has her finger on the pulse, she may be missing out on a more profound reason for the rise of “raunch” in the last few years.
When the cold war was going on, people in the west developed a consumer lifestyle in opposition to the dreary conformity of the Warsaw Pact countries. Our new enemy, or at least so we’re told, is the fundamentalist Muslim World, where women are are forced to cover up every part of their bodies.
Just as during the cold war their was a large movement to convert the west to a nicer version of socialism, now there’s a new Puritanism in our society which the likes of Levy seem to represent.

I was reading one of her fellow-travellers in our own Sunday Tribune yesterday who claimed that she saw young girls who were “…dressed, and there’s no other way to say this, like whores.”
Oh, No? What about B-girl, bag, bawd, bimbo, blower, broad, call girl, camp follower, cat, chicken, chippie, concubine, courtesan, fallen woman, floozy, harlot, hooker, hostess, hustler, loose woman, midnight cowboy, model, moll, nymphomaniac, painted woman, party girl, pickup, pink pants, pro, scarlet woman, slut, streetwalker, strumpet, tart, tomato, tramp, trollop, or working girl?
The fact that she didn’t know any of these terms, or have the presence of mind to look them up on www.thesaurus.com as I just did doesn’t say a whole lot for her journalistic abilities.
What’s more shocking is that the author of this lexically-challenged piece tells anyone who didn’t fall asleep before getting that far that she finished her own primary education all of half a decade ago, which would make her 23.
I could have a cheap shot at her and say she’s probably a lesbian but the truth is probably more complex than that.

I read that one of the Queen Bees of Feminazism, either Andrea Dworkin or Catherine McKinnon claimed that women who suppose erroneously that they enjoy sex are “collaborators” in a “Sex War” to which I can only reply, speak for yourself, you fat dyke!
People who’ve done research into the area rather than assume that their own prejudices reflect universal truths have found that at least 30% of women enjoy having sex just as much as men. For the vast majority of civilisation women’s sexuality has been denied as much as their intelligence or their ability to do most jobs as well as men, or even their humanity in the case of loony-tunes philosophers like Descartes.

We’re probably living in a brief Chrysalis moment where women are both able to enjoy the benefits of civilisation and live a sexually liberated life, yet an unholy alliance of radical feminists and the religious right wants to deny them this.
In John Updike’s latest book, Villages, set in the 60’s a woman utters the immortal line “the only thing we have to trade on in fucking, and since the pill the price has gone way down.”
The fact that sex isn’t something women have to withhold from men in order to gain financial security is something that ought to be celebrated.
Which is why I got such a kick from reading this review from the Guardain:

There, there, dear," I kept wanting to say to Ariel Levy, as I read her rightful, righteous wrath about women's collusion in their own objectification, their willing embracement of - hell, no, grotesque submission to - the current dominant value of "hotness". (Which she well defines as the constant demonstration not of actual desire but of simulated desirability conjoined with availability.) Don't take on so. What else would you expect in a world that has commodified desire along with dissent? Just laugh at the lapdancers, pet, and giggle at the college girls going wild: you'll only wear yourself out fulminating against fashion, and fashion is what it is. It will pass. Corsets and chemises did. Besides, you've a gift for reporting - your description of an uncool woman challenging a female media boss at a press conference has clarity with depth - and you wouldn't want to spend the next 20 years tossing off copy on tits and totty any time an editor wants to run explicit pictures, would you? Now go and research women's economics, which I bet you could make interesting.

Couldn’t have said it better myself.

This Party ain't big enough for Both of Us

2006-06-23T12:48:00.000+01:00

When I was up in Rossport last week I heard a joke that went somewhere along the lines of the following:
What do you get if you put 2 anarchists into a room?
A: 3 Splinter groups.

It’s unfortunately close to the truth that people who are on the left tend to be somewhat confrontational by nature whereas people on the right have such a need for order that they always toe the party line no matter it might go against the better part of their natures.

So I have to admit a certain degree of schadenfreude at the schism in the soi-disant progressive democrat party at the moment.

It seems that our good friend Micheal McDowell isn’t happy being a millionaire lawyer who’s running the justice system even though he’s in a party that received 3% of the vote at the last election. It looks like he’s just as fed up as the rest of us at seeing Mary Harney take up so much space in the media and he wants the top job for himself.

This is a bit like 2 bald men fighting over a comb except that only one of them is a bald man and instead of a comb it’s the leadership of a party that’s doomed to go the way of Clann na Poblacta within the next few elections.

Baldy McD is telling us that Harney promised him that she’d step down and let him fill the considerable space that she’d vacated. Yeah, well, politicians say stuff that they don’t really mean sometimes. Year before last Bertie claimed he was a socialist, but this week he dismissed socialism as a “failed ideology” and the leader of the socialist party as a nitwit who presumably couldn’t hold an intellectual candle to the man who said he wanted to bring posterity to Ireland when he took the leadership of Fianna Fail in the ‘90s.

We’re obviously going to hear 2 completely different accounts of the so-called leadership pact between the PD heavyweights. Famously, Tony Blair took Gordon Brown to a posh restaurant in London to carve up the labour leadership between them and some hacks over there have been writing about nothing else ever since, though in the bigger scheme of things it hardly matters as they’re both going to do whatever George Bush tells them to.

It’s quite possible that Harney did the same with McD but that he had to wait so long for her to finish eating that he was so groggy that he didn’t really know what she was saying.

Yesterday they went to lunch again together and insisted this wasn’t to clear the air, which isn’t surprising as I’ve never known a big lunch to have that effect, especially if you order the three-bean salad.

But if McD really wants to lead the most unpopular party in the country, he’s going to have to make a heave for the leadership pretty soon. Well, good luck to him, I say, as it’s not going to be easy pushing Mary Harney out of her place and he may need Tom Parlon to bring a few of his strongest oxen up from Offaly to help displace her.

Of course, once she’s gone I’m going to have to write about something else, as I can hardly go a posting without pointing out how overweight, surly, arrogant and extreme she is.

The good news is that her removal could help avert an economic downturn as Harney will no longer need to try to look good for her job, which will provide an enormous boost for the chocolate cake industry, while the governments savings on restaurant-based expenses will allow them to bring in more tax cuts.

Mmmm….Tax Cuts.

Go to hell, Shell

2006-06-12T18:24:00.000+01:00

While I was backpacking around Spain a few years ago reading Hugh Thomas’ excellent history of that country’s civil war, I was shocked to find out that the Observer, a paper I’ve read religiously every Sunday since I was about 15 supported the fascists.

I didn’t know at the time that it used to be a right-wing paper for about 200 years until it was taken over by a wealthy, noblesse oblige type who turned it into a liberal paper that became required reading for vegan types like myself.

But, like Bono, who once sang “When I was three I thought the world revolved around me, I was wrong”, the paper seems to be reverting back to it’s former position.

It’s partly that genuine left-wingers like Nick Cohn have gradually moved to the right on issues like Iraq where he’s in step with the ludicrous Euston group. It’s partly that they keep supporting Labour at every election. But it’s mostly the supplements they keep publishing in association with big business interests.

Recently there was a Pravda-like supplement on animal testing which may have contributed to a hardening of attitudes against opponents of vivisection. This week, they published a supplement about energy efficiency in association with Shell.

I’m sure some jokes about this have already been made, that it’s like having a supplement on human rights in association with the Taliban or a healthy eating supplement edited by Mary Harney.

Oddly enough, I actually agree with most of the stuff that’s actually contained in the supplement. There’s a piece by James Lovelock who argues that the Earth, which he regards as a living, breathing organism is on it’s last legs though as he’s 79 himself one wonders if the great anthropomorphiser is merely having intimations of his own mortality.

Things get a bit more suspect with wildly over-optimistic pieces about bio-fuels and solar. It’s not pointed out that ethanol, the bio-fuel of choice for companies like Monsanto isn’t really all that energy-efficient at all compared to the more environmentally friendly but less profitable woodchip.

Then there’s a piece called Here come the caring, sharing millionaires. And there was me thinking that Shell were doing this out of the kindness of their hearts.

It seems that it’s hip to be green again, just like it was in the late 60’s and late 80’s. In the last few months we’ve seen the ludicrous spectacle of David Cameron flying in a private jet to witness the effects of global warming at first hand. We’ve seen B.P. change it’s name to beyond petroleum. And even George w Bush has told America to use less fossil fuels.

I’m not old enough to remember the 60’s but I remember how dissiliusioned I was in the early 90’s when the economic recession wiped the environment from people’s minds as if we were all stepford wives, and I can’t help feeling that when the current economic bubble bursts we’ll all be more worried about our mortgages than about Gaia.

Except maybe that people will make the link between the cost of oil and the environmental effect this time.

Those of you who’ve seen that excellent documentary The Corporation will know that Shell are no strangers to this sort of corporate eye-washing. In it their CEO has a cup of tea with some prostestors and tells them he shares their concerns, but that he works for a corporation where money is always the bottom line.

Last weekend I went up to Rossport in mayo to find out just how cynically Shell pursue this bottom line.

For an extra €200 million Shell could put the proposed new gas pipeline offshore and leave the people of Rossport free from fear of an explosion potentially a third the size of Hiroshima. That’s a lot of money to you or me, to Shell it’s peanuts.What’s worse is what Shell regard as “acceptable risk”

To them, if 1 in a million people in the affected area die, that’s acceptable. But the affected area is considered to be the whole country which will benefit (though not a great deal, thanks to Ray Burke) and the project will be there for 30 years, so it’s OK for 120 people to die, just so Shell can save €200 million.

So that’s what our lives are worth to shell. €1.66 million. I almost wish we worth as much as the victims of 9/11 ($200million), or the people of the Falklands (£10million).

Of course I’m sure we’re worth a lot more than, for instance, the people of Nigeria which is really reassuring. After all, we are letting them have all that gas almost for free even though we’re a rich western country and not a banana republic, though we will be if Enda Kenny gets elected, according to Bertie.

Unlike many of the people who mooned at the bemused security guard up in Rossport, (that’s me, second from the left) I’m confident that if the greens have a government ministry after the election, (environment, ideally) that the shell pipeline will be forced to go offshore. I recognise that we need the gas as we’re the 7^th most fossil-fuel dependent nation, although we seem to be ignoring the a huge resource of bio-fuel in Mary Harney’s stomach which could be tapped in a single liposuction operation.

Yet if we stopped listening to people like Shell and started driving smaller cars and living in smaller cars, we could probably leave both the Corrib Gas Field and the Tanaiste’s gut alone.

Hey Islam, You Suck!

2006-04-06T22:31:00.000+01:00

Most of you reading this are probably bloggers yourselves as the media tells us that we’re all bloggers now, the obvious implication being that people who live in the third world where a phone is a major luxury aren’t really people, or “notpeople” as Faulkner called them.

So you’ll be aware that there’s a section on the blogger homepage called “promoting your blog” which tells you how to make loads of money like those successful bloggers. One piece of advice I read in a newspaper was that you should keep to a popular subject like politics though it’s hard to see how you could find a niche that could be exploited when everyone else writes about the same thing.

Lately it occurred to me that the only way that I could add to the paltry 500 or so hits, most of which are from myself, is to say something insulting about Muslims.

Last night I was watching this documentary about some guy from the South of the US who went to live in A Muslim community for a week. The presenter, Morgan Spurlock of Super Size Me fame, went round asking Americans what they associated with Islam, and to a man, they said terrorism. They didn’t have a clue what a Muslim call to prayer was when it was played on a tape. The main protagonist was amazed to find out that Islam has the same roots as Christianity. To explain this Spurlock showed a cartoon displaying a tree with 3 branches, one of which Mohamed was sitting, which is deeply offensive to Muslims who are suspicious of images and hate to see any representation of their prophet.

So it’s tempting to say that the reason that Americans don’t like Muslims so much is that they don’t understand them.

Unfortunately I don’t think this is the truth. I’ve said before that the more I find out about George bush, the more I Hate him, and this is still true, even after his latest state of the union speech where he was talking up biofuels, which on the face of sounds genuinely progressive, which could cause a little cognitive dissonance for me, as it’s hard to imagine walking down the street shouting “George Bush we know you, you’ve come round to our point of view”. But it’s also true that the more I find out about the form of Islam that is practiced in the Middle East today, the less I like it.

There are many in the US who are quite happy to think that as Europeans aren’t so keen on Dubya that we must be all walking round wearing Bin Laden T-Shirts. The truth, as ever, is more complicated and nuanced than Fox News or USA Today would have people believe.

Personally, I feel that terrorism is the least of the problems that we face from the Muslims, who are amking a concerted effort to outbreed us. But don’t take my word for it, read the banners that they were displaying after those cartoons satirising Mohamed were published, one of which read, “we have the numbers” which is frightening true, as within 50 years there could be 3 times as many muslims as Europeans.

To me, the worst thing about those cartoons is how desperately unfunny they are. Those Danes might have been better of making a gloomy movie in Super 8 about how horrible it is being a muslim woman. But what struck me most is how the Islamic community reacted. If they are so sure that what they believe is the one true faith, why do they care what some cartoonists in a cold, wet, Northern European country think?

Still, at least those cartoonists got their work published around the world, which is more than I can say for my blog, though my brother and cousin did log on from Australia once.

So here’s a few thoughts on Islam of mine. I I’m probably wrong in thinking that the muslim community go round looking for stuff to be offended by so they can start a riot, though this is what the cartoon controversy suggests. But maybe I’m not. So here goes.

Christianity is Judaism with some of the nasty stuff taken out. Islam is Judaism with some more nasty stuff put in.

Any religion that denies people any pleasure in this life so it’s adherents can have 42 virgins in the next could only be believed by sexist psychopaths.
Travelling around Morocco I found many of the people to be rude, aggressive and greedy. People I know who’ve been to Egypt, Tunisia and Turkey have similar stories to tell.

What the people of Palestine have suffered is pretty trivial compared with what the people of East Timor and Kurdistan have suffered at the hands of Muslims.

Israeli women are very beautiful. I’d love to go to Israel and fuck every woman there under the age of 40.

It’s very obvious that the holocaust happened. Any who believes otherwise is a nutter.

Iran shouldn’t be allowed to have the bomb as it’s leaders are psychopaths.

The ruling class in Saudi Arabia are greedy, feckless idiots whose country will be an impoverished, overpopulated wasteland when the oil runs out.

Islam has a rhetoric of equity but many people in Bangladesh are starving to death while Saudi princes squander their enormous wealth on fripperies.

Turkey should never be allowed into the EU. There are far too many Muslims here already.

If Allah exists, why does he let so many people of his starve while so many non-believers have such a high standard of living?

Muslims blame others for all their problems but their religion is what stifles progress and leaves their societies so backward.

Europeans who convert to Islam because they think a Muslim Europe is on the way should all be imprisoned for life. If it was the opposite way around things would be much worse for converters.

If any Muslim reads this and declares a fatwa against me, this will prove every negative thing I said about them to be true.

The Rich Stay Healthy, The Sick Stay Poor

2006-01-12T20:06:00.000Z

I was in the kingdom of the mad, autocratic king of Nepal (© guy in todays Guardian) a few years ago watching some English language Indian TV with some other backpackers as you do when the ads came on. It’s the sort of thing that you get used to after a while, seeing products advertised that most people outside have never even heard of, let alone be able to afford. But then there was one that seemed outrageous even by those highly compromised standards.
“You’re going to a party in a weeks time and you just cant fit into this dress?”
Well, no actually, for all sorts of reasons but… someone else had the remote control.
“Well, try new magi-slim! You can lose 10lb in a week!”A Scandanavian guy asked how much that was; I told him about 4.5 kilos. He nodded.
Then we heard a list of all the places in India where you could get this product, which was a
not inconsiderable one.
Then the punchline.
“Now available in Bangladesh!”
What could I do but laugh at the sheer absurdity? Normally advertisers try to sell us things we don’t need and can’t afford, but now they were trying to sell things that people could neither need nor afford or even want.
I’d heard before that big pharma companies in the US had been taking advantage of tax breaks for donating medicine to 3rd World countries by dumping some unused appetite stimulants on the people of Sudan, but I thought this was even more bizarre.
It’s bizarre not only because most people and Bangladesh have at best barely enough food to eat but because being fat is considered a sign of wealthy status there, as it still is in India, and was in the west until a few generations ago.
Look at sketches for Dickens’ novels and you’ll see emaciated, staving waifs next to bloated businessmen. It’s an image that has stayed with us even though thin is very clearly now in. We still talk of “Fat Cat” businessmen and the Dickensian imagery serves cartoonists calling for a better deal for the 3rd world well.
This is in spite of the fact that obesity is a much bigger problem in the west as a result of the so-called “green revolution” of the 40’s when petrochemical fertilisers were invented. Since then, at the mere cost of almost completely eliminating biodiversity in much of the world, cutting down most of the rainforests and developing a insatiable appetite for a dwindling supply of fossil fuels, everyone in the west has enough to eat and most people have more than enough.
Or so I though until yesterday.
Ireland has certainly come a long way since the famine, although even back then we were still producing enough food to feed 10 million people. If I had a cent for every time I heard that we were now the fourth richest country in the world (per capita) and I invested them all wisely we’d probably be the third richest country in the world. As for the rest of the west our problem is now having too much food which leaves us paying more money to go to gyms and run on treadmills, which are an apt metaphor for our society as a whole.
But yesterday we learnt that starvation, shockingly, is still with us.
When I heard that an old woman in Enniscorthy had rotted after starving to death in her own filth, those images of Dickensian waifs came flooding back. Unfortunately, it doesn’t help that the person in charge of the health care system is both in thrall to the fat cats of Private Health care and… how shall I say this? In need of a few tins of Magi-slim herself?
It may seem like a tasteless metaphor, but the horrible truth is that just as there was more than enough food being produced to feed everyone during the famine, there’s at least enough money to feed everyone 100 times over in our economy and yet people are still starving to death.
I’d love to think that the one good thing that might come out of this tragedy would be that David McWilliams would reconsider his “Wonderbra Effect” theory that recycles the old Smithsonian “rising tide” maxim to the effect that everyone’s life has improved under the Celtic Tiger. Sadly, he’ll probably find some way rationalise that in the bad old days things would have been even worse for her, though I’m at a loss as to how anything could be worse than starving to death in your own filth.
I’d love if Mary Harney would take the blame for this tragedy as eagerly as she could took credit for all the places she opened. I’d love if she gave us an honest explanation for why there are more than twice as many home help workers in the far poorer North than there are here.
I’d love if Bertie Ahern would admit that if he was really a socialist, that a country where an acre of land sells for €89million when some people don’t have enough food to eat would represent somewhat of a non-success for him.
Yet, a few days after media move onto their next big story, Red Ahern, Fatty Harney and the other Celtic Jackals will be up to their old tricks, telling us how we’ve never had it so good, and how much better our country is than those sclerotic economies on the continent.
But snort this up your nose with a €500 note, McWilliams: What happened in Enniscorthy would never happen in Sweden, in France or in any country in the EU. Or in Canada, Australia or New Zealand, or Japan. In fact the only other industrialised country where this would happen is the US, the root of all god things for the jackalocracy. There’s and old joke that there’s no point in telling politicians to go to hell as they’re trying to build it for us. If you want to know what sort of hell Mary Harney wants to build for us, take a look at the US, where care for older people is only available to those that can afford it, and where older people are treated with contempt as they don’t contribute anything to the economy.
It’s true that running the health care system isn’t easy and that countries with good health care systems didn’t build them overnight. But it also throws the efforts of Bono, Bob and Brown into sharp relief: How will they ever feed Africa if one of the richest countries in the world leaves one of it’s citizens to starve?
And if this happens in a time of plenty while the state still largely controls the health care system, what will things be like when the multinationals outsource somewhere else and the fate of older people is in the hands of grubby, bean-counting businessmen?

McWilliams & Co: The Celtic Jackals

2006-01-09T22:44:00.000Z

There’s a Simpsons episode where Homer, after watching The Mask of Zorro, decides that he should settle all his arguments by duelling. The strategy works well for him for a while until an old southern colonel accepts his challenge. He flees to an old family farm where he accidently creates an new, toxically addictive plant called tomacco, gets on the wrong side of those addicted to the product, and flees back to Springfield, only to find the Southern colonel waiting for him.

I had a similar experience just before Christmas. I’d been working on a couple of organic farms in France, having really glad to have been away from all the ugly boorishness that’s accompanied the last ten years of spectacular economic growth. Yet I wasn’t even back in the country for an hour before there was a bus emblazoned with the smug visage of the man who’s appointed himself poet laureate of the Irish economy, David McWilliams.

I’d taken a dislike to this smarmy little know-it-all long before he’d aquired his current guru status among the Irish right. I’ve called him a vile little worm before but then I realised that this is a huge insult to worms, without whom human life would inconceivable, unlike right-wing economists, who we were managing fine without for about 2 million years.

Funny thing was, I didn’t start to hate him until a few days after I saw him in the flesh, assuming he is a human being and not a cyborg developed by the CIA for spreading right-wing propaganda. I vaguely recognised him as that guy from that show on TV3 when he somehow managed to get an interview with Henry Kissinger who was visiting UCC at the time. I was outside in the cold and rain protesting against the presence of the latter, which, sadly is aptly symbolic, though if I’d known more about the former I would have had a few worlds of abuse to shout at him as well.

That Sunday I watched his show hoping to get a glimpse of myself on TV. I wasn’t a big fan before that as I considered it mainly as a forum for his right-wing buddies like Kevin Myers, Shane Ross and Charlie McCreevy to tell the rest of us how great they all were. (bizarrely, he once bagged an interview with Noam Chomsky as well).
That weekend his main interviewee was Mary Harney, who’d also come down to Cork to genuflect at the feet of the man who’d bombed Cambodia back to the stone age. He asked her how she felt about those protesting his presence. She replied that if it had been Gerry Adams there and not Kissinger, we’d all have been at home, and that therefore we were all hypocritical anti-Americans. Astonishingly, he let her get away with such a staggering piece of Orwellian, Fox news double-think, which angered me so much that I never watched his show again. Clearly, I wasn’t alone as he got the heave-ho from TV3 not that long after that, though that might have been more because of the poor production values as the right-wing politics. Or the fact that he talks like comic-book-guy from the Simpsons.

Next time I saw his ugly little face was when he was a guest on TV3’s equally ill-fated Dunphy show. He was debating the merits of the Celtic Tiger with Fintan O Toole who’d written quite a good book on the subject. Fintan used the phrase “right-wing ideology” more than once to describe the government’s prevailing ethos. McWilliams turned his smarminess knob up to 11 and replied “Fintan, you sound like Hilary Clinton. There is no right-wing conspiracy. It’s all in your head.”

Needless to mention, he was also allowed get away with this by Dunphy. He earned the laughs of the crowd and the kudos of the Sunday Independent. Then he went away to write a book about how right he is about everything.

I know mostly about this book from an interview he gave to the Irish Times, which described him as “Cheeky”, as if that made his right-wing views more acceptable. Maybe if Hitler had told a few Jewish mother jokes the Holocaust would have been OK as well. But what annoys me most about the little fucker is not his obnoxious views, his nauseating voice or his insufferable arrogance, it’s the labels he applies to everyone.

Kirkergaard certainly had a point when he said that “He who labels me, negates me.” (Yes, I do know that from watching the first Wayne’s World movie.) But then economics isn’t called the dismal science for nothing. It’s a science that sees us less as living, breathing individuals than as cogs in a machine for generating wealth. That’s why he’s so comfortable labelling those intellectuals who disagree with him as “Confused cosmopolitans” or “Rural Nostalgists”. If he was as eloquent a phrase-maker as he thought he was, it wouldn’t be quite so bad, but when he launches neolgisms like “Malahidilect” and “expectocracy” on an unsuspecting world, you really wish that one of the many SUVs on Dublin’s streets would run him over.

Sadly, that’s not going to happen with all the gridlock on the roads at the moment, so those few of us left outside the Celtic Tiger’s big, coke-filled tent are going to have to fight back with a few vapid clichés of our own. I thought of “Bush babies” to symbolise the Irish Right’s slavish devotion to the moron in the White House, but it doesn’t quite hit the mark. “Harney Helpers” is a bit too glib as well. “members of the dissident IDA/NRA” are both a bit to cumbersome. I settled on Celtic Jackals as Jackals are the animals that right-wingers most resemble. It’s often said by those on the right that being left-wing is like a permanent adolescence as we always want what John Bruton called an Improvement for the better and we never accept things the way they are. To me, being Right-wing is like a permanent infantilism where one never grows out of wanting more and more possessions, not caring about the impact of your behaviour on the rest of the world, and screaming blue murder when you don’t get your way about even the slightest thing. (What’s the name of that Ryanair guy?)

McWilliams and his ilk would be content for this country to go the way of the US, where around 15% of the population live in poverty and where 1% of the population are in jail at any given time in spite of the country’s vast wealth. It’s a logical extension of his belief that the happiness of a society can be measured purely by it’s overall wealth, and if you’re poor, well, tough shit, you must be too stupid or lazy.

In the same Irish Times interview he claims that Ireland is receiving 7 times as many immigrants as France, which is a utopia for many Irish “egalitarians” (according to him). Note that he uses the e-word, as if he thought his tongue would be ripped from his mouth by the ghost of Adam Smith if he used the s-word. If he wasn’t a right-wing economist and they weren’t automatically right about everything, I’d say he was way off the mark as France has a far bigger non-indiginous population as we do. I thought of my visit to France living largely outside the cash economy as a big fuck-you to the likes of McWilliams. It’s true that there aren’t as many SUVs or as much Coke in France, but is this really such a bad thing? At least the roads are all fine, the trains run on time and they have done for quite some time. The right won’t ever admit this, but the economic boom isn’t going to go on forever and at the end of it people are going to wish we spent the money improving health and transport instead of blowing it all on big cars, big houses and designer drugs.

Yes, there were cars burnt in France a few months back. It happens in Dublin and Limerick all the time. After all, not everyone has been lifted up by the “wonderbra effect”.

I didn’t read his book, and I’m probably not going to. The first sentence is “Ireland has Arrived”, which says it all, really. Clearly, the fact that many people can afford SUVs is more of an accomplishment to him than millennia of Literature, Music and Art.

In a hundred years time people wont know that Ireland was the third richest country in the world (per capita) for a few years but they will still be reading Ulysses.

But not the vulgarly-titled Pope’s Children.

Bowled out for '06?

2006-01-07T20:44:00.000Z

Here, a bit later than I anticipated, are my predictions for this year.

January:
Seamus looks through predictions for last year. Notes that he didn't predict Liverpool winning European cup. Predicts that Liverpool will overcome Luton 5-3 in thrilling FA Cup tie.
Passenger seen dragged onto ship in Shnnon wearing Ball and Chain. Bertie denies any impropriety on part of Americans. Cold snap hits Northern Hemisphere pushing up price of gas. Ha Ha, say Russians. Seamus admits to self that if he couold understand the risk equalisation issue he might possibly think that Mary Harney was right. Average commuting time to Dublin increases to one and a half hours. Bertie reminds everyone that in bad old days people had no cars and had to spend whole time shooting up heroin.

Febuary:
Makes us shiver. George Bush denies global warming responsible, wearing confused look on face.Fight breaks out in Bagdhad between American soldiers arguing about whether the insurgency is being fought by Shias or Sunnis. Death toll reaches 121. Tony Blairs argues against reclassifying cannabis as a class A drug, wearing smile on face.

March:
Bereaved families of American dead set up camp outside White Houes, with banners asking Bush if he knows who the good guys are. White House refuses to comment. Chilling screams heard from US plane which shatter windows in Shannon area. Bertie claims that American soldier was reacting to stories of hardship Irish people suffered when Fine Gael were last in power.

April:Chelsea lose to Liverpool in Champion’s League semi-final. Abramovich invites Mourinho into office, turns round on swivel chair and greets him while stroking cat. Trapdoor opens but Mourinho held up by weight of ego and survives. Tony Blair rejects calls for inquiry into incident, saying, hey, you know, he seems like… What was the question again?

May:
Starts getting warm. George Bush goes on holiday to Texas. Protestors follow. SSIAs mature. Run on prada handbags causes shortage which leads to riots in Grafton Street. Micheal McDowell blames combination of dissident republicans and Polish immigrants for incident. Hear, hear; says Pat Rabitte.

June:
Heatwave hits central US. Protestors outside George Bush’s ranch build big fan to keep selves warm. Record temperatures also recorded in Dublin. Bertie says that when Fine Gael were last in power, people only knew about the sun from illustrations that were washed up on the coast from Spain. When asked about Kyoto, refers to it as a dead issue.

July:
Major Earthquake hits somewhere in Central Asia. World’s media gets in Tizzy for a few days. Kerry Katona not hurt, reads headline in Irish Sun. Bob Geldof organizes benefit gig where a reformed U2 play. When informed that they never split up, storms out calling everyone a big bunch of shaggin’ cynics. Protestors fan collapses killing many. Rapture index up to 231.

August:
Global heatwave causes polar bears to seek kidney replacement. Bush invites press to Texas to deny that global warming exists but decides that it’s too hot out and goes back to watch football on TV with Aircon at full blast. Looking at sunset from Tuscan Villa, Tony Blair notices that Sun is really, really red.

September:
Annoyed by constant noise coming from outside ranch, Bush grabs oozy from security guard and massacres protestors. Condoleeza Rice warns world not to overreact saying that this is a new type of war we are fighting here. World leaders are asked to reconsider their support for Bush. Angela Merkel says that when Germany had a hand-on leader like this things were a lot better. Berlusconi says that last two times italy pulled out of war everyone called them cowards and he’s not going to let that happen again. Tony Blair says, hey, you know, we all get a bit stressed sometimes. Rapture index up to 239.

October:
David Cameron subtly suggests that Tony Blair may be a dope addict after he fails to show up for reopening of parliament citing bad vibes as reason. John Prescott tries to defend him but fails to pronounce the word Marajuana properly.

November:
Plane arrives into Shannon with words “Ha Ha we are torturing people and there’s fuck all you can do about it, you European pussies” painted on in big red lettering. Bertie says that when Fine Gael were in power none of us had enough money to worry about sand niggers being tortured. Meanwhile, Letterkenny becomes commuter town for Dublin. David McWilliams hails this development as a sign that Ireland is now the best place in the history of the universe. Tony Blair admits on TV that he occasionally has a puff of dope now and again. Gordon Brown says he noo it, demands leadership.

December:
Floods hit Bangkok, Amsterdam and Venice, killing hundreds of thousands and wiping 6% of the worlds economy away in a stroke. “I want to get back with Bryan”, reads Irish Mirror Headline. New British leader Gordon Brown appoints Bob Geldof chief of commission to supply Aid. Questions over political judgment raised . Generous Irish response prompts Bertie to say that if this had happened 20 years ago we wouldn’t have given a brass farthing because we were all too poor. Pat Rabitte says that we should concentrate on helping people in our own country, so we should. George Bush says that if he hears one more fucking question about global warming he’ll kill everyone in the room. After a pregnant pause, a fox news journalist asks if he thinks the Iranian government had anything to do with this.
Rapture index reaches 250. Jesus comes back down to Earth. Bertie says that when Fine Gael were in power we had no visitors from Israel because of the poor facilites on offer at the time. 144,000 Syrian Christians from Indian state of kerala go to heaven, rest of us perish. Immediately before being cast into hell, Bertie says sure how bad could it be, I’ve lived under a Fine Gael Government.

The Seamus Awards 2005

2006-01-01T13:53:00.000Z

Hey Folks,
Haven't posted up anything in a while as I've been away in France working on organic farms. It was good to get away from the Whole Celtic Tiger thing for a while though I couldn't put much stuff up on my blog because of the weird keyboards. Being away for almost 5 months means I haven't seen all the movies that came out this year but you don't really expect comprehensiveness from bloggers, now do you?

Here, nonetheless, are my awards for the year.

Best Novel: Kafka on the Shore, Haruki Murakami

Best Non-Fiction Book: Collapse, Jared Diamond

Best Movie: The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou

Worst Movie of 2005 (or any other year): Dear Wendy

Best Album (Rock) : Oceans Apart, The Go Betweens

Best Single: I predict a riot, Kaiser Chiefs

Best Album (Electronica) '64-'95, Lemonjelly

Best Concert: Elecrtric Picnic

Best Cork City of Culture Event: Frankenstein

Worst Cork City of Culture "Event": Knitting Map

Best Riot: G8, Stirling

Most Ironic piece of Merchandise: G8 T-Shirt, made in Honduras

Best Wedding: My Brothers, Patmos, Greece

The Aisling Enright award for best niece: Aisling Enright

The Michael O Leary award for most nausaeating git: David McWilliams

Hugo Chavez prize for standing up to George Bush: Hugo Chavez

Tony Blair award for Brown-Nosing George Bush: Bertie Ahern

George Bush Award for chutzpah: Draft-Dodger Dick Cheney Labelling Iraq war opponents "Spineless"

Best Football Match: Need You Ask? Liverpool 3 AC Milan 3 (Liverpool win 4-2 on penalties)

Best other football-related event: A Tie between Man Utd losing Roy Keane and their manager losing his marbles.

I'm sure there's more stuff I can think of, but I've got to look into my crystal ball and let you all know what '06 has in store for us. Last year I predicted lots of ecological disasters and turned out to be on the button with that one. So watch this space.

No more Bombing in Ireland?

2005-09-30T16:53:00.000+01:00

When I was leaving Holland back in 1994 after a miserable summer being exploited in the horticultural industry, my landlady asked “It’s good in Ireland Now?”

I wasn’t quite sure what it was she was referring to exactly, I didn’t think she’d have known that college fees had been abolished back home that summer, for example. Then the pfennig dropped when she said “No More bombing?” in that weird interrogative way that those Dutch have.

It wasn’t that the ceasefire in Northern Ireland didn’t mean that much to me, it was that it didn’t really affect me at any more than it affected her, i.e. not at all. It was something going on in a different country, now, 10 years later it’s still a different country and it will be for another 15 years at least.

Nevertheless I’ve still had to face questions from idiotic Americans (and a few idiotic Europeans as well) about the big war that was going on back in my homeland.

Now that the IRA has finally decommissioned it’s weapons hopefully that won’t happen so much any more.

But though the Irish Examiner helpfully printed a list of all the people that died by violent means in a political context in the course of the last 40 years to put a seal on 40 years of self-hatred among Ireland’s bien-pensants, the thing that’s bothered me most about the IRA is not that they killed 180 people in Britain but that they called themselves the Irish Republican Army.

If they’d called themselves the Northern Ireland Liberation Front, for example, not everyone would think that all Irish people were violent thugs and the rest of us wouldn’t have to suffer demonisation everywhere we went.

This isn’t to diminish the suffering of any of their victims, it’s just that the scale of the conflict has been so wildly exaggerated by the all-powerful British media, so much so that movie Sin City the Irish characters were represented as mad pub bombers even though the last time a British pub was bombed by the IRA was 1974, just after the US had stopped saturation bombing Vietnam and Cambodia.

Compared to what some empires suffered after declining and falling, I think the Brits got off quite easy. After the fall of Rome, the city was ransacked so much it took a millennium to recover. In Britain, a few pubs and hotels got bombed.

Yet as Britain is a powerful country with an even more powerful friend in the US, they’ve successfully been able to portray themselves as the victims of modern-day barbarians from across the “Irish” Sea.

How many people around the world know about the Dublin And Monaghan bombings? In one day, a bigger proportion of Ireland’s population was killed by loyalist terrorists with the collusion of the British military than that of Britain’s was killed in the whole 40 years of the troubles. How many know about the millions who died during the famine or were killed by Cromwell?
Not a lot, because those who control the media control perception, which is why so many people in the US still think Sadamm Hussein had weapons of mass destruction. It’s why people think that the killing of 100,000 kurds in Iraq was an act of evil while the death of 5 million South East Asians was a tragic mistake.

What’s most ironic of all is that Ireland really is part of a big war by facilitating the US occupation of Iraq by letting their troops fly through Shannon, subsidised by the Irish taxpayer to the tune of €10 million a year.

Meanwhile, Ian Paisley refuses to accept that what has happened has happened. It’s no surprise. Recently I found out that the person who originally decided that the world was 4000 years old was another Ulster Prod. One of George Bush’s fundamentalist friend’s reprimanded journalist Ron Suskind for living in the Reality-based world.

Protestant fundamentalists like Bush and Paisley make their own reality and their own morals by interpreting the Bible whichever way they please and if that means endless conflict in the North, the Middle East or anywhere else well that’s just tough on the rest of us.

At least there’s some encouraging signs that the loyalist community is beginning to implode, as extremists wearing Union Jack t-shirts with the words “Fuck the Pope” tattooed to their foreheads are starting to kill each other. Bring it on, I say, as long as no Catholics or innocent Protestants get killed. Of course, as they act violently they’ll be described as “Irish” in the world’s media.

The good news is that many people, particularly in Eastern Europe see Ireland not as a place of conflict but as a place of prosperity where they can come and make a few bob without the risk of racial violence that exists in the UK.

The News doesn’t seem to have filtered through to the sink estates of East Belfast yet. But then, they don’t live in the reality-based environment.

Don't read this: No-one pays me to write it

2005-08-23T15:07:00.000+01:00

I was browsing through the Blogosphere in Sunday’s Turbine looking, as usual, to see if my own Blog was mentioned, and, as usual, it was all the usual Irish bloggers that got a mention. I was begining to think that maybe all those bloggers that they mention week in week out were Turbine bloggers who wanted to say stuff that they couldn’t put their own names to because of the country’s Draconian libel laws, much like the cogair website from the early days of the world wide web.

I think the word Draconian is a bit redundant these days, by the way, and if the Republic of Ireland was at the centre of civilisation instead of being a tiny peripheral country that most people aren’t aware even exists then the word McDowellian would be far more apposite.

Anyway, after yesterday I think those bloggers are probably just people like myself, who according the nearest thing Ireland has to a Liberal paper, are “annoyed people with time on their hands who might otherwise be pasting letters from magazines into weird and threatening letters – or be gainfully employed”. Ouch! Feel the condesencion. It’s not that much of a shock to me as the Turbine has been getting noticably snootier over the last while, complaining about scangers, scobies and the like, but not in a tongue-and-cheek Ross O Carroll Kelly way. Perhaps it’s dawned on them after reading about themselves in Wikipedia, the open source encyclopedia that's also written by people with time on their hands, that it’s appeal is always going to be limited to people who live in places like Foxrock and therefore they have nothing to fear from insulting scobies, who they probably think aren’t able to get all the way through an article by Diarmuid Doyle anyway. This week Doyle, a supposed liberal made the astonishing claim that he thought it represented “inverted snobbery” for a middle-class student like Dermot Laide to be sent to jail just for murdering someone in cold blood. I suppose people called “Dermot” and derivatives thereof ought to stick together as in this country it’s a name only middle-class people are allowed have, though in the more egalitarian United States even Clitus the slack-jawed yokel was allowed call one of his kids by that name.

There’s got to more than mere class condesencion involved here though. You can sense in a lot of the coverage that bloggers get in the press both here and internationally a resentment that being able to mould opinion is no longer the exclusive prerogative of print journalists. This is nothing new. In the late nineties the Murdoch press was full of scare stories about how much porn was up there on the web, even though it’s only the same proportion as in print media, and the irony that Murdoch papers like The Sun did so much to normalise porn was obviously lost on them. Yesterday the Turbine printed another piece which was obviously lifted from the Independent on Sunday which argued that we live in a “relativistic” media world where the New York Times is on a par with the thrashiest blog. I'd love if that were true, but America’s soi-disant paper of record sells over a million copies daily, a figure that only sites like www.Moveon.org can even come close to, even though the Times constantly misled the American people over the existence of WMD in Iraq while it was one of those thrashy bloggers that exposed the fact that America’s dumb-ass president was being operated by remote control by his sinister svengali Karl Rove.

It’s certainly true that you can’t believe everything you read on the web. When I tell my girlfriend strange-but-through stuff like that the president of Turkministan renamed bread after his mum she asks me where I read that and I joke that it was on my own blog. But in an age where media press conferences are little more than photo-ops for George Bush, blogs have come around just when America needs them most. If the mainstream press are afraid of them, probably not nearly as much as the powers that be. When the printing press came along first the Catholic Church were terrified of it as before then they had a monopoly on interpreting the bible, after Gutenburg people were free to set up their own religions, many of them with even more outlandish beliefs, just as, regretably, many blogs are to the right of the Bush administration. But argument and debate things without which society becomes as sterile as Europe was in the Middle Ages.

I used to think that the reason civilisation was created in the first place was to allow the interchange of ideas which is why the centres of Ancient Athens and Rome were both known as the Forum. If people like Socrates were alive today he might well be on the internet trying to get people in places like Kansas to think for themselves and not believe everything that Fox News tells them, though if he was the Turbine would still be telling him to get a proper job.

But here’s some bad news. The people who control the issuing of domain names on the web, www.icaan.org are answerable to the US Treasury, who up till now have kept their noses out of their affairs. But last week the Bush-appointed treasury secretary expressly asked them not to create a new domain code, .xxx for porn sites as the his supporters think this will increase the amount of porn on the web, though people who actually understand how the web works think it will make it easier to filter. This could be the start of a slippery slope which sees Uncle Sam increasingly dictate what can and can’t be seen on the web. And not just in the land of the free, but right here in the people’s republic of McDowellisatan as well.

A Steyn on the dress of the Grand Old Lady of D'Olier Street

2005-08-15T13:46:00.000+01:00

In a 1942 movie called Strange Holiday Claude Rains goes away fishing for a few weeks while his nation is at war and returns to find blank expressions and a prevasive climate of fear where he comes from. It's a pretty unsubltle dig at those in the US who let other people fight the Nazis who were never going to impose their way of life on the US but could easily have become the bullying superpower that that America is right now.

I thought of this movie after as I've been away for most of the last two months and haven't had much chance to read the Irish papers (It costs €80 a year for a subscription to the Irish Times- Fuck that!) but it seems that on my return they've been taken over by aliens from a distant planet that bears no relation to the world I live in myself.

To be fair, the main object of my shock and horror is a man whose been writing for the Irish Times for a while, Mark Steyn. Looking like a surly younger version of Osama bin Laden when he wasn't quite old enough to grow a full scraggly beard, but having far more extreme views,he originally wrote for the Chicago Sun-Times when it was owned by Conrad Black who brought him over to England to write for his far-right titles like the Telegraph and the Spectator. How he ended up writing for the D4 chattering classes is a bit of a mystery, but his appointment did coincide with the beginning of former PD Geraldine O Kenneide's tenure as editor. He's already been the subject of an angry demonstration by anti-war activists outside the Times' office in D'Olier street, yet the baggy-eyed one seems to be standing by her man as she did with that other swivel-eyed bearded psychopath Kevin Myers a while ago.

Last week he outdid himself for extremism by suggesting that George W Bush is being a wimp over the Iraq situation and should use the nuclear option, not in any metaphorical sense, but in the sense of dropping a big bomb on Iraq that would kill millions of people and spread disease around the area for centuries and possibly make the whole area uninhabitable. His justifiaction is that nuking Japan in 1945 brought an end to the war and ultimately saved more lives than it terminated, even if most of the lives that it ended were civilian. He glosses over the subtle differences between the two conflicts, like the fact that Japan attacked the US first, that they were fighting the whole nation whereas they claim to be friends of the Iraqi people today, and that nuclear profliferation has meant that an attack would almost certainly result in Iran, Pakistan and other muslim nations stepping up their arms programmes and making the world a much more dangerous place.

The really scary thing is that he's saying in print what the likes of Rumsfeld and Cheney are probably saying in private, though they know that a nuclear attack on Iraq would make things worse and alienate the US from the rest of the world even more. Still, you know that deep down they'd love if the middle east was one big arid desert with no sand niggers getting between them and the oil they need for their SUVs. Cheney actually said a few years ago that there was a problem caused by the Good Lord choosing to put the oil under countries that weren't democratic.

But why a neo-con like Steyn should be writing for the Grand old Lady of D'Oleier street is still a mystery. I'm considering a boycott of the paper until Baggy eyes gives him the heave-ho, but the trouble is that it's still the Irish paper with the greatest plurality of views, even though it doesn't give any genuine left-winger a regular column and instead lets fuddy-duddy Ken Barlow types like Vincent Browne and Fintan O Toole share their equivocations with us. Then you've got people like Breda O Brien telling us that the tide of history is turning against abortion, making statements like: "A foetus is not a child, but then a teenager isn't a grown woman". I kind of agree. I never thought being born was such a big deal and always wished that I celebrated my conception day instead of my birthday, as Breda obviously does. Presumably she celebrates Christmas in March as well, and thinks that if the 3 wise kings were really wise they would have shown up 9 months earlier.

Still, there are worse things than the Times. Like the Sunday Independent, for example. I came across a piece from the lifestyle section which complained that Irish universtities teach the work of "frauds" like Noam Chomsky instead of "genuine intellectual titans" like Conor Cruise O Brien and Eoghan Harris. (I'm not making this up) He claims that there's a "Cosy liberal Consenus" on campus. I'd love if that were true, but the words "liberal" and "consensus" don't really go together which is why the right, who agree to think whatever the Sindo leader writers tell them to think, has been in power for so long, no matter how irrational that may be.

This Sunday, Eilis O Hanlon was suggesting in her wrist-slashingly unfunny "Satirical" way that Ireland wasn't really a democracy any more as (according to her) Bertie had done some sort of dirty deal with the the Shinners to bring the Columbia 3 home from that bastion of democratic values that is Columbia. As someone who's been abroad and listened to how my country is regared as the terror state it's sickening to see the Irish people swallow the US line on Columbia. It seems that most of us think the country is a genuine democracy and that the government have nothing to do with the right-wing paramilitaries that shot all four left-wing candidates before the last election, just as many people in Britain believe that the RUC have no links with loyalists. What's more sickening still is that the Sindo printed 8 articles about the 3, none of which deviated from the line that they were anti-democratic terrorists even though it's clear that the situtation in Columbia is far more complex than they give it credit for.

But there's no room for complexity in the world of CNN, Fox News, or our own Sindo. You're either for them or against them. I'm happy to say that I'm against the Sindo. I hope the hypocrites who write for it all choke on the Columbian Cocaine they probably snort every night.

Put your money where your big fat mouth is, Harney

2005-08-08T10:51:00.000+01:00

I was cycling down through West Cork the other day and noticed that I couldn't get reception on my mobile phone for love nor money when I was heading down towards Sheep's Head even though my providers, Meteor, claim that they have 100% national coverage. Perhaps they think that Sheep's head is part of Holland because of the preponderence of Dutch licence plates in the area.

I thought of this when I heard that the so-called Columbia Three have been holed up somewhere in West Cork for these last six months. I think that it's good to know in this era of 24/7 surveillance that people are still able to hide from the authorities much as Micheal Collins was in the old days.

Of course there's another theory that the government have known about them all the time and that Bertie's been turning a blind eye to it to appease the IRA and goad them into declaring a ceasefire. Mary Harney isn't at all happy about this, but then she never seems to be happy about anything. But can Harney, who paid €300 to listen to Henry Kissinger, really live with herself if she's part of a government that's been appeasing terrorists? Living with such a lie could eat her from the inside, though this would take quite some time as there's a lot of her to be eaten. I think it's better to get some closure on the issue, put her money where her extremely capacious mouth is and get the PDs out of their coalition with a man who can talk out of both sides of his mouth simultaneously.

To me, it's dissapointing that the government have to cling to the notion that the three went to Columbia to see some birds when there's no shortage of ornitholigal diversity in the peninsulae of West Cork. I'd love if they could come straight out and say that they were trying to help the indiginous people of Latin America to defend themselves against US-backed right-wing militias and Oil companies.

Unlike Bertie, I'm in a position to say that I'm proud that some Irish people are standing up to the might of US hegemony and defending oppressed peasants. I remember when Marion Keone was interviewing George Bush last year he had the Brass balls to claim that the US is the biggest provider of foreign aid in the world. Quite apart from the fact that Japan gives more in aid, most of the US's aid goes to oppressive governments like that of Columbia, where peasants land is sprayed with defoliant in the guise of fighting drugs so the likes of Unocal can come in and drill their oil. I'd love if there was a part of "socialist" Bertie that thought the same way and would come out and say so.

In the current climate of the "War on Terror" this isn't a possiblility. In that BBC show The Power of Nightmares there was footage of Donald Rumsfeld claiming back in the 70's that terrorists all over the world, including the IRA were backed by the USSR which fitted nicely into their Manichean World view though it wasn't supported by the facts. I'm pretty sure the last thing people in the North would have wanted is to live in dreary housing estates with little hope that things would ever get better while across the border people were enjoying the fruits of an economic boom.

Today there's no evidence that there's a global conspiracy of indiginous peoples around the world against the might of the western-military industrial complex, much as I'd love if this were the case. Still, it suits the powers that be to tar all "terrorists" with same brush, even when in the case of the PKK and Al-Qaueda, what they want is the complete opposite.

But if Bertie has any integrity he won't hand the Columbia Three over to Interpol. It would be a signal to many of his supporters that the Fianna Fail dog is being wagged by the PD tail.

Who's a Useful Idiot Now?

2005-07-22T17:09:00.000+01:00

You may have noticed in my last posting that I was a bit pissed off that "Irish" and "Muslim" terrorists were being tarred with the same brush by the right-wing press and media in the UK, not to mention a not-unsubstantial section of the so-called "liberal" press.

After thinking about it for a while, I think maybe it's not such a bad thing as it might convince the likes of Al-Queda that we hate the British just as much as they do, though if any of them were to get a flight to Dublin or Shannon and saw all the copies of FHM on sale they'd hardly know that they'd left the UK at all.

Over the last few days I've seen the fear pervading the streets of London the same way the smell of roasted hops and barley pervades the street where I live (I live near a brewery) from a safe distance and wonder if the people there can stand back from the situation and ask why this is happening to them.

When Britain was a target for IRA bombs in the '70s and '80s, most people in the UK didn't have the foggiest idea what their motivation was, unsurprisingly, as the British government was only too happy for the rest of the world to think that they owned all of Ireland against the will of the country's pugnacious natives. If the people there understood that what they were really dying for, which was the right of fascistic descendents of fanatical Scottish mountain thugs to continue bullying the Catholic minority in their little sectarian statelet, they might have thought differently about the situation.

Likewise, today, if people could make the link between the current bombings and the war in Iraq there might be some pressure on Tony Blair to reconsider his policy of helping the fanatical junta that currently leads the US to seize control of the oil of the middle east.

Maybe this is why there was an article in the Guardian, a paper becoming increasingly to Tony Blair what Fox News is to George Bush, dismissing opponents of the war as know-it-alls, who have no proof of the link between the war and the terrorist attacks.

Believe it or not, I met a girl who claims she knows Bush's former Homeland defence secretary Tom Ridge, whose constant terror alerts kept the US population living in fear in the months leading up to George Bush's reelection. When I told her that I thought the war in Iraq was all about Oil, she insisted that it was a "coincidence" that the biggest consumer of oil in the world was invading the second biggest producer at a time when it's governement was led almost entirely by former oil industry executives.

Maybe the author of the that piece in the Guardian thinks that it's a coincidence that Britain, Spain, Australia and Qatar, all of which nations supported the war in Iraq were attacked in onwe way or another while France and Germany, both of which have massive muslim populations have just been lucky so far. Maybe it's the fact that Osama bin Laden has repeatedly said that he wants to split Europe from the US that leads the we-told-you-so brigade, as he vulgarly calls us, to think that there may be a hint of a connection between the two.

Unfortunately Tony Blair hasn't got a reverse gear so there isn't going to be any shift in policy from him. At least our own government over hear will be able to take comfort in the fact that no-one knows that our country exists and therefore won't be interested in bombing us, in spite of the fact that by lending our air-space to the US, the blood of 25,000 Iraqis is as much on our hands as those of the Brits.

Ireland becomes victim of Terror - At last!

2005-07-18T16:51:00.000+01:00

I read with some bewilderment in the last few days that Ireland had finally become the victim of terror and that the harsh reality was that we weren't as immune as we thought we were before now.

I don't know where we got the idea that we were. I would have thought that if we had some sort of immunity to terror then that person who was bludgeoned to death with his own wooden leg by Cromwell's troops would have survived the incident which would have mafe for a few good fireside stories. Likwise the man who was waving a white handkerchief at British troops on Bloody Sunday. He'd probably still be alive today, appearing on talk shows telling the world how the bullets just bounced off him. Or the people who were killed in the Dublin and Monaghan bombings in 1974. I could go on and on, yet there would still be people who would argue that what they meant by terror was islamic terror.

In a perceptive critique of the media coverage of the Oklahoma city bombings in 1995, Robert Fisk noted how the bombers were referred to as "terrorists" when it was assumed they were muslims and then suddenly morphed into "extremists" when it turned out they were white Americans.

White Protestants don't do terror. They do Final solutions, collateral damage, strategic limitation and a whole load of other euphemisms. Terror is something that only Paddies and Arabs get up to.

To an outsider, the representation of the facts by the Anglo-Saxon media can seem bizzare but if you understand the puritan ethos that underpins Anglo-Saxon societies, especially the US, it makes a little more sense. When puritans first landed in the US, they believed they were on a mission from God to kill the Native Americans whom they regarded as savages. In the same epoch, Cromwell also cited some historical passages from the Bible as justification for his use of State terror against Ireland. When the famine struck Ireland many in the British government believed it was a gift from God, who they believed to be a big fan of Anglican hymns.

I was a bit digusted to find out that the person who first came up with the phrase "manifest destiny", the belief that Americans are so much better than anyone else that it's their right to impose their way of life on the rest of the world was one John O Sullivan, somebody with a very Irish-sounding name.

I'm sure there were many in Ireland who were shocked by the attacks in London, believing that as we speak the same language and share so much common popular culture that they can empathise. Yet I've seen one article after another in the British press over the last 10 days that tars "Irish" and "Islamic" terrorists with the same brush, even though the journalists writing these pieces know as well as I do that only a tiny proportion of the population of Ireland and the Islamic world supported either the IRA or Al_Queda, though many of their readers won't.

The sad truth is that no matter how we think we are just the same as the English, most of them have a superiority complex that leads them to see us as pugnacious leprechauns.

The fact that the Waterford teenager who died in Turkey wasn't the first Irish person to die in violent circumstances won't provide much consolation for her family or friends. The papers are full of encomia which present her as a bubbly, evervescent young girl which I've got no reason to disbelieve. The question has to be asked, what was a nice girl like her doing in a place like Turkey?

I have to admit, to my shame, that everyone in my family other than myself has funded the coffers of the brutal junta of this this state with their tourist euros. It's easy to see why they might, as the brutailty of the conflict in Kurdistan is so far away from the tourist beaches of the Aegean. It's shameful that tourist agencies encourage package tours to places like Turkey which normalise what's in reality of the most violent, repressive countries on Earth. To put it in some perspective, one of the key reasons Bush and Blair invaded Iraq was that he had allegedly killed 100,000 Kurds. Yet the Turkish junta has killed at least 30,000 kurds, and the US and Britain arm them to the teeth and encourage the EU to accept them as a member.

As people who've suffered a long history of exploitation our sympathies ought to be with the kurds who want nothing more than their own autonomus state. But until now, we've seen the situation there much as Chamberlain saw Czechoslovakia: A country far away about which we know nothing.

Sadly, instead of engaging with the PKK and asking ourselves if it's morally right to visit Turkey, we'll probably all dismiss the "terrorists" as evildoers to whom it would be cowardly to cave into. Which would be great news for the Turkish government and the American and British arms firms who get so much of their money.

Seamus' G8

2005-07-08T17:09:00.000+01:00

It's been a pretty insane few days for me. On Tuesday night I arrived in Prestwick airport outside Glasgow which had a heavy security presence as George W Bush was to arrive there the following day. I'm a little confused as to why this was the case, perhaps, like Tony Blair he was flying with Ryanir to show how man-of-the-people he is.

Over the years I've read so mush bush-hating literature that I feel I've gotten to know the man quite well and even found out that we have the odd thing in common, like liking the thrills and disliking tidying the house, but this week we did have one common objective, and that was to reach the G8 summit, even if some police officers suffered in the process.

It seems he accomplished that Goal a little better than I did, although it seems to be me and the peoople I'm sharing the eco-village here outside Stirling that are being victimised. Yesterday, we were blockaded in here by the police as we tried to reach a vigil for those arrested the day before, even those who were trying to get to the airport and brandishing airline tickets, which seems harsh and according to legal advisors is illegal.

It didn't actually bother me all that much, as I kind of like it in here. I was lucky to reach this place, arriving on Glasgow with nothing other than an out-of-date printout from G8 Alternatives, I met 1 Kiwi and 2 Austrian girls who told me of this place, a self-contained commune where protestors from all over the world are gathered.

There's a part of me that would love to live like this all the time, the only difference between this and a proper hippie commune is that most of the food has to be brought in, though it is all vegan so I'm happy. I love that all the meetings are consenual in contrast to the stiff formality of the G8 negotiations. I love the way that it's mostly women that are in charge, like in Brehon or Amazon times or some Hellenic Thesmophorae.

Yet I hadn't been here for more then a few hours, exhusted from a long air and ferry journey from Patras in Greece, before I was on the road again, with a large group trying to blockade the motorway where the G8 cavalcades would be passing. We left at 3 in the morning, when I really should have been asleep, like a mob of witchunting peasants from a Frankenstein movie, except the monster that global capitalism has created is far more terrifying than anything that Bram Stoker concieved.

At first our endeavour seemed doomed as there was a massive police presence outside, granite faced Scottish coppers dressed up in jackboots and protected by petrochemical shields, backed up from the air by helicopters, one of which is still hovering around as I write this.

It seemed at first that they were pushing us back, though masked members of the black block launched a scorched-earth strategy against the outposts of global capital, thrashing a Burger King and Shell station. There's a part of me that admires their willingness to risk imprisoment for their beliefs and nearly all of me believes that it's corpartions like Shell that should be indicted for their crimes against humanity and the Earth, though there's another part that wonders what any of the destruction really accomplishes.

After we'd got through the industrial estate, I started to become paranoid and thought that the police were leading us into a trap, which was exactly their plan, and I was almost certain that I was going to be arrested at one stage. But we found a narrow path that led to a small village where there was only a minor police presence. It was like Fallujah without guns when we got there, masked protestors breaking through the police cordon with nothing more than sticks and stones.

From the village we could see the motorway to which we made our way through a golf course and a couple of muddy fields, followed all the while by the boys in blue overhead.

I'm still amazed, giving the overwhelming odds, that we made it to the motorway at all, or that I had the courage to stand with only three or four others and block articulated lorries from passing through a link road, or to try to block the cops from trying to get down another road and break up the main blockade. It was at that point that I got seperated from the main group and had to take part in a tactical retreat through the muddy fields, though thankfully I wasn't one of those pushed over a barbed wire fence by the cops.

I was so tired and wet by that time that I decided to make my way back to the campsite with a few others. On the way back I was passed by half a dozen copcars who made didn't seem to bat an eyelid when they passed which lulled me into a false sense of security, though I've heard that there are still arrests being made and there's a possibility that I might still be arrested, but I'm not wearing any black so I should be OK.

I hope I've accomplished something other than just annoying a few motorists and getting a blurry picture of myself into the Scottish Sun. Most of the people in here are people who really want to change the way the world works in favour of people rather than corporations, the ecosystem rather than money, but how far we've advanced those goals remains to be seen. At least I know that if in 50 years time if all the world's resources have been used up, which they will if present trends continue, that I fought as much as I could to prevent that happening.

The G8 v a GR8 protest

2005-06-06T15:14:00.000+01:00

On the way back down from my brother's stag nite in Mayo I finally got round to listening to some lectures by Jello Biafra, former lead singer with the Dead Kennedys and American green party member. He's a perceptive critic of the new global order and though he's angry (why wouldm't he be) he's not without optimism. Occasionally, though, he'll come out with a bizarre statement like "we (protestors) stopped the Vietnam war", which is of course, bollocks, as what stopped the war was igniminious military defeat for the US.

In the last few years I've become a bit sceptical about the efficacy of protesting, though it didn't stop me getting almost arrested in the run-up to the Iraq war.

I'm still scpetical as to whether showing up in Edinburgh for the G8 summit, even after my fellow countryman Bob Geldof imprecated me and a million others to come and hopefully convince the leaders of those nations to be a bit nicer to those not quite as well off to themselves.

Then they went back a bit and said that they only meant a million in a metaphorical sense, although around 2 million showed up in Rome for the Iraq protests a couple of years ago. Funny thing is the cops probably said there was only 150,000.

Maybe he meant a million in the sense that Russia is a democracy. And if India isn't a bigger industrial power than Canada already, it surely will be in a few years time.

I'm hoping that the whole thing will be a bit like Braveheart with the Scottish cops turning against their Anglo-Saxon overlords and joining with Celtic warriors like myself who know in their Jungian folk memories what it's like to be exploited by brutal uber-capitalism. But at I'm not holding my breath, at least until I get to the toilets if they're anything like they are in Trainspotting.

Then there's Live 8 down in London, which isn't that unlike the summit in terms of it's eurocentricity, with only one artist from Africa, the place where almost all modern western music comes from.

Then their distrubting tickets by txt msg lottery, a technology which is unknown to the vast majority of Africans. If that isn't bad enough Gordon Brown says he approves of the protests, just as Bertie claimed that the 100,000 that marched in Dublin were on his side.

Still, it would be nice to know that while the world leaders are arguing about the efficacy of aid payments, how to control Africa's population and get food from the plates of fat westerners to hungry Africans and then agreeing to do whatever George Bush says, there'll be a million of us out there who know all the solutions to the worlds problems if only the world's pols would pay some attention.

So maybe I will head along.

Victory for the Reds - But will the Empire strike Back?

2005-05-26T15:13:00.000+01:00

After the euphoria of Liverpool’s incredible win over AC Milan last night dies down (that could take a while) and all the millions of words have been written, people will sit down and ask what it all meant.

It obviously means that Liverpool are the greatest English team in the history of European competition. There are a few grudging Man U fans who used to think their team was better because it wasn’t a “real” competition back in the 70’s and 80’s because “only” the best team from each country qualified. This may have meant that there were fewer quality clubs, but it meant that to qualify, a team had to win their domestic league or the trophy itself, unlike Man U, who qualified for their 1999 win in second place. The fact that Liverpool won the trophy after only coming 4th last year will take some of the sheen off their argument that United have a greater European pedigree.

It’s possible, of course, that with their millions of pounds Chelsea will be able to eventually win the Champions league 5 times, but of course that’s contingent on Roman Abramovich not losing interest or getting arrested for one of his many shady doings.

Which brings me to my point: isn’t it a remarkable coincidence that Liverpool’s magnificent win came out around the same time as the latest Star Wars movie?

Think about it. From 1977 to 1984, a small, family-run club from a fading industrial town in the North of England took on the might of Europe and won. When Bob Paisley arrived in Rome to take on Borrosia Munchengladbach in ’77 Italian journalists mocked his woolly cardigans but they were laughing on the other side of their faces when he took the trophy back to Anfield, a stadium that even then seemed old fashioned to many European visitors.

At the same time the world watched the Jedi take on the might of the evil empire and win though they had little other than a fearsome belief in their own ability.

Just as the end of the last Star Wars prequel looped right back to the glory days of 1977 with Cheweebaca and a young Luke, last night’s game brought memories of Keegan and Toshack flooding back for many on the red side of Anfield.

Unfortunately, much of football has gone over to the dark side in those intervening years, but Liverpool remain a beacon of traditional community values. Though the club have massive worldwide support from Ireland to Asia, most of the people who come to their games are actually from Liverpool and wouldn’t eat a prawn sandwich if they were starving to death.

Mind you, if you think Man U are too money-orientated right now, their “fans” haven’t seen anything yet. I hesitate to use the word “Evil” to describe a real human being, particularly an short, ugly, aging one, but anyone who thinks that the problem with Man U is that they don’t make enough money and that the club is too much about the sport. It’s like he’s Jerry Maguire in reverse.

I was reading a financial journalist in the Observer who said in the typically snotty way that they have that while he understands the offside rule quite well, none of us soccer heads can understand the arcane ways of the financial markets, and I’ve got to say that I don’t have a clue how a foreign millionaire can buy a club with someone else’s money and then burden the club with all his debts, but then, tragically for some of the genuine supporters in the city, it seems Martin Edwards didn’t either when he prostituted the club on the stock exchange.

Mind you, Glazer seems pretty innocent next to Abramovich, a man who used his massive power to get Russia’s sinister, imperialistic president Putin re-elected and was rewarded by having a state oil company sold to him for 1% of it’s market value and then shifted the profits to offshore tax havens.

And then there’s AC Milan, owned by Italy’s own Putin, Silvio Berlusconi, who also used a TV company to get a shady character elected as leader, this time his good, Burberry shirt wearing self. When Jean Baudrillard wrote that power gave football a diabolical responsibility for sedating the masses, he had sinister tycoons like these in mind.

In the documentaries about the 20th aniversery of the Heysel disaster, people argued that at the time there seemed to be no future for the game as it was being eaten alive from the inside by hooligans and faced with the irrational hatred of Margaret Thatcher, who must have thought that unemployed Liverpudlians would have been better off getting on their bikes and looking for the jobs that she’d taken away than watching the best football team in the world at the time, from the outside.

It could be argued that if money-men like Martin Edwards and Rupert Murdoch hadn’t injected so much dosh into the game then it might have died from glamour deficiency. And it’s true that there’s very few people want to go back to the era of the maximum wage, when players who didn’t have any skills other than playing soccer were only paid at most £100 a week.

But who, apart from swivel-eyed free marketers like the direction in which soccer is going right now, where a tiny number of clubs are able to vacuum up all the talent and players think loyalty is the name of a card they get from Tesco?

As many people were pointing out last night, the great thing about soccer is the sheer unpredictability, that it’s 11 men against 11 men on the night and it didn’t matter that either Chelsea or AC Milan had so much more in the way of financial resources in either of the last two rounds. So when Liverpool’s second half performance destroyed AC Milan’s hubris, it wasn’t hard to think of their character and heart as a millennium falcon destroying a death star that threatens to blow small, traditional clubs out of the water.

Lest you think I’m being hyberbolical, I’m aware that Liverpool were the second richest team in England before Abramovich bought Chelsea and that they have a big global fanbase, though around 3000 of the overseas supporters were from Ireland, a country from which much of the population of Liverpool city can claim descent. As I’ve pointed out before, Liverpool is a Celtic enclave in an Anglo-Saxon country which is why much of England has such an ambivalent attitude to the town, and it’s actually far more reasonable for us to take credit for their success than it is for the London Media to claim that Bono, Bob Geldof, Seamus Heaney or any other Irish person is “British” (Wankers!)

But this is no time for bitterness. It’s a time to celebrate Liverpool’s incredible achievement and I’m sure that even the loudest, most boorish, Man United fan might just have had the odd goose bump when Stevie G lifted the European cup last night.

Harney the Honkin' hep cat

2005-04-22T16:59:00.000+01:00

There's been a lot of talk recently about what sort of music politicians like to listen too, as there often is when there's elections coming up and stuff and they want to try to convince the voters that they're real people.

This recent bout was set off, however; by George Bush revealing what was on his iPod. Nice of him to share this information with us, now that he's being open and democratic amybe he'd like to tell us what his evidence is for his claim that Sadamm Hussein had links with Al_Queada.

Of Course, that's not going to happen, so we have to be thankful for slim pickings like the list we got last week.
I'm happy to relate that for the most part it confirms my prejudices that he's a man of little culture who's most happy listening to jingoistic country and western music written by people, who, like himself have never been outside America, and there doesn't appear to be a single Black or Female artist, which suggests that he's not really enjoying himslef all that much when he's listening to Condoleeza Rice play the piano.

It would have come as a shock if Dubya was into Free Jazz or early classical music or global groove or yo la tengo, I wouldnt have known what to think, except that Karl Rove was trying to make him look like an intellectual. According to Kitty Kelly, Bush's parents once lambasted someone for making them listen to a classical recital, which they descbribed as "awful music".

But there is one shock, and that's that he likes a couple of Irish artists, Van Morrison and The Thrills. Having seen the Thrills live last year and sung along to most of their songs, I have to say I feel a little violated and wish George would have kept this piece of information to himself. Still, it's out there and I can only console myself that his other choices show him to be a man that's totally out of touch with the music that people from the non-Texan part of the US, though it does beg the question of what he was doing when he wasnt studying in college as the answer to this question generally involves quality time with the stereo. It's kind of odd that Rove didn't suggest he put on some Jazz, Classical, folk or MOBO particularly when he appears to be only using 1GB from 20.

Anyway, not to be undone, the Guardian asked some British pols what tunes they were into. Apparently, it's been an open secret that Geoff Hoon, the defence secretary was one of the Children of the Revolution whose behavior shocked Cardinal Ratzinger so much, and he's got a collection of old Beatles and Stones records to prove it. Then Oliver Letwin said in a terribly English way that he wasn't sure which music common people listened to. Needless to mention, the person with the most well-rounded music collection was Charles Kennedy, not that that'll mean he'll get any votes.

Then on Sunday, our own Turbine got in on the act and asked some of our leaders which musicians they liked. Amazingly, they got a straight answer out of Bertie, who said it was the Bee Gees, which led the Turbine's psychologist to suggest that this was because of nostalgia for when he was young and hairy, which he certainly was. Enda Kenny told them he was a Springsteen fan, in keeping with his macho, Kilimanjaro-climbing, life-saving image.

Then they asked Mary Harney. I would have thought that her favourite band would have been Boston (Not Berlin, that's for sure) but apparently she likes Andrei Bocceli, which is just the sort of innofensive, middle-of-the-road stuff you'd expect her to like, although a part of me hoped she'd say that she never listened to music because work was more important.

Then she said she also liked Jazz, which I can't quite accept, as Jazz is a form of music associated with slacking, drug-taking and all the other things Mary Harney dissaproves of. But then it also originates in America, which for Harney is the root of all good things.

I don't know why she'd feel it necessacry to lie like this, as Will Hutton wrote a book saying how much better Europe was than America and said in the prefac that he was a big fan of Sheryl Crow (No Shit!) and apparently that Gaulist par excellence Jaques Delors is a jazz fan too. On the other hand, Condoleeza Rice is a trained classical pianist.

But then I could never imagine Harney smoking a reefer in a basement jazz club wearing a beret or searching for early Charlie Parker 45's.

But then no-one seemed brave enough to ask Micahel McDowell. But we all know that he listens to Wagner overtures and skinhead punk that he downloads from hate websites. Except he doesn't, because listening to music would make him a human being.

The Benny "No Pill" Show

2005-04-20T15:26:00.000+01:00

When I heard that Cardinal Rat-Zinger had been elected Pope yesterday, I suddenly realised how all those people out there who don't like soccer feel at the end of the World Cup or European Championships feel as they realise that all the palaver is over with.

Then you've got to feel sorry for all those people who were rooting for the plucky underdogs from Honduras or the Phillipines but knew in their hearts that the Germans were going to win in the end. At least journalists aren't going to have to learn how to pronounce the name of the Capital of Honduras, Tecucigalpa (I think)

Sky News informed us that Rat-Boy was the first German Pope in a Millenium, though they're not yet quite so interactive that you can press your red button and ask why, perchance, this might be the case, but you know that they'd just mumble back that historical context wasn't really their thing, it's not the sort of information which graphics flashing along the bottom of the screen is conducive to conveying.

But here's the reason (briefly). In the eleventh century Henry IV, emperor of the "Holy" "Roman" "Empire" decided that it was within his power to appoint archbishops, and the then pope, Gregory VII insisted it was his exclusive prerogative. Neither side willing to back down, Gregory declared war on Henry, and was supported by the German "Nobles" who saw this as a chance to ameliorate their own power within the so-called empire. After losing a battle, Henry was forced to back down and wear a sackcloth while kneeling in the snow. It led in the long term to the Holy Roman empire, or "Germany" as we would now call it, becoming a loose confedation while England, France and Spain became United Nations that would conquer most of the World, and that it wasn't until Fredericak the Great and Bismarck overpowered the rest of the nation in the 18th and 19th centuries with their brutal Prussian militarism that Germany became united. So, according to some Historians, this tiff about who got to nominate bishops led eventually to the death camps at Austwich.

Thankfully, the church isn't that powerful anymore, but there were a few other things that happened in the intervening milenium. Some would argue that the Reformation was inevitable, that people in Northern Europe weren't going to let a bunch of priests in Rome rule them forever, but others would say that the Investiture Controversy led to alienation between the church and Germany which culminated in Luther's Wittenberg Theses and the Sack of Rome in 1527, when marauding troops of "Emporer" Charles V destroyed the city, killed around 80% of it's population and made off with most of it's priceless treasures.

That was almost 5 centuries ago, but then that's only a quarter of the existence of the Papacy ago. Can you imagine people in America today, 60 years after the end of World War II electing an Austrian with a creepy body-image fixation to be one of their leaders? Oh, Right.

Since then Italians have always been a bit snooty towards Germans, who they regard as vulgar and classless, even when they were copying their styles of Music and Architecture. Mussolini said that Italians were builing an empire when the Germans were living in the forests, though he later said that Italians were Nordic Aryans.

Now, it seems, they've made up. Maybe if some people from Honduras or the Phillipines ransack Rome today they might get the papacy in another 500 years.

Lenny from the Simpsons insists that Germans arent so bad - hey, they may have done some bad things in the past, but that's why pencils have erasers - but unfotunately this particular German wants to do some bad things in the present as well, like continuing JPs legacy of opposing contraception in the face of uncontrollable population growth and the spread of AIDS in Africa. Of Course, some are insisting that Rat-Boy is his own man and avoided being called John Paul III to avoid being in the Poles Shadow. Of course, he does put himself in the Shadow of Popes Benedict I-XV, but then nobody knows who they are, so what the Hey?

Others are suggesting that not-very-gentle Ben is a transitional figure who's going to pave the way for a relative liberal possibly (but possibly not) from Africa or Latin America. As John O Farrell suggests, it might be time to democratise the process a bit more.

Meanwhile, we're treated to the sight of Africans coming all the way to Rome to celebrate the appointment of a German who's going to insist that they don't use the pill no matter what the circumstances are. Then we were treated to the sublime Freudian Slip of Kristen Guru-Murty describing the new Pope as the son of a Barbarian. Of course, Freud said that there are no accidents, which is a typical deterministic, Germanic way of looking at things. And that's not good news for the people of Africa.

Mary & Me: This town's not big enough for both of us

2005-04-11T16:15:00.000+01:00

Cork has a long and noble history of fighting against tyranny and oppression, particularly when it’s imposed upon the denizens of the city by outsiders, but this weekend a bunch of aliens from another planet arrived and discussed ways to take away many of our liberties and we let them do so without even registering a protest.
This isn’t a happy time in the city’s history. We’ve made a complete dog’s breakfast of hosting the European city of Culture so far, with events of genuine cultural importance priced beyond the reach of the majority of the town’s population, who have to make do with a few fireworks. Even the business community could only find €8 million to spend on culture, they still managed to spend €100 million on a hideous new development across from the bus station. Then the city overcharges for bin taxes, with the result that many people are leaving litter thrown all over the city.

Then the fucking PDs host their conference here! What have we ever done to hurt anyone to deserve this? It’s not that we’ve voted in any PD candidates in the last two elections, that’s for sure.

Last PD TD we had was Maureen Quill, who used to remind me of a rubber mask I had when I was a child. I had a friend who used to work as a waiter in Iasacs and when the unlovely Ms. Quill visited, instead of giving him a tip she kissed him on the cheek, the sort of thing that leaves you scarred for life.

To be fair to the people of Cork, it would have been really hard to protest against the presence of the PDs in our fair city, as they weren’t really in the city, but way out in Tivoli, which is a fair old trek out, even on a mild spring afternoon like Saturday last. As well as this, it’s getting harder and harder to organise any sort of demo here as the cops can arrest you for putting up signs advertising one, mainly thanks to the efforts of the PDs themselves.

I decided therefore that the town wasn’t big enough for both of us and went down to Crosshaven for the weekend. I could be unkind and say that it isn’t big enough for Mary Harney alone, but I’m not going to. After all, if Fatty Harney was advocating universal vegetarianism and Free Love, I wouldn’t be pointing out how grotesquely overweight she was, would I?

You could argue, of course, that with the nation facing a growing obesity problem having a Health Minister that looks like Jabba the Hutt sends out all the wrong signals, or that by spending so much on so-called “health care” which is really disease care and doing so little to promote overall good health is no way to care for people’s health.

You could also argue that Harney’s policy of bringing in the private sector to run hospitals won’t do anyone any good except the greedy capitalists that run them, and you’d have a lot of support. If you take a look at George Monbiot’s writings on the experiences of the Private Finance Initiative in the UK, you’d wonder how Fatty Harney could even consider such a thing. In one privately built hospital sewage was running from the taps, and it didn’t even save the taxpayer in the long run.

So why would she consider it? You have to ask why she’s so enamoured of Thatcherite ideology when Thatcher was a woman who hated our country and our people with such venom. Perhaps it’s that Harney hates herself because of her hideous body shape but that this hatred is repressed and comes out in as contempt for the traditional sense of community values that we’ve always had in this country and love for the dog-eat-dog ways of our neighbour.

When I was reading an obituary for Saul Bellow written by that other former left-winger Christopher Hitchens, I got the sense that conservatism is something that happens people when they get older, like prostate problems and a growing interest in Snooker. With the PDs, though, you get the impression that Mickey McD was trying to convert his playpen into a detention centre and Fatty Harney’s first words were “Low Taxes”

It’s good to see that we still have some checks and balances against the power of PDism in the country, as it looked like Mary Harney was backing down on the issue of who would build the second terminal at Dublin airport.

This doesn’t stop them from taking the credit for all the country’s accomplishments, though. At the start of the conference, Liz O Donnell held up copies of the Economist from 1988 and 1997, one describing Ireland as the poorest of the rich and another as Europe’s shining light.

Contemporary history 101: Between 1992 and 1997 Ireland was governed by two coalitions, one FF/Labour and the other FG/Labour/Democratic Left.

During the last election debate, Micheal Noonan memorably described Bertie as being like a cock that crowed in the morning and thought the sun was rising because of him.
Fatty Harney may be more like one of those overfed battery hens that can barely stand up, but she still gives herself the credit for everything. When she was trade and industry secretary she went round to every new business in the country to take credit for it’s existence, then when the global recession came along she thundered that this was no time to be “playing politics” with job losses. Can you believe the chutzpah of this woman?

Another time Mickey McD was arguing with Eamon Gilmore that when labour were in power the country was going to the IMF for help even though the help they needed was to save the country from the consequences of Fianna Fails errors, and when “we” were in power the country was the fastest growing economy in Europe, etc, etc. Thet reminded me of two kids arguing over whose dad had the biggest car.

McDowell’s recent humiliations haven’t dented his arrogance that much. He wants cops to be able to issue on-the-spot fines of €200 to people who urinate in the street. That might not be a lot of money to him, but to the sort of person who’s got nothing better to do than piss against a lamppost, it might be an awful lot, though I hardly see it as being that much of a detterent. Then again, many of the people who piss on Lamposts are Ross-O’Caroll-Kelly types who can afford it and might ask if they can have a dump as well for €500.

McDowell also wants the guards to be able to take a DNA sample without people’s consent. This raises the unpleasant prospect of Gardai being able to stick their dirty little fingers into your mouth to take a DNA sample just because they suspect that you might have been involved in a crime.
Quis custodes ipsos custodes?, you might be asking ( I sure as fuck was) Who’s going to stop Micheal McDowell from pissing all over our civil liberties? Some might say we live in a democracy and we could get rid of the fat bald smarmy little Nazi if we wanted, but then if you watched FG’s spokesman on “justice”, Jim O Keefe agree with everything McDowell said you realise that the choice is between a smart fascist blueshirt and a thick fascist blueshirt; or tweedledum and tweedledummer if you like.

No PD conference would be complete without a few digs at Sinn Fein, and on Friday McDowell was saying that the IRA were a glove puppet on Gerry Adams hand. I’ve always thought that Micheal O Leary had has hand up Mary Harney’s ass. I could go further and say he had his whole body up there, but that would be dragging myself down to the level of a woman who described people who protested against Henry Kissinger as being Hypocrites. I don’t want to let that happen to me.

Cork has a long and noble history of fighting against tyranny and oppression, particularly when it’s imposed upon the denizens of the city by outsiders, but this weekend a bunch of aliens from another planet arrived and discussed ways to take away many of our liberties and we let them do so without even registering a protest. This isn’t a happy time in the city’s history. We’ve made a complete dog’s breakfast of hosting the European city of Culture so far, with events of genuine cultural importance priced beyond the reach of the majority of the town’s population, who have to make do with a few fireworks. Even the business community could only find €8 million to spend on culture, they still managed to spend €100 million on a hideous new development across from the bus station. Then the city overcharges for bin taxes, with the result that many people are leaving litter thrown all over the city. Then the fucking PDs host their conference here! What have we ever done to hurt anyone to deserve this? It’s not that we’ve voted in any PD candidates in the last two elections, that’s for sure. Last PD TD we had was Maureen Quill, who used to remind me of a rubber mask I had when I was a child. I had a friend who used to work as a waiter in Iasacs and when the unlovely Ms. Quill visited, instead of giving him a tip she kissed him on the cheek, the sort of thing that leaves you scarred for life. To be fair to the people of Cork, it would have been really hard to protest against the presence of the PDs in our fair city, as they weren’t really in the city, but way out in Tivoli, which is a fair old trek out, even on a mild spring afternoon like Saturday last. As well as this, it’s getting harder and harder to organise any sort of demo here as the cops can arrest you for putting up signs advertising one, mainly thanks to the efforts of the PDs themselves. I decided therefore that the town wasn’t big enough for both of us and went down to Crosshaven for the weekend. I could be unkind and say that it isn’t big enough for Mary Harney alone, but I’m not going to. After all, if Fatty Harney was advocating universal vegetarianism and Free Love, I wouldn’t be pointing out how grotesquely overweight she was, would I? You could argue, of course, that with the nation facing a growing obesity problem having a Health Minister that looks like Jabba the Hutt sends out all the wrong signals, or that by spending so much on so-called “health care” which is really disease care and doing so little to promote overall good health is no way to care for people’s health. You could also argue that Harney’s policy of bringing in the private sector to run hospitals won’t do anyone any good except the greedy capitalists that run them, and you’d have a lot of support. If you take a look at <a href="http://www.monbiot.com">George Monbiot</a>’s writings on the experiences of the Private Finance Initiative in the UK, you’d wonder how Fatty Harney could even consider such a thing. In one privately built hospital sewage was running from the taps, and it didn’t even save the taxpayer in the long run. So why would she consider it? You have to ask why she’s so enamoured of Thatcherite ideology when Thatcher was a woman who hated our country and our people with such venom. Perhaps it’s that Harney hates herself because of her hideous body shape but that this hatred is repressed and comes out in as contempt for the traditional sense of community values that we’ve always had in this country and love for the dog-eat-dog ways of our neighbour. When I was reading an obituary for Saul Bellow written by that other former left-winger Christopher Hitchens, I got the sense that conservatism is something that happens people when they get older, like prostate problems and a growing interest in Snooker. With the PDs, though, you get the impression that Mickey McD was trying to convert his playpen into a detention centre and Fatty Harney’s first words were “Low Taxes” It’s good to see that we still have some checks and balances against the power of PDism in the country, as it looked like Mary Harney was backing down on the issue of who would build the second terminal at Dublin airport. This doesn’t stop them from taking the credit for all the country’s accomplishments, though. At the start of the conference, Liz O Donnell held up copies of the Economist from 1988 and 1997, one describing Ireland as the poorest of the rich and another as Europe’s shining light. Contemporary history 101: Between 1992 and 1997 Ireland was governed by two coalitions, one FF/Labour and the other FG/Labour/Democratic Left. During the last election debate, Micheal Noonan memorably described Bertie as being like a cock that crowed in the morning and thought the sun was rising because of him. Fatty Harney may be more like one of those overfed battery hens that can barely stand up, but she still gives herself the credit for everything. When she was trade and industry secretary she went round to every new business in the country to take credit for it’s existence, then when the global recession came along she thundered that this was no time to be “playing politics” with job losses. Can you believe the chutzpah of this woman? Another time Mickey McD was arguing with Eamon Gilmore that when labour were in power the country was going to the IMF for help even though the help they needed was to save the country from the consequences of Fianna Fails errors, and when “we” were in power the country was the fastest growing economy in Europe, etc, etc. Thet reminded me of two kids arguing over whose dad had the biggest car. McDowell’s recent humiliations haven’t dented his arrogance that much. He wants cops to be able to issue on-the-spot fines of €200 to people who urinate in the street. That might not be a lot of money to him, but to the sort of person who’s got nothing better to do than piss against a lamppost, it might be an awful lot, though I hardly see it as being that much of a detterent. Then again, many of the people who piss on Lamposts are Ross-O’Caroll-Kelly types who can afford it and might ask if they can have a dump as well for €500. McDowell also wants the guards to be able to take a DNA sample without people’s consent. This raises the unpleasant prospect of Gardai being able to stick their dirty little fingers into your mouth to take a DNA sample just because they suspect that you might have been involved in a crime. Quis custodes ipsos custodes?, you might be asking ( I sure as fuck was) Who’s going to stop Micheal McDowell from pissing all over our civil liberties? Some might say we live in a democracy and we could get rid of the fat bald smarmy little Nazi if we wanted, but then if you watched FG’s spokesman on “justice”, Jim O Keefe agree with everything McDowell said you realise that the choice is between a smart fascist blueshirt and a thick fascist blueshirt; or tweedledum and tweedledummer if you like. No PD conference would be complete without a few digs at Sinn Fein, and on Friday McDowell was saying that the IRA were a glove puppet on Gerry Adams hand. I’ve always thought that Micheal O Leary had has hand up Mary Harney’s ass. I could go further and say he had his whole body up there, but that would be dragging myself down to the level of a woman who described people who protested against Henry Kissinger as being Hypocrites. I don’t want to let that happen to me. </a><a href="http://news.google.com/news?imgefp=qeI3QNZ4-gIJ&imgurl=www.sbpost.ie/post/pages/maryharneyonceagain.jpg">http://news.google.com/news?imgefp=qeI3QNZ4-gIJ&amp;imgurl=www.sbpost.ie/post/pages/maryharneyonceagain.jpg</a></a>

Harney: Fat

Cork has a long and noble history of fighting against tyranny and oppression, particularly when it’s imposed upon the denizens of the city by outsiders, but this weekend a bunch of aliens from another planet arrived and discussed ways to take away many of our liberties and we let them do so without even registering a protest. This isn’t a happy time in the city’s history. We’ve made a complete dog’s breakfast of hosting the European city of Culture so far, with events of genuine cultural importance priced beyond the reach of the majority of the town’s population, who have to make do with a few fireworks. Even the business community could only find €8 million to spend on culture, they still managed to spend €100 million on a hideous new development across from the bus station. Then the city overcharges for bin taxes, with the result that many people are leaving litter thrown all over the city. Then the fucking PDs host their conference here! What have we ever done to hurt anyone to deserve this? It’s not that we’ve voted in any PD candidates in the last two elections, that’s for sure. Last PD TD we had was Maureen Quill, who used to remind me of a rubber mask I had when I was a child. I had a friend who used to work as a waiter in Iasacs and when the unlovely Ms. Quill visited, instead of giving him a tip she kissed him on the cheek, the sort of thing that leaves you scarred for life. To be fair to the people of Cork, it would have been really hard to protest against the presence of the PDs in our fair city, as they weren’t really in the city, but way out in Tivoli, which is a fair old trek out, even on a mild spring afternoon like Saturday last. As well as this, it’s getting harder and harder to organise any sort of demo here as the cops can arrest you for putting up signs advertising one, mainly thanks to the efforts of the PDs themselves. I decided therefore that the town wasn’t big enough for both of us and went down to Crosshaven for the weekend. I could be unkind and say that it isn’t big enough for Mary Harney alone, but I’m not going to. After all, if Fatty Harney was advocating universal vegetarianism and Free Love, I wouldn’t be pointing out how grotesquely overweight she was, would I? You could argue, of course, that with the nation facing a growing obesity problem having a Health Minister that looks like Jabba the Hutt sends out all the wrong signals, or that by spending so much on so-called “health care” which is really disease care and doing so little to promote overall good health is no way to care for people’s health. You could also argue that Harney’s policy of bringing in the private sector to run hospitals won’t do anyone any good except the greedy capitalists that run them, and you’d have a lot of support. If you take a look at <a href="http://www.monbiot.com">George Monbiot</a>’s writings on the experiences of the Private Finance Initiative in the UK, you’d wonder how Fatty Harney could even consider such a thing. In one privately built hospital sewage was running from the taps, and it didn’t even save the taxpayer in the long run. So why would she consider it? You have to ask why she’s so enamoured of Thatcherite ideology when Thatcher was a woman who hated our country and our people with such venom. Perhaps it’s that Harney hates herself because of her hideous body shape but that this hatred is repressed and comes out in as contempt for the traditional sense of community values that we’ve always had in this country and love for the dog-eat-dog ways of our neighbour. When I was reading an obituary for Saul Bellow written by that other former left-winger Christopher Hitchens, I got the sense that conservatism is something that happens people when they get older, like prostate problems and a growing interest in Snooker. With the PDs, though, you get the impression that Mickey McD was trying to convert his playpen into a detention centre and Fatty Harney’s first words were “Low Taxes” It’s good to see that we still have some checks and balances against the power of PDism in the country, as it looked like Mary Harney was backing down on the issue of who would build the second terminal at Dublin airport. This doesn’t stop them from taking the credit for all the country’s accomplishments, though. At the start of the conference, Liz O Donnell held up copies of the Economist from 1988 and 1997, one describing Ireland as the poorest of the rich and another as Europe’s shining light. Contemporary history 101: Between 1992 and 1997 Ireland was governed by two coalitions, one FF/Labour and the other FG/Labour/Democratic Left. During the last election debate, Micheal Noonan memorably described Bertie as being like a cock that crowed in the morning and thought the sun was rising because of him. Fatty Harney may be more like one of those overfed battery hens that can barely stand up, but she still gives herself the credit for everything. When she was trade and industry secretary she went round to every new business in the country to take credit for it’s existence, then when the global recession came along she thundered that this was no time to be “playing politics” with job losses. Can you believe the chutzpah of this woman? Another time Mickey McD was arguing with Eamon Gilmore that when labour were in power the country was going to the IMF for help even though the help they needed was to save the country from the consequences of Fianna Fails errors, and when “we” were in power the country was the fastest growing economy in Europe, etc, etc. Thet reminded me of two kids arguing over whose dad had the biggest car. McDowell’s recent humiliations haven’t dented his arrogance that much. He wants cops to be able to issue on-the-spot fines of €200 to people who urinate in the street. That might not be a lot of money to him, but to the sort of person who’s got nothing better to do than piss against a lamppost, it might be an awful lot, though I hardly see it as being that much of a detterent. Then again, many of the people who piss on Lamposts are Ross-O’Caroll-Kelly types who can afford it and might ask if they can have a dump as well for €500. McDowell also wants the guards to be able to take a DNA sample without people’s consent. This raises the unpleasant prospect of Gardai being able to stick their dirty little fingers into your mouth to take a DNA sample just because they suspect that you might have been involved in a crime. Quis custodes ipsos custodes?, you might be asking ( I sure as fuck was) Who’s going to stop Micheal McDowell from pissing all over our civil liberties? Some might say we live in a democracy and we could get rid of the fat bald smarmy little Nazi if we wanted, but then if you watched FG’s spokesman on “justice”, Jim O Keefe agree with everything McDowell said you realise that the choice is between a smart fascist blueshirt and a thick fascist blueshirt; or tweedledum and tweedledummer if you like. No PD conference would be complete without a few digs at Sinn Fein, and on Friday McDowell was saying that the IRA were a glove puppet on Gerry Adams hand. I’ve always thought that Micheal O Leary had has hand up Mary Harney’s ass. I could go further and say he had his whole body up there, but that would be dragging myself down to the level of a woman who described people who protested against Henry Kissinger as being Hypocrites. I don’t want to let that happen to me. </a><a href=</a>"http://news.google.com/news?imgefp=qeI3QNZ4-gIJ&imgurl=www.sbpost.ie/post/pages/maryharneyonceagain.jpg">http://news.google.com/news?imgefp=qeI3QNZ4-gIJ&amp;imgurl=www.sbpost.ie/post/pages/maryharneyonceagain.jpg</a></a>

Die, SUV drivers

2005-04-08T17:48:00.000+01:00

I cycled up from Ballinascarthy in West Cork where my brother and his fiancée and their young child live this weekend.
The cycle down the day before had been reasonably pleasant, nothing like the fantasy I may have derived of cycling in rural Ireland from reading Molloy or The Third Policeman but pretty pleasant all the same.
Coming back wasn’t so nice. I was a lot more tired, the weather wasn’t so nice with an unusual easterly wind blowing, and the battery on my mp3 player had gone flat. There’s a stretch of road close to the end of the journey where I’ve often got so tired that I start to hallucinate that the road is going down instead of up.
I’m clearly not that fit, as it’s only a journey of about 30 miles and I met people who were travelling 2 or 3 times that distance every day. One “Canadian” I in Vietnam met told me he was travelling 100km a day which is about 62 miles in real distance. He told me he was aiming to get to Nepal, but I put a bit of a downer on his plans by explaining the situations in Burma and Tibet.
Nonetheless, it would still have been a reasonably nice cycle if the government ever lifted one of it’s stupid fat fingers to help cyclists. You’d think they’d have somewhat of an incentive to do so as we are one of the worst countries in the EU for implementing the Kyoto accord, probably because Mary Harney thinks Kyoto is a Korean town that Intel might re-locate to if we don’t bring down our corporation taxes even lower.
Our government’s neglect of cyclists is atypical by European standards. In countries like Holland and Germany there are thousands of miles of cycle path which means that older people whose reflexes and depth of vision may be compromised are able to cycle.
Here, you really need your wits about you to cycle, and if Flann O Brien or Beckett were writing their novels today, they’d be a lot shorter because their protagonists would be run over by an SUV.
Ah, SUVs. Bane of my life; polluting my air, taking up all the space on the roads; mysteriously, a couple of nights ago one owner was sitting outside my window for an hour in a particularly tank-like model with the engine running. It seemed like a crazy, inexplicable thing to do but no more than buying an SUV in the first place.
I was reading about a far-right American film festival organised by right-wing nutters who fear that Hollywood is controlled by liberal jews (I’d love if that were true) where one of the participants came out with something like: “So what if we invaded Iraq for their oil? We need their oil”
This is the way SUV owners think. They figure they must “need” a big car because there are so many other big cars out there that they’ll get killed if they get into a collision with another one while driving a small car, though god knows if they wanted to experience real danger they should try cycling. It’s the same philosophy that underlines American gun laws. It also leads to America attacking oil-rich nations so their people are slightly more safe from other Americans.
In a sane society SUV owners would be pariahs in the same way that paedophiles are now. Instead celebrities like Jay Leno and Schwarzneger boast about how big their cars are. Unfortunately it’s getting to be the same way here, and conscious of their reputation as the “Party on” party, Fianna Fail are doing piss-all to check this disturbing trend, unlike our more responsible neighbours in Britain and Italy where they make their owners pay top Euro to drive them into urban areas.
Last time I cycled down to West Cork I parked by the side of road to adjust my mp3 player and a middle-aged SUV owner blew his horn at me really loudly to warn me how dangerous it was to be listening to music when there were nutters like him on the road. Then I was cycling up last Sunday I stopped at that chip shop on the road from Bandon to Inishannon to get something to drink and noticed an SUV parked there with a family inside that were stuffing themselves with chips and their complexions suggested this wasn’t a rare occurrence. It led me to the melancholy thought that money can buy you lots of things, but not taste. Even worse was to come when I got past Inishannon and an SUV with two shaven-headed chavs drove up really close to me and blew their horn really loud and seeing my annoyance stopped long enough to gloat at my misery, though it was long enough for me to get their registration number. This sort of thing wouldn’t be tolerated in a civilised society, but in Celtic Tiger Ireland I wouldn’t even bother my arse trying to report them to the authorities.
The fact that people are even allowed drive these monsters at a young age is a fucking disgrace. There are more statistics than you can shake a stick at which prove that most accidents are caused by males under the age of 25, and more to show that people are more likely to die in a collision with an SUV than a fuel-efficient car. Recently there’s been a report that suggests that the reason males under the age of 25 kill so many people on the is that the part of their brain that deals with risk assessment isn’t fully developed. When there’s similar research about Marajuana the government wheels it out triumphantly as “Proof” that it’s draconian drug policies make sense, but with a report like this they shrug their shoulders and think about making some more TV ads.
It’s not all doom and gloom for cyclists though, as our government has signed over a lot of law-making powers to Brussels, which isn’t always a bad thing, as the EU are proposing a law which makes drivers liable in any collision with a cyclist. How great would it be if that law got passed? Then you could cycle out in the middle of the road in front of SUVs and there’d be nothing they could do to stop you.
Then they’d know what it was like to be treated with such disrespect.
www.wastemonsters.co.uk

Blair: Flair for failure

2005-04-07T15:56:00.000+01:00

Yesterday I offered myself to the people of the Anglo-Irish city of Liverpool as an Irish nationalist candidate, arguing that the people of that city had been betrayed by the Labour government and that things could only get better if the city became part of the Irish Republic.

I don’t think the people of Liverpool are alone in being betrayed by Blair’s government.

It’s pretty fashionable to say that Blair is a man who’s totally out of his depth running a major industrial nation, that he’s delegated the real running of the country to Gordon Brown whose work he takes all the credit for, that he runs the country in an undemocratic presidential style, that he’s incapable of admitting that he’s made a mistake, that he’s a stooge for neo-liberal globalistation, that he lets his ego get in the way of important foreign policy decisions and that his skills as a campaigner and presenter of policy aren’t matched by his skills as a leader.

He has his defenders as well. In Sunday’s Observer David Aaranovich launched a blistering attack on his critics, like John Lanchester I never saw that coming.

Tony is married to a catholic, so he ought to know that we sin both in our thoughts and in our words, in what we have done and in what we have failed to do. If I’d been writing this piece eight years ago, I’d be criticising the Thatcher and Major governments for the things they had done, like Smashing the Unions, destroying the public transport system and health care system, selling arms to Saddam Huessein and the House of Saud and a miriad of other things.

But just as Robert Rubin, Clinton’s first trade secretary criticised his former boss for not taking advantage of his eight years in power to do something about the massive inequality in the country and the time bomb that the country’s dependence on petrochemicals was fuelling; critics of Blair mostly argue that someone with such a huge majority shouldn’t be so satisfied with such minor victories. It’s noticeable that both Clinton and Blair’s most passionate defenders on the left can never come up with anything better than minor initiatives like Sure Start in the case of Blair or being able to come up with catchy one-liners like “I feel your pain” in the case of Clinton.

Of course their were obstacles for both of them to do anything positive, in Clinton’s case the Republican majority in both houses and in Blair’s the massive power of the Murdoch press.

The “Forces of Conservatism” of which Blair spoke in a famous early speech aren’t entirely mythical, but the sinister thing is that it’s archaic institutions like the House of Lords that have taken some of the nastier edges off some of his policies, like the Orwellian anti-terror bill.

The key to explaining paradoxes like this is that is that many people rightly associate the term conservative with being right-wing while it literally means being resitant to change no matter what side of the political spectrum it comes from, so when Blair accuses people of being conservative for opposing the removal of ancient liberties that have existed since the time of the Magna Carta he’s right on one level but there’s a cunning piece of prestigination going on that clearly goes over the head of people like Aaranovich.

Maybe I should cut his defenders some slack as they want to believe that democracy really works as it’s practiced in countries like the UK as, in theory democracy is a beautiful and noble concept. But I’m on the side of the people who scrawl on lavatory walls that if voting really changed anything they’d abolish it.

Many of the people who work within the Blair administration might think they’re genuinely forcing change, but I don’t think history works like that, that it’s really determined by social forces that politicians are powerless to effect and it’s often scientific innovation that pushes society ahead, or in the case of some recent inventions, back.

Religious types like Blair might believe in a notion of progress, indeed Blair’s own party used to sing a song about creating a shining city on a hill at their party conference. Others like myself see it as being cyclical, and argue that for the last 25 years the Anglo-Saxon nations have been moving in the direction of authoritarianism and inequality. When Blair talks about removing any vestige of Thatcherism that might be left, that’s all he’s doing: talking. He’s really the third part of an unholy trinity that began with the vindictive Thatcher herself who cast down plagues of oppression on her enemies, and continued with the meek, conciallitory, forgiving Major. This, neatly, makes Blair the Unholy spirit, which is pretty apposite as he’s kind of slippery and no-one really knows what he stands for.

Almost everything that the so-called Labour government has done is characterised by continuity with the previous administration. One of Thatcher’s most fervent beliefs was that the private sector did things better which led her to farm out many of the things that governments had taken a hand in since the Victorian era to people who had no concern other than making money, a process which Labour has mostly continued. It’s true that they did renationalise Railtrack, but that was more to do with pragmatism than ideology. Some will say that pragmatism isn’t a bad policy for a government, but when one party is ideologically right-wing and has no interest in compromise and compromise is all the other party does, the pendulum will continue drifting to the right.

This is more or less what’s happened. If you look at the figures for the gap between rich and poor they continued to widen for the first two years of Blair’s government, but then merely stabilised. When the tories get back in power, they’re going to start widening again.

People offer many different explanations for why Blair supported George Bush’s war in Iraq and gave us the bizarre spectacle of the most right-wing American president in a lifetime boasting of his friendship with the leader of the British Labour party. The Aaronovichs of the world will tell you that he really believed the universally discredited “evidence” of the existence of WMD in Iraq and yearns for the people of Iraq to live in a democracy just like the people of Britain, though he never talked about it that much before Bush got elected. Others cite Britain’s so-called “special relationship” with the US and Blair’s own massive ego, and the interests of British Oil companies.

To a history student like myself, the spate of wars that the US and UK have got involved in in the last seven years are the inevitable result of the downsizing of government over the last twenty years. When the modern state developed first in the 12th and 13th centuries, war was it’s only function and it wasn’t until after the French Revolution that governments took an interest in social affairs. After all, the French monarchy didn’t go broke because they spent all their money building hospitals for needy orphans, but on losing the 7 years war and helping the US to free itself from the British monarchy which Americans seem to have forgotten, but that’s a whole n’other story.

If you read Anthony Sampson’s book on the Arms trade, you’ll notice that before the Second World war European nations spent most of their money on arms while the US spent most of it’s money on building the country’s infrastructure, but the war completely inverted this process, with the Atlee government bringing in the golden age of Big Government in the UK which led to almost thirty years of you’ve-never-had-it-so-good social stability which broke down in the 70’s with various explanations, my favourite of which is that M15 thought the country was going socialist and engineered some catastrophic strikes.

But here’s the rub: Blair is a man with no sense of history, which is why he can’t see that he’s a merely a conduit for larger social forces. It’s this naivite that led him to think he could be the man to end the troubles in Northern Ireland and by extension the whole sorry history of Anglo-Irish conflict. In 1998 Blair came up to Belfast and all but pushed Mo Mowlam out of the way and took the credit for all her work, telling the world that the hand of history was on his shoulder.

Yet 7 years later, where has the Good Friday agreement got us? There haven’t been any more attacks on Britain by the IRA but then there was only one between 1994 an 1998. But many of the freed prisoners from both sides of the political divide have got involved in honest-to-god crime with tragic results for many people here. Then a clause in the agreement meant that anyone born on the island of Ireland could claim citizenship, which gave Micheal McDowell an excuse to bring in a raft of anti-immigrant legislation. Worse still, it means that Ireland can import toxic waste from Britain (Literally; I don’t mean the Daily Mail ) and much of it will be incinerated in the Ringaskiddy area. Thanks for poisoning me, Tone.

But Blair’s biggest failure has got to be the Fox-Hunting debacle. The Labour government devoted over 600 hours of parliamentary time over almost 8 years to this issue, and, in spite of the fact that most of them are lawyers, still totally fucked up the wording of the bill so that it’s still legal to shoot a fox and feed it to dogs.
Eight Fucking Years! In that timespan Alexander the Great conquered the known world and Napoleon made himself emperor of the part of Europe that was worth being emperor of. But Blair couldn’t even get the better of a bunch of bloodthirsty aristos.

He’ll still get re-elected of course, as the electoral system is so heavily balanced in his favour and they have the media stitched up so much that most genuine liberals are afraid to vote lib-dem because they think Charles Kennedy is a flaky alcoholic. Yet that’s the democratic system that people fought for centuries to achieve.

Right, Tone?

Seamus goes to Liverpool?

2005-04-06T17:12:00.000+01:00

A couple of weeks ago I ended a piece on Sectarian identity in Liverpool by suggesting that the city’s problems might be resolved by it becoming part of the Republic of Ireland.

I was joking of course. The logistics involved in building border crossings everywhere would be enough of a deterrent by themselves, though this wouldn’t be so much of an issue if Ireland and the UK both signed up to Schengen, which is of course an other issue entirely.

As well as this, in spite of the city’s predominant Catholicism and Celtic heritage and the contempt for which Westminister governments have displayed for this once-great city, most Liverpudlians probably think of themselves as being British, though not to the extent that some people in places like Burnley and Blackburn do, though what could stop them from bringing a big bag of doorknobs over to Liverpool to introduce to any Irish nationalist candidate? (I could be facetious and say the parlous state of British public transport, but I won’t.)

But the more I’ve thought about it, the more I’ve realised that it’s not really that absurd after all, when you consider that Britain owns a bit of Spain, which in turn owns a bit of Morocco, which in turn owns Western Sahara. The difference is, of course, that while Liverpudlians are “owned” by the British state in a very real sense as the UK is very obviously a monarchical state, if Liverpool was part of the Irish republic they’d be citizens who’d get a chance to vote for their head of state every 14 years or so.

The dog’s breakfast that Charles and Camilla have made of their wedding plans has given a fillip to the Republican movement in Britain, which I’ve always had sympathy for, but the monarchy isn’t going to dissapear any time soon, because, as Johhny Rotten sang, those tourists are money.

The reason I support groups like Republic is partly because if there was a genuine debate in Britain about becoming republican, people might start to know what the word meant and then they might feel silly claiming that the Republic of Ireland was part of the United Kingdom. (I don’t think it would stop them altogether). As well as that, the loyalists in the north of Ireland wouldn’t have a Queen to be loyal to.

I was going to get to that, wasn’t I? It’s obviously central to my argument that a bit of North-western Ireland is still part of the UK even though only half of it’s inhabitants claim British ancestry, whereas a much higher proportion of her majesty’s Liverpool subjects have Irish ancestry. If someone could draw attention to this by standing as an Irish nationalist candidate in Liverpool it’s possible that they could make some of the northern loyalists realise how ridiculous their position is. (I stress the word possible, as if the coverage of the Pope’s death in the British media doesn’t make them see the absurdity of their position, it’s hard to see what could.) It would also draw attention to the Republic’s shameful treatment of it’s emigrants. Then, if that person got elected, how bad would that be? More candidates could follow suit, and who knows, maybe even hold the balance of power in a few years?

Liverpool voters are clearly looking for a candidate to rally around. After years of neglect by the Thatcher and Major governments, the Blair administration thanked the people of the city by betraying it’s dockworkers, then in 2001 added insult to injury by parachuting millionaire aristocrat Shaun Woodward into one of the town’s constituencies, dragging along every single-issue left-wing candidate into the city in his wake, though, disappointingly he still got elected to represent a government which hasn’t done a whole lot for the city.

Then, after watching the first half of Liverpool’s heroic victory over Juventus last night, inspired by fans singing the fields of Athenry, and then turned over to Sky News at half time to hear that the election was called, I wondered why I couldn’t be a left-wing single issue candidate in Liverpool. Obviously I’m not a subject of the UK, and even more obviously I’d have no wish to be. The prospect of being beaten up by the BNP doesn’t appeal to me so much either, though I’ve been beaten up by English fascists before and lived to tell the tale.

It’s a shame that while Irish emigrants to America managed to hold on to their identity, many of those who went to England were so scared by the “No Irish, No Blacks, No Dogs” signs that they gave up their identity in a way that people from of Afro-Caribean origin and their domestic pets couldn’t.

Yet the ambivalent attitude that the rest of England has to the city of Liverpool is surely rooted in race. While they’re quite happy to take the credit for The Beatles and the local, non-Everton soccer team, most of the population of the country sees the town as being crime-ridden and it’s residents as being pugnacious idiots who exist purely for their amusement and as subjects for their condesencion. Which is pretty much how most English people see Ireland, in spite of the fact that the Republic is richer than the UK and the rate of violent crime is far lower. It’s pretty obvious to me that the reason so many British governments have neglected the city is because they don’t see it as being part of England at all, that the Irish immigrants who came over there in the nineteenth century may have had a function once but now their children are abandoned to live on the meagre benefits that the state throws at them.

For those of you that don’t know, benefits are about 30% higher in Ireland than in the UK. The minimum wage is about 20%, corporation tax is lower which makes it more attractive for foreign investment and unemployment is much lower, even before you consider the massive fraud of having so many people, especially former miners, on incapacity benefit. Rather than smash trade unions as the UK did, Irish governments of the 80’s and ‘90s developed a complex social partnership system which was the basis for the country’s current economic success.

I’m sure I’m not the only one who thinks that we should share the benefit of our new-found wealth with our cousins abroad, and I’m equally sure there must be at least a few people of Irish stock in Liverpool and elsewhere in the UK who want to live in a Republic where the only queen they have to offer any allegiance to is Paul O Grady.

Eamon de Valera and others often suggested that the solution to Northern Ireland’s problems was to exchange the protestant population their for the Irish community in Britain, which the Brits always dismissed as being impractical. My proposal instead offers a chance for Liverpudlians to come back to Ireland without even having to move.

Who wants to help me? All you’ve got to do is put me up in a place in Liverpool between now and May 5 and feed me lots of vegetarian food. I’ll pay my own deposit, which hopefully I’ll get back.

Hope to hear from you scousers out there, aw’right?

Next: Pope George Ringo

2005-04-04T16:01:00.001+01:00

It's been hard to avoid mention of Pope John Paul II in the last few days, especially if you live here in Ireland, for which the Pope had a special place in his heart, having spent a week here in 1979.

We gave him quite a welcome here, it seems, with about 40% of our population coming out to see him when he appeared in Dublin, Drogheda and Limerick. When I found out that he never came to Cork that was probably the moment that started me on the path to athieism.

I joke, of course, though I wish some of the people writing encomia to him were as well, though it's obvious that they're serious. The funny thing is that when many famous figures die unexpectedly newspapers rush out obituaries that might be way out of date, but the Pope's death was a foretold one but they could have used some old ones anyway as the Pontiffs pontifications have been pretty much the same for the last twenty years.

One pundit claimed that JP2 was totally ill at ease in the modern world, as if he was living in a monastery in the side of a rock living on wild berries and not someone who travelled round to almost every country in the world and then get carted around in a state-of-the-art popemobile.

Another told us what a great man he was to kiss the ground in Scotland thus acknowledging that it was a different country to England. I think it was really because he was told that the dust on the airport pavement was the most nutricious food he could get in that country, and if he'd eaten one of their deep-fried Mars bars people would have been wheeling out those obits a long while back.

Others give him credit for ending communism by giving financial and moral support to Solidarity and by refusing to apease communism the same way previous popes had appeased Nazism.They're the people with the sort of simplistic notion of history that probably expected the problems of Poland and other Eastern European countries to be magicked away when they became good capitalists like ourselves. Instead, many of them come here seeking a better life, and it's the same people that welcomed John Paul to Ireland that voted against European expansion, often because of their oppostion to abortion.

Being educated in a Convent school, you get an impression of what it's like when a group of elderly men in Rome decide how you lead your life. One of the nuns who taught me showed us some pictures of a Polish dude at various stages of his life. It obviuosly turned out to be JP, though it wasn't obvious to most of us until we saw snaps of him in his 40's, though the Sister claimed she knew him from the pic of 14-year-old Karol. That seemed freaky to me but then she's a bride of Christ and JP was Jesus' point man down here on the Earth that the pontiff kissed so extensively, so it all made some sort of sense to her.

Then there was my religion teacher who wouldn't decide on any moral issue until she read the Vatican's opinion. It's true that there are a lot of complex moral issues out there but I don't know if some aging clerics are the right people to delegate the job of deciding what's wrong and what's right, particularly when the book they base their judgments on was written between two and three thousand years ago. (For a left winger like me it's a bit easier: I find out what George Bush or the Daily Telegraph thinks and think the opposite.)

When the Bible was written, the Jews were hunter-gatherers being chased round the desert by various pastoralists like the Babylonians, Egyptians and Romans and were always just on the edge of extinction, which is why they had to develop such strict laws encouraging early marraige. The contrast with Buddhism, for example is striking, as the countries that practiced it never faced the threat of extinction, so, for example, they have no proscription against masturbation as it doesn't really hurt anyone.

Times change, though, and whereas the Jews have come perilously close to extinction more than once, the same can't be said of Catholics, who number around 1.2 billion at the moment, and are growing fast. Most of this growth is in places where people most need spiritual sustinence, like Africa, but the Catholic Church thanks Africans for their often zealous support by refusing to allow them to use contraception. As a result the population of Africa is projected to rise to 2.3 Billion in 2100, a 23-fold increase since 1870. The only thing that's keeping it in check is AIDS, which will continue to cause misery for millions as long as the Church opposes condoms.

Unless you take Genesis 1:28 seriously, this can't be a good thing, but the problem is that many Vatican clerics do, that they genuinely think that we can keep using up the Earth's resources indefinately and that God will provide for us. Others believe that the end of the world is actually a good thing, as then they'll all be beamed up to heaven in the Rapture. I've got news for them: The book of Revelations, from which this theory was culled, was written under the influence of hallucinigenic drugs.

Those of us who believe that the Earth is a complicated and interdependent system and recognise that our lifestyle isn't sustainable can only hope that the people of Africa realise that their own belief systems pre-date Christianity by thousands of years and that Religion is merely another form of imperialism.

If, like me, you don't want Africa or Asia to become unsustainably over-populated there are some positive things you can do, like donating money to the international planned parenthood federation. Or you could just buy a big box of condoms and send them to a village in Africa.

I'm hopeful that the modern world will reciprocate the Vatican's contempt for it, particularly as the new Pope is almost certain to be a conservative, but the signs aren't that good. It may seem to us here in Western Europe, even in a largely religous country like Ireland that the influence of the church is on the wane, that shopping or football might be the new religions, but elsewhere religous fundamentalists are outbreeding the rest of us as they get married earlier and don't use contraception.

This is Pope John Paul's legacy. The papacy used to be a great world power, but now their influence is limited to woman's wombs. Unfortunately this is where babies come from who grow up to be adults who use up a share of the Earth's dwindling resoursces.

Some things do get better though: During the investiture controversy a "Holy" "Roman" "Emperor" was forced to kneel naked in the snow to beg for the pope's forgivness, but now I'm able to criticise him to my heart's content.
Along with the rise of the Evangelical Right in the US and militant Islam, he's helped to bring about the end of humanity from chronic overpopulation.

Yet I doubt anyone mentioned this in the hours and hours of coverage the Pope's death recieved on RTE, which shows we've got a long way to go before we become a truly secular nation.

What's the dirt on Bert, baldy?

2005-04-01T16:48:00.000+01:00

I hate to see a man being kicked when he's down, so now that Michael McDowell is eating humble pie (No, it's humble pie, Mary) after his humiliating climbdown on immigration and the even more humilating Brinks Theft, I'm not going to point out that he's a fat, bald egomaniac who looks like Martin Boorman and has yellow teeth.

Maybe after €2.7 million was stolen the other day McDowell will be able to empathise with those people who've had their freedom stolen by his Garda goons and been sent back to Africa. Maybe he knows how those of who value civil liberties that we had even in the dark days when John McQuaid had a veto over the government feel when McDowell sneaks in and steals them in the name of protecting us from a non-existant terrorist threat.

It was sickening to those of us who base our opinions on reason rather than prejudice to hear McDowell's cold-blooded defence of his initial refusal to let Elukanlo Ulonkunle back into the country. He's a man that almost started crying when he found out what happened to Jean McConville 30 years ago, yet when he's faced with the dilemma of an African youth today he suddenly changes into his cold pragmatist hat.

Few in the Irish political establishment in the Republic have any time for Sinn Fein and even their defenders can say little in defence of some of their actions. Yet no-one can defer to Mickey McD in their visceral hatred for the organisation. Yet the more I hear him criticise the Shinners, the more I suspect that he's secretly jealous of the arbitrary powers they give themselves and would love if he could unleash the gardai on immigrants with complete lack of concern for due process.

The robbery a few days ago should be a wake-up call for Fatty McDowell, as that robbery happened in the country with the second highest proportion of police officers in the OECD, but most of them are employed bullying immigrants and small-time drug dealers. To top it all, Boorman-boy spent €12 million and one third of the gardai in the country protecting George Bush and Condoleeza Rice from tree-huggging hippies like myself.

Instead, he blames the private security firms that fill the gap left by his catastrophic misuse of resources. It's odd that the PDs insist that the private sector do everything better but don't seem to know how to react when this argument is proved to be as flabby as Mickey McD or Fatty Harney's belly.

The week before McDowell's fervently held-belief that he represents the views of the plain people of Ireland, to whom he stands up against tree-hugging, muesli-eating liberal elitists in RTE, the Irish Times and the Sunday Tribune was also given the lie by pupil power in Dublin. Watching those Dublin students on TV made me prouder to be Irish than any time for a while. There's a theory that opressed peoples all secretly desire to be opressors themselves and the Israeli government are always happy to provide them with evidence. I'd always thought we were different but for a while there it seemed that we were more like the Nestor figure in Ulysses who insisted that the only reason we never persecuted jews was that we never let them in. It seemed that we were quite happy to donate shit-loads of money to African children even when the country was a basket-case, but that we didn't want any Africans in their own back yard. It doesn't seem like that to me any more, especially after another community in Mayo, an area with little history of multi-culturalism are sticking up for another immigrant.

This won't stop McDowell from pandering to any lingering latent rascism. Though I disagree with everything he says about everything, I admit that like my grandfather would have said, he's a clever man who has complex views on the state and what it's role is relative to the people that it governs. It seems that when it comes to alcohol, drugs and pornography he thinks that it's the state's role to protect us from ourselves which is why we have among the harshest laws in the west on all those issues. Yet on issues like immigration he feels it incumbent upon himself to pander to our darkest, most negative instincts.

Of course, he feels he's entitled to do this, as unlike Sinn Fein, RTE, or people sitting around in internet cafes like myself, he's a member of a democratically elected goverment. This is presumably why any time anyone challenges him about any of his fascistic policies. I guess he's able to block out the fact that only about 3% of the population actually voted for the PDs. The funny thing is that it's usually people who live in working-class areas that vote for fascist parties as they're the people that actually have to live among immigrants , but most PD voters come from middle class areas like South Dublin.

So why does a party with so little support have so much power? It's a question that Michael McDowell should answer when he claims to be defending democracy against the likes of Sinn Fein and Al-Quaeda. How did he get such an important post only weeks after comparing Bertie Ahern to Ceaucescu?

In the early days of the internet there used to be a site called cogair.ie., cogair, of course, being the Irish for Whisper. Run by journos who knew stuff that they couldn't print because of our insane libel laws.

One persistant rumour was that Bertie wife left him not because of mutual differences but because he was beating the crap out of her.

If a high-powered lawyer like McDowell knew something about this that the rest of us didn't, that would make it really hard for Bert to give the PDs, who're becoming an increasing electoral liability, the heave-ho, wouldn't it?

But then, if it ever came out that our so-called minister was blackmailing our leader, that wouldn't look good for McDowell, or for the other two members of the anti-holy trinity that run our couuntry, Mary Harney and Micheal O Leary.

But sadly for Mary Harney, Humble Pie is a strictly metaphorical type of pie.

Rice Stirs Chinese

2005-03-23T15:36:00.000Z

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?

2005-03-21T16:37:00.000Z

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

2005-03-19T16:44:00.000Z

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

2005-03-14T16:11:00.000Z

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

2005-03-11T15:57:00.000Z

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

2005-03-04T16:51:00.000Z

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

2005-03-03T16:17:00.000Z

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!

2005-03-02T15:46:00.000Z

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

Death to the United Provinces of Smugness

2005-02-17T16:01:00.000Z

In the dissapointing third installment of the Austin Powers trilogy, there's one funny moment when Austin's father, played by Michael Caine tells us that there's two things he cant stand: people who're intolerant of other cultures - and the Dutch.

It's funny because while there's never been any love lost between the English, French and Germans, most of it's managed to bypass the low countries, with Holland in particular regarded by many people as having an ideal balance in the way it runs it's country and it's people regarded as relaxed and tolerant, while their neighbours are percieved as being arrogant (Britain), Rude (France), or German (Germany).

While Dutch people are generally polite, probably the most annoying thing about them, apart from their language, is the smugness. While it's true that they have much to be smug about, living as they do in one of the most open and equitable societies in the world, sometimes their attitude to the rest of the world can be extremely grating. When I was working as a horticultural technician for arond 55% of what was the statutory minimum wage in the country at the time, my boss managed to reinforce the stereotype of smugness as well as parsimony by lecturing me endlessly on the situation in Northern Ireland. There was little point in telling him that the homicide rate was higher in Amsterdam than in Belfast, or that the conflict in the North really had nothing to more to do with me than the conflict in East Timor had to do with him.

What was most curious was that told me that they used to have the same sort of problems way back when, as if I hadn't got the point that their society was generally more advanced in every way. I remember my father had been to the Netherlands a few years earlier, and he faced the same anti-Irish prejudice. He told me that they were stunned by his intelligence, which he didn't mean as any sort of boast, just that they imagined that we were all idiots because we were so much poorer than them at the time.

We're richer now, so we must suddenly have got smarter in the last ten years.

I'm still wondering what those ethnic problems they used to have were. Was it when the Germans invaded their country in the 40's, or the French in the 1790's, or the Spanish in the 15th and 16th century? I'm pretty sure if the area near the German border was still part of Germany and half the population were German and they marched under nazi flags on Hitler's birthday the Dutch natives wouldn't lay down and accept this, though that was the premise of all his endless condesencion.

Yet in the years that followed the war some unspeakably terrible things happened in Indonesia, though they've more or less gotten away with them as they suffered so much under the nazis. It wasn't that they were repressed that much, it's just that Holland had a history of being an imperial power and being a colony was a bit much for it to take. The odd thing is that it's colonial empire was based on sand as they would have been invaded by Germany a long time before if it had been a unified state, and it was protected from France by a natural border with France in the shape of a big soggy marsh which froze over in 1795 allowing the French Revolutionary directory to take over their country virtually instanteneously. When you know stuff like this, their smugness seems a lot less justified.

Yet I'm sure that if I went there again right now, I'd encounter the same prejudices. I can console myself by saying that they're probably just jealous that we're so much richer than them and have so much more literary talent. After all, Holland's most famous writer was a 13-year-old German girl. (They do have lots of good painters). And we're richer than them. Did I mention that? We have more of the one thing Dutch people like most - money.

And, Oh, I almost forgot, theirs is the country that has more chance of ethnic conflict in the short-term. Just as their empire in the past was based on sand, the facade of liberlism is based on the exploitation of immigrants from places like Morocco and Kurdistan. So there probably wouldn't be a million dutch on permanent sick leave sitting around smoking dope if there wasn't the same number of immigrants willing to work in their place. Clearly the Dutch authorities must have thought that the immigrants would merely fight among themselves like they always do, after all that was how their countries got colonised in the first place. Instead, it seems many of them have links to organistions like Al-Queada.

The chickens started to come home to roost when Pim Fortuyn, a bald, homosexual, rascist (only in Holland) who insisted that the country was "full" got killed a few years ago. Next up was Theo Van Gogh, a filmaker who said that Islam was a "retarded" religion. (He has a point)

I'm afraid that something has to be done about these awful Dutch people fighting each other. Perhaps the British Army should intervene and stop them, they've done such a good job in the North. Of course, the Irish army have an excellent record in peacekeeping missions abroad, and wouldn't the irony be piquant.

But, with the revelation that the man who sold chemical weapons to Sadamm Hussein was also Dutch, perhaps they're going to face a war from George W Bush. The country seems to fit all the criteria for invasion, it gives comfort to terrorists by giving them employment and supplies arms to terrorist regimes.

It wouldn't be that hard to put together a coalition of the willing. Britain is no problem, Bush just has to go down to the butchers and get a nice bone for Tone. Germany might come on board as they've never forgiven Frank Rikhard for that incident in the 1990 world cup. Even France might join as they used to own Holland before and Louis Napoleon might have been concieved in the Royal Palace in Amsterdam. Spain, too, has a proud history of Holland-owning.

Though Holland is an advanced industrial economy, invading it would be relatively easy, as much of the country is under water. In fact, if Bush wants to destroy this hotbed of terrorism, he should just let Americans pump greenhouse gases into the athmosphere as much as they want and Holland will eventually sink.

Which is pretty much what he's doing already.

Maybe he's smarter than I gave him credit for.

Ken Sees Red

2005-02-16T15:50:00.000Z

I used to live with a guy who grew up in the pre-Celtic tiger years who, like many Irish people of his generation was forced by economic circumstances to go and live in the UK. He found himself living on the streets of London and heard that there was an Irish centre there where he might find accomodation. After queueing for hours he finally got to meet the man behind the desk, who was none other than the then leader of the now defunct Greater London Council, Ken Livingstone.

It's a tribute to a man that must have had a busy schedule at that time that he was willing to take time out to help members of an ethnic minority in this way. Ken is often accused of egocentricity, yet when he was leader of the GLC in the late 70's and early 80's he was only paid £6,000 a year, about as much as someone playing for Birmingham City gets every week these days.

He's consistently shown himself to have a much better understanding of polictics and economics than a lot of people on the labour front bench today and if he'd lived in an age when ideas counted more than image or spin, he could be in a position of genuine policitcal influence rather than the joke job of mayor of London.

It's a job somewhat akin to being leader of the Palestinian Authority, with all responsiblity and no power. For example, when Ken was forced to cover his ass after the Madrid bombing, the otherwise wonderful activist site Alternet accused him of scaremongering.

Even though the Labour Leadership fought tooth and nail to stop him becoming mayor, his election may have worked to labour's advantage as he alllows some to indulge in the fantasy that labour are still a left wing party. When he expressed some sympathy for the May Day marchers a few years ago the Daily Telegraph got it's knickers in a twist, as it has somewhat of a prediliction for doing.

This week, though, Blair will be wishing that it was Buster Merryfield lookalike Frank Norris that got the job. Ken's gotten himself into a spot of bother by accusing a Daily Mail journalist of being a Nazi.

That seems like a reasonable enough accusastion to me. When I read Micheal Burleigh's The Third Reich: A New History, I was somwhat sceptical of his assertion that the Germans blamed their defeat in the first world war on the fact that the British had better propaganda. I was somewhat sceptical about this but then I was staying with some German friends and flicked through a calender with a photograph commerating what happened every day in history. On One page there was a picture of the Mail which that day was leading with a story that went something like: "Government plans to reduce age of consent for gays - SHOCK!" I wondered why the extension of gay rights in England could be of such concern to Germans, but it turned out that they were commerorating the birth of Viscount Rothermere, the founder of the newspaper, who had such an impact on their own countries history.

During the first world war, the Mail used to print stories about German soldiers eating babies which a newly literate but hardly disciminating working class lapped up. After the war Josef Goebbels studied their methods and realised that if you kept telling people the same thing, even something ludicrous like that Germans are the master race, they'd eventually believe it, and he turned out to be right. The Bush administration uses similar tactics when dealing with the US public, as does the contemporary Mail when dealing with issues like immigration.

The Mail has never been as much of a friend to the Irish as Ken has (to put it mildly), so I'm more inclined to take his side. During the second world war, they portrayed De Valera riding a donkey to "satirise" his policy of neutrality. It's sister paper, the London Evening Standard was even nastier when it, at the height of the troubles in the North, it printed a cartoon of a horror film simply titled The Irish. This is exactly the sort of thing that the Nazis used to do, and if you study what they write about immigrants and what the Nazis used to say about gypsies, you find find any great fundamental difference. So I agree with Ken when he says that their staff would have been the first to collaborate with the Nazis if they'd won the war, though I suspect the Telegraph would have been jostling in the Queue.

Yet Ken is being asked, even by the Guardian, to apologise. Why on Earth should he? Have they ever apologised to him for helping Margeret Thatcher to cripple the GLC, or for saying that he's too irresponsible to be mayor? For that matter, have they ever apologied to anyone for anything they've ever said, ever, except when losing a libel appeal? Not that I'm aware of. Tony Blair's request that he, like, y'know, says sorry shows him to be paranoid about the pernicious influence of the Mail, even though his party is way ahead in the polls and the worst thing that can happen him is a shrinking of his majority which might lead him to need to appease the left of his own party.

Yet for real chutzpah, would you Adam and Eve this article from the Telegraph, which argues that this event represents a new rudeness in British politics for which labour are mainly responsible. So I guess it must not have been Margeret Thatcher who shouted "Out, Out, Out", or Michael Howard who told single mothers to go and live in the gutter. Or John Major who described his cabinet colleauges as "Bastards". Or William Hague who goes round telling rascist jokes. Or Nicholas Ridley who accused the Germans of trying to take over Europe. Or Norman Tebbit who told unemployed people to get on their bikes. Or Micheal Heseltine who twice stormed out of interviews.

As to whether this will affect London's chances of hosting the next Olympics, well, Paris is a far more beautiful city with better infrastructure, existing stadia and a better location. But in London it's much easier to get drugs. So even after Ken's faux pas and the Mail's puerile reaction, maybe they have a chance.

Fox News: You're still all going to die

2005-02-15T15:21:00.000Z

Some of the many articles I've read on the subject of Fox-Hunting over the last seven years have suggested that the "sport" is a sort of displacement activity, a connection with the visceral that many upper class people would otherwise lack in their lives.

One typically arrogant, right-wing hunter, Roger Scruton argues that's it's the things that repel other people about the "sport"; the blood, gore, and suffering, that draw him to the sport, as he sees little of this in his career as a right-wing "philosopher". I can see where he's coming from as he obviously lives in a world where there's so little excitement or danger, but he'd have more of a point if there was any danger in the "sport" to anyone other than the fox.

Perhaps Scruton should give a torque wrench to some eco-warriors and agree to let him have a two minute head start to be chased around South London. Then he'd enjoy a real sense of danger, I'm pretty sure.

Scruton is a "philosopher" who thinks that people shouldn't have sex before marraige as it weakens what he percieves to be traditional roles for males and females. He thinks the sexual freedom of our age is responsible for a breakdown in western values, etc, etc.
It takes a special kind of arrogance to think that while killing a small, defenceless, animal is a "connection to the visceral" while having promiscuous sex is morally indefensible.
He also argues that the rituals around hunting are another tradition worth preserving as they represent a bond with the nation's past as if the "sport" has achieved legitimacy just by being old and having the state's seal of approval. Perhaps he thinks promiscuous sex is alright in the context of a arab harem as well.

Our own Fox-Hunting advocate, Kevin Myers seems to come from a similar position.

It would be flippant to say that some people enjoy the viscerality of sex while others get the same adreniline rush from violence, as if the issue of consent never arose.
Yet it's undoubtedly true that fox hunting is still popular among the British upper classes, a set of people with a reputation for prudishness and anal retentivity that's not totally undeserved.
Milan Kundera has a joke in one of his books where an English Lord says to the wife: "I do hope you're pregnat my dear. I'd hate to go through those bizarre motions again."
So perhaps many English foxes have died because English aristocrats weren't at ease with their sexuality, having been handed over to wet nurses while their mothers agonised over what time of day to have tea.

The irony is, by killing foxes, they push up the rabbit population, and, as we all know, rabbits fuck like... um, I'm lost for similes.

More importantly, though, what are we to make of Prince Charles current engagement? He's a traditional English upper-class sort and it's possible that he's never had sex with a woman that he's not married to, though when you see some of the things that his kids get up to, you wish he never had sex within marraige either. He's also been a keen hunter, though he acknowleges that parliment is the legitimate government of the country and has agreed to obey the law. Yet only a week before it comes into "force", he gets engaged.
The ironic thing was that he caught a fox 25 years ago when he married Diana but never seemed to appriciate how lucky he was to married to such a babe. Now that the dogs can't go out hunting any more, he's had to take one of them home with him.

I'd hate to be the royal photogarpher that has to capture Camilla Parker Bowles' inner beauty. I'd hate to be a father who used to call his daugther "princess" as this may have been a compliment when Diana was his wife but in future it may be considered libelous.

The odd thing is that while Al-Quaeda await the date of the wedding - actually, Osama, I think you're past it, you're scared of the British security forces and you're going to let the chance to kill loads of patriotic brits gathered in one place pass you by - Prince Charles could probably get away with hunting all along, as the Police have declared it a "low priority" and argue that it would be impossible to enforce. Call me a sceptic if you like, but it seems to me that they manage to apprehend a huge amount of illegal drugs which are detectable only by the most sophisticated survelliance techniques, they have so many security cameras around the place that the average Londoner is filmed 1000 times a day, yet they say they can't be expected to locate a huge convoy of horses, dogs, and oh, guns?

This latest development is a serious kick in the teeth for labour supporters, many of whom are genuine humanitarians, though some are motivated by mere class hatred, which I have no issue with. They've waited nearly eight years for the government to give them this one scrap and when they do it's not even to be enforced properly.

This is desperatly dissaponting to me. I was looking forward to seeing English aristos crushed by the same jackboot that's persecuted miners, eco-warriors and anti-globalistion protestors in the past. The fact that they show such deference to the upper classes shows that they're a nation locked in the past no matter how the government tries to portray the country as being modern and enlightened. I hope that enough Labour supporters in Britain will be dissapointed enough to register their anger at the ballot box in May.

This course of action isn't available to us here, as Fianna Fail have never shown any interest in the issue and the only alternative is..... Fine Gael.

But at least the hunt sabateours who're so experienced at breaking up hunts might come over here and help us to end this barbaric practice.

Hold on, people, waste management is a subject that affects the whole planet!

2005-02-14T15:46:00.001Z

In Don DeLillo's masterly novel Underworld there's a section where he deals with waste. Trash, garbage, detritus. It's a more interesting subject that people might imagine. He takes the view that the transition from pre-history to history took place when people started discarding things which gave future generations a clue to how they lived. It also represented the point at which we started to see ourselves as being outside nature and saw the earth as being something that was there for us to exploit, a belief we subsequently reified through the invention of religion.

Heaven only knows what whatever the amoeba evolve into after we are all gone will make of us. We make stuff from minerals that we find under the ground, package them in other minerals that we find under the ground, then when we are finished with it we dig another big hole in the ground and throw it all into it. They'll wonder how any civilisation who dealt with the Earth in that way could have lasted so long; excpet of course that post-industrial cilivisation has only lasted around 200 years and it may not last that long again. Then again, Human consciousness has only existed for 30,000 years at most, so it's possible that if any other life form develops they'll see us the way we see the way we see the meteor that killed off the dinosaurs.

That's something to think about next time you throw a used condom into the bin. Unfortunately I'm thinking about waste an awful lot lately, becuase I live in the northside of Cork and people are refusing to pay bin charges and the waste is really starting to pile up and stink the place up.

It's getting to be a bit like London in the 70's, or that Simpsons episode where Homer gets on the wrong side of City Hall and they refuse to pick up his waste.
A few things struck me about that episode, for instance the Simpsons kept using disposable nappies when clearly it would have made more sense to use old-fashioned cloth nappies in the circumstances. It's neatly symbolic of how we've become locked in to an endless cycle of generating waste.

In Britain in the 70's the binmen went on strike for ages. It could have provided an oppurtunity to start looking at waste in a different way, to stop even calling it waste and to start looking at it more as a resource, as they still do in many Eastern countries. In Tibet, cadavers are fed to birds of prey, and in most of India vegetable waste is eaten by cows who convert it into fertiliser. Needless to mention, this way of thinking was alien to the high anglican cleaniness-is-next-to-godliness Margeret Thatcher, who thought smashing the unions was the answer, and though the bins did get picked up it did nothing to solve the long term problems of waste management.

Clearly people in the Northside of Cork have learned nothing from this, choosing to respond to the ham-fisted way the City Corporation has imposed bin charges by leaving all their trash out on the street and hope that city hall will eventually give in, though there's no sign of them backing down as of yet. When the summer comes and tourist agencies for flies start telling them that Cork is the new Calcutta, it might be a different story for the people running the soi-dissant City of Culture, though they might persuade visitors that the piles of trash are some sort of outsider art project, which in a very loose sense I suppose they are.

Though I have little support for either side in this stand-off, I joined the protest in Cork last weekend. I kind of joined in the chanting, though I could never summon the same sort of wrath I could for the Iraq war and occupation. At one stage I started my own comically prolix chant, which went something like "What do we want? An integrated and environmentally sustainable waste management policy! When do we want it? Now!" The organisers weren't amused. Neither were the cops, of whom there were enough to clean up the streets (in a literal sense) if they weren't expressly prohibited by law from doing so. The really Orwellian thing is that while anyone advertising a demo by handing out fliers can get nicked for littering, the government have washed their hands of any responsibilty for keeping the streets clean.

I'm actually in favour of the polluter pays principle, the problem is that while they're charging €5 per bin, the initial charge is €255, so a household only has to pay twice as much if they fill a bin every week than if they only fill it once a year. As well as this, while the government endlessly shows ads telling us to recycle stuff, they rely on the private sector to take care of it, as they seem to have got it into their heads that these people are selfless altruists for whom making money is a serendipitous epiphenomon. And it's ordinary consumers that are being picked on, not big business or construction.

I've been making an effort to recycle my stuff for years, but it ain't easy. Ireland is one of the worst countries in Europe for recylcing and Cork is one of the worst cities in the country for people who don't want to throw stuff out.
I wish the government would stop waiting for those nice capitalists who love the Earth so much to take care of the problem and do something themelves. I wish they's discourage all the superfluous packaging that makes consumers lives more difficult in every way and get newspaper publishers to stop having so many supplements, especially motoring supplements, which no-one reads (as far as I know)

Not that recycling isn't profitable, though. Rumour has it that while we see all that plastic that our consumer goods get stuffed into as waste, those resorceful Chinese see it as a resource. If recycling companies can do a deal with them, the whole process will go like this:

1. Company makes product, puts it into packaging, which is referred to as "adding value", though really there're just adding cost.

2.Company sells prodcut to consumer, charging extra for the packaging.

3. Consumer a) throws stuff into bin, contributing to waste Charges, or
b) gives it to recylcing company who take it for free, which looks like they're doing you a favour, then

4. They sell it to Chinese guys at a massive profit, they reconstitute it, sell it to companies and the cycle goes back to 1.

Everyone's a winner, except the consumer who gets fucked over at every stage, and the people whose countries get invaded to provide the oil to make the plastics and the people who's trees get cut down to provide the paper, and living organisms that need oxygen to breath.

This bigger picture is one many bin charge protestors seem to miss. When Joe Higgins of the Socialist party was in Cork he showed himself to extremely well informed about environmantal aspects of waste management, but I got the impression from local counciller Mick Barry that he wanted people to recycle stuff just to get out of paying bin charges.

It's this sort of tunnel vision that's leading to rubbish pile up on the streets, though, like in that Simpsons episode, the solution is pretty simple. If the Corporation just gave a complete waiver to anyone on disabilty, charged a resonable price, and made sure everyone had access to recycling bins, all but the most hard-core refusniks would comply.

Yet it seems to me that we're a city of Homers with no level-headed Marge among us.

Rice Curies favour - But not with me

2005-02-11T14:06:00.000Z

This week Marshall McLuhan must be laughing so much in his grave that the locals must be aboot to go down to the mounties and ask what all those funny sounds from the graveyard are, eh?
Marshall, if you're not dead, I'm desperately sorry.
McLuhan was the man who told us that the medium was the message and predicted pretty accurately in my humble estimation, that as we became more saturated with media information, the shorter our collective attention spans became.
Couldn't help thinking of this when I read some of the encomia that greeted the arrival of the new American secretary of state in Europe this week.
After Colin Powell resigned I put up some snide insinuations that she and Bush might be having some sort of affair.
I think the internet was invented for stuff like this that would never see the light of day in any print medium.
I'm less sure about the nature of their relationship now. It seems that W was introduced to Rice in 1998 by his much more moderate and sane father (that, as you know, aint saying a great deal) who realised that his so was the Republican party's choice and wanted a relative moderate on his team as a counterweight to some of the neo-cons like Rumsfeld and Wolfowitz.
The key word here is "relative". While Rice may be moderate compared to the people I mentioned, this is clearly no great feat.
Remember that when the Bush administration was trying to convince the world that it was the "moderate" Miss Rice that warned the world the smoking gun might be a mushroom cloud? I sure as fuck haven't, but it seems that some European journalists who've been seduced by the "mood music" emanating from her general direction. Even on the supposedly left-wing Guardian people were at least suggesting that she should be given a chance.
When the Bush administration were asked by the UN and the government of every civilised country in the world to give the UN weapons inspectors a chance, Rice told the world to go and take a flying fuck, or words to that general effect. So why should we listen to her now?
One possible answer is that the poor old people of Palestine have been through so much that any straw that seems to offer a chance a peace should be grasped, that a starving man doesn't care where his food is coming from.
I'd go along with this general line of argument I had enough trust in the Bush administration to think their words might mean something.
Yet it's important to realise where the Bush adminsitration are coming from on the Middle Eastern question.
Around 50 milion Americans believe in the Rapture, which means that they think if they've led good lives and not watch Sex and the City or go around with any underwear on display
then God will lift them up to heaven and leave sinners like myself behind. They believe that a sign that the rapture is going to come is when Israel regains all it's Biblical lands.
It doesn't seem to matter to Rice that many of the people who believe this are the same people who were bullying her when she was an African-American growing up in the archetypal hick state of Alabama.
Not that Rice is above accusing people of Rascism when she wants to get her way: "don't impugn my integrity" is her among her favourite phrases.
Coming from the background that she did, she ought to be able to able to sympathise with the Palestinians , but the truth is that even if she does care about them, it would be political suicide for Bush to allow the creation of an independent Palestine, as the shocking truth is that 9% of Americans already think Bush is too much of a lefty and if many of them desert him then people will start to get suspicious when the disparities between the opinion polls and election results get really big?
So why all the sweet talk?
Have a read of Ron Suskind's book on Paul O Neill
to get a sense of what the answer might be. It's revealing of what both Bush's attitude to Israel is - apparently he favoured a complete pull-out of peace-keeping troops as he thought this might help "clarify things" and the Machiavellian political tactics that the Bush team employ. It seems that they appointed him just so they could get their insane tax cuts past senate and congress, which given that he too had a reputation as a "moderate", he was able to do. When he'd done this, they hung him out to dry, starting a "whispering" campaign against him on places like Fox News and Talk Radio, claiming he was loose-lipped and "too honest" which is one of the worst criticisms Bush can make, it seems.
The really sad thing is that the Bush adminsration never sued Suskind, which means that either everything bad he says about Bush is true or they just don't give a rat's ass as swing voters in Ohio don't read books anyway.
As O' Neill was Bush's moderate face on Capitol Hill, so it seems to me Rice is Bush's moderate face to the world.
It's a difficult job but my fear is that Rice may be able to pull it off, perhaps convincing the world that she stays up nights worrying about the plight of Karen hill tribe people and that their future invasion of Burma has nothing to do with that country's long border with China.
Over the last 3 1/2 years Americans have been going on about how they're willing to kill and die for their freedom. Maybe now's the time to exercise that freedom by questioning the adminstrations motives.
But if we can't even do this in Europe, what chance in Nebraska?

They've got the guns, and, um, that's it

2005-02-04T18:22:00.000Z

It seems the peace process in the north has finally broken down and the level of recrimation here is so strong that I'm forced to concede that whoever it was that said that the Irish are a very fair-minded race because we never speak well of each other may on some level have had some sort of valid point.

The scaremongering on the RTE news last night was so bad that I thought my house had blown away and landed in Kansas.

True, when people who've made their collective name killing and maiming people warn the rest of us not to underestimate the gravity of the situation that could be interpreted as some sort of threat but it really ought to be the people over on the other side of the Irish sea shitting themselves.

Thing is, they've also got the fear of Islamic terrorism to worry about and this must be a very confusing development. Hopefully the British nanny state will come in and take care of the situation by having green alerts when they're supposed to fearing the IRA and sort of orangey, mosque-coloured alerts when the danger is percieved to come from muslims.

You may think that I'm being facetious but I'd really be upset if the IRA started bombing England again, not because the number of casualties have ever been that high, but because there's always a section within their society that's so willing to exploit anti-Irish sentiment, and far from having gone away, they're in rude health, (and isn't "rude" the appropriate word) though it seems with BNP, Ukip and whatever Kilroy-Silk's new party is called, they're just as vulnerable to fragmentation as extremists over here.

Meanwhile the politicians here are falling over themselves deciding who to blame.

I blame Micheal McDowell. If it wasn't for his insistence that the IRA give up all sorts of crime, there might be no prospect of the IRA going back to war. It may be that this is part of a cunning plan to outsource crime abroad as the level of crime has way escalated since the peace process began but my feeling is that he's let his vicious, class-based hatred of the IRA get in the way of his political judgment.

History may remember his insistence last December that the IRA give up all sorts of crime as well as all their guns as the last chance ever for peace in the country being thrown away.

He's never asked that the US stop starting illegal wars in Iraq before they are allowed use our air bases again.

He's never asked the British goverment give up their massive nuclear and conventional arsenals, with which they could bomb Ireland back into the stone age if they wanted. This danger is hardly a negligible one. After all, the British do have a history of attacking Ireland, murdering, starving and enslaving the people, a more recent history of bombing anyone that doesn't like George Bush as much as their own government; and they are the race that invented the phrase :"My country, right or wrong."

If George Bush and his junta of neo-cons get it into their swivel-eyed heads that Eye-ur-land poses some sort of terrorist threat, he just has to go down to the butchers and get a bone to feed Tone and next thing we could be facing sanctions followed by saturation bombing and then Halliburton taking control of our massive natural gas fields.

You may think I'm being facetious again, that the British govemment acknowledge the existence of the Irish Free State, even if many of it's citizens don't, and that they let us have our own legitimate army. I must say that's it's absolutely spifffing of them to let a sovereign independent state have it's own army, especially when there's no posibility of any war between the Republic of Ireland and the UK.

Or is there? I have to say that I'm deeply concerned with Tony Blair's loyalty to George Bush and what the consequences are for the future of Europe, and Ireland in particular. In 1984, the "British Isles" have become united with the United States to form Atalntica, which is in a permanent state of war with Eurasia. There are those who might say that this was just a work of fiction set in an imagainary future which has already become the past. But so many of it's predictions are coming true, with the United States facing a future of perpetual fear and foreign wars fought in the name of a freedom that is more imagined than real.

Meanwhile, while hostility to other European nations seems to be as strong as it's ever been in the UK, the population is more supportive of the so-called war on terror than any other European nation. It's largely because the British feel a sort of ethnic affinity with Americans, though more people in the US are of German descent.

Throw in the fact that in the 70's, a middle-aged Donald Rumsfeld was trying to convince the world that the IRA were being backed up by the Soviet Union (No Shit!) and the notion of the UK severing itself from Europe, allying itself to the US and then launching an attack on the Republic of Ireland doesn't seem quite so outlandish.

Things I once thought unbelievable in my lifetime have come to p-a-a-a-a-s, which is why predicting the future is such a treacherous business. After the first world war people thought the horrors that they'd witnessed were so awful that there'd never be another war. But they didn't count on the obstinate agressiveness of the Germans. So maybe we should be a little more aware that the British have a bit of a history of attacking nations that they percieve to be a threat.

On the other hand, there's probably no point in dwelling on it because there's precious little we can actually do about the fact that they have such a massive army, whereas there is something they can do about the much less substantial but far more immediate threat that they percieve themselves to face.

When looked at it from that perspective, the IRA's obstinacy might not seem quite so obtuse. I don't claim to know their mindset, but it must seem frustrating that the British can get away with the criminal theft of Iraq when they can't even rob a bank.

I can't defend Mitchell McLoughlin's statement that the murder of Jean McConville wasn't a crime. It was a morally heinous act by any standards.

Except by the standards of the Bush admistration that we implicitly support. According to them, if you give comfort to terrorists, you're a terrorist yourself, and the only way to deal with terrorists is to kill them. The British Army were a state terror group at that time. For me, it was a crime, but it's a crime the US and British have commited 100,000 times in the last few years.

They've gotten away with it, as they've gotten away with demonisind Irish people throughout the world because between them they represent the world's only hyperpower. There are those, like McDowell, who think that they enjoy this power beacuse they're better than us and that we should therefore cower before it.

I'm not among them.

For a slightly different perspective on similar issues, see here

A man sees what he wants to see and disregards the rest

2005-02-01T16:29:00.000Z

Last week the oscar nominations came out, and for the first time in Donkey's years I hadn't seen a single one of the five films nonimated for best picture. I had a chance to watch Finding Neverland for free back in October but it seemed a bit schmazly, though that's not usually that much of an issue for the acadmedy. A couple of other of the nominated flicks had been on release for a few weeks but I preffered to indulge of the brooding European Angst of movies like Vera Drake and The Inheritance.

Yesterday I tried to rectify this situation by catching up with two of the nominated films. The Aviator wasn't bad at all. Million Dollar Baby was.

I expected to come out of this movie saying, like, y'know, it was alright, but no girlfight, the way poncey soi-dissant film buffs like myself usually do. Instead I was left reflecting how troubled a society must me to take such a militantly rascist, right-wing movie to it's collective bosom.

I was hardly expecting a radically anti-establishment film from the Republican mayor of whatever one-horse shithole Clint Eastwood is the mayor of. He is the guy who made his name playing the one-man hippy-killing machine Harry Callahan.
And it is a movie about boxing. Ever notice how most American movies on this subject seem to concern people descended from non-aryan countries like Ireland (City for Conquest, Gentleman Jim, The Great White Hype); Italy (Somebody up there likes me, Rocky, Raging Bull); Puerto Rico (girlfight) or the Israeli diaspora (Body and Soul)?

It seems that Hollywood is trying to tell us that while Americans from ethnic backgrounds are pugnacious trogladytes that can only express ourselves through our fists, those or Anglo-Saxon or German/Scandanavian origin are peaceful people that are only stirred to violence when threathened by peasants from Afganistan, Nicaragua, El Salvador, Vietnam, Laos, etc.

Eastwood's latest work continues this igniminous tradition. He might have considered actually making a movie about an African-American fighter; as, astonishingly, when I looked up my 1996 Time-Out film guide, I couldn't find a single film about a black American fighter, though since then, Ali and The Hurricane have been made, though even then both of these are factually based.

Eastwood hamfistedly attempts to redress this balance by having the film narrated by a black boxer played by Morgan Freeman. Oddly enough, many of the same people who criticised Alexander for excessive use of narration are salivating over this movie. I've never liked Morgan since he lectured a vegetarian journalist insisting that she'd have a weak immune system as a result of her humanitarianism. Maybe he should go to India and drink the same water as Hindus and then see who's got a stronger immune system.

He didn't endear himself to me any more with a performance that makes Uncle Tom look like Brother Huey, as a feckless, improvident gambler. The only other black character is an obnoxious bully who taunts both a simple-minded hick and the girl played by Hilary Swank.

She's Irish, so she is. Oh, faith and begorrah, she's as Irish as a bowl of mashed potatoes cooked over a turf fire. She wears a green robe with a harp and the words Mo Chuise. She's got great teeth, which means she ain't English. And guess what? Her family, the Fitzgeralds are feckless and improvident, like all Irish-Americans. And they're from that well-known centre of the Irish diaspora, Missouri, though some IRA propagandists like to put it about that most of them live in Rich, liberal states like Massacheutsits. (I probably didn't spell that right, but then I am an ignorant Irish hick myself)

Made by Bush-backing AOL-Time-Warner, the film seems like an advertisment for the Republican plan to destroy social security, by portraying her welfare-dependent family as overweight, ignorant, greedy, ungrateful scum. What happened you, Warners? You used to make movies that sympathised with the disenfranchised, like The Public Enemy and I am a fugitive from a Chain Gang. Now you seem to think that it's there own fucking fault that they're disenfranchised.

Trying to free herself from a life of anomie, Ms. Fitzgerald does the one thing that Irish people know how to do, and that's fight. She fights her way through Europe where there's always a sea of green, white and gold, as there's always ( according to Morgan) either Irish people or people who want to be Irish. It's more the former than the latter dude. If you put on a cap backwards and started talking in rhyme, you'd find out that they wanted to be black. Taking on those slimy Europeans proves to be her downfall, as she fights a black former prostitute from East Berlin who likes to fight dirty. Any more right-wing American prejudices you'd like to reinforce, Clint? Why didn't you portray her reading Dude, waroom ist mein land? before the fight?

The odd thing is that many liberal critics seem to have taken this movie to their heart as it lambasts the hicks who often vote repeblican, though there isn't a bush-Cheney sticker in sight. The truth is that Missouri isn't the most right-wing state by a long way and preffered a dead dude to John Ashcroft.

In trying to make himself more Irish, he reads Yeats translated into "Gaelic" (oddly enough) and then renders The Lake Isle of Inishfree perfectly back into the original, so maybe he gets TG4 by cable. But even though, as may be clear, I despised the film, I could see genuine echoes of Ulysses in Clint's search for his real spiritual daughter.

But Clint's a republican and they don't read books, preferring Fox News and Radio Talk shows. If you think that's a stereotype, then go see Million Dollar Baby yourself. Then you'll know what stereotypes are.

Apocalypse 60 Years ago

2005-01-28T15:29:00.000Z

Last summer I was down in Killarney saving Ireland's natural oak forests with a group of international volunteers. Generally the craic down there is fairly mighty and there's plenty of wit flying around the place, but someone took it upon themselves to take the piss out of people of a certain nationality for their alleged lack of humour, with slightly disturbing consequences.

When the German girl told us that she had a German joke she got our attention fairly pronto. I think that although The Tin Drum by Gunter Grass and Felix Krull by Thomas Mann are two of the funniest books I've ever read, the stereotype of Teutons as being humourless isn't without a modicum of truth, so I was intrigued to hear the joke as well.

Unfortunately for almost everyone concerned, the joke went a little like this.

The Pope goes into a supermarket somewhere in Germany. He takes his goods to the checkout and the girl there tells him the price. He takes a €10 note out of his pocket, and the girl looks really stunned. His Holiness asks what the matter is. She replies:
"That's the first time I've ever seen a Pole pay for anything."

Everyone responsed with a pointed silence, but the German girl, bless her dear little heart, assumed that we'd just not gotten the joke.
She started off explaining, "You See..." and I shouted out "No!" as loudly as I could, guessing that she was going to dig herself deeper into a hole, which she pretty much did by explaining zat zey have all zese Poles coming over to zeir country und stealing stuff.

The Year before I was on a trip through Halong Bay in Vietnam, when I overheard this big, fat, German discussing the Euro with an English woman. I wasn't eavesdropping, HE VAS TALKING REALLY LOUD ZE VAY SOME GERMANS DO. He wanted to know which parts of the UK had accepted the Euro. He'd heard that IRELAND had accepted the Euro, and then he shook his head disgustedly, and said "ALWAYS WITH ZE FIGHTING", with a total lack of irony.

This week the German nation is being reminded that they have a bit of history of being with ze fighting and stealing stuff from Poles, for example, Oh, I don't know, their land, their freedom, their dignity and, in the cases of those of semetic origin or left-wing views, their lives.

Let me declare an interest by saying that I'm part German-Jewish on my mother's side and that if my ancestors hadn't left Germany then the man who became my grandfather would probably have been enslaved and then gassed.

There are those who think that Germans have suffered enough for the holocaust and that they should be able to put it behind them, that their past doesn't matter all that much. I think this would be a reasonable argument if they were willing to knock down every building over the age of 50 years and never listen to Beethoven, Bach or Wagner or read Goethe or look at paintings by Durer or Friedrich or watch movies by Murnau or Fritz Lang ever again.

Of course the past matters; the past is what makes us what we are. It's ironic that many of those right-wing brits who criticised Tony Blair for aplogising for the famine are the same people who want to preserve their ancient institutions like the Monarchy and the House of Lords.
It's also wishful thinking to imagine that Germans have learned the lessons of Auschwitz. Though in many ways the Modern German state is as liberal as any, when you see even the sort of Germans who go trekking in the jungle in Vietnam or working in woodland conservation express the sort of attitudes that led to the Holcaust, you wonder how much they've really changed.

In one respect the Germans are treated unfairly as they're hardly unique in committing acts of genocide. At the same time the Nazis were gassing six million Jews the British were deliberately starving at least two million Bengalis to death, yet they don't go through a periodic ten-year guilt fest. At the same time around double the amount were being slughtered in Russia, and in the United States, a country many of whose citizens have the same belief in their own infallibilty that gripped Germany in the 30's, it was only 30 years before that native Americans were granted basic civil rights, up till then the constitution protecting Caucasian Americans from "the savage Indian" by giving them the right to murder them if they felt threatened. It's also been pointed out by Daniel Goldhagen and in a recent BBC Documentary that many occupied nations were extremely complicit in the genocide.

For many, though, it's the clinical, industrial efficiency of Auschwitz that makes it so shocking, that so many people could be so cold-blooded as to make murder their 9-to-5 job. Yet in virtually every industrial country today there's a thriving arms industry where people who may appear to be decent fathers and husbands build weapons that kill and maim innocent people around the world.

Many people see the holocaust as an aberation which is why every ten years you get people platitudinously insisting that it must never happen again. Ten years ago this week, the editor off the UCC college mag used this exact same cliche, I mean phrase. If only Slobadon Milosevic, Robert Mugabe, and the junta in Indonesia had read that. If only! Still waiting for the UCC pubs officer (1994-95) to come and sort out those tyrants in whatever way she deemed fit, though.

Yet it should hardly surprise people that as people have been slaughtering each other since time began, that people people would do it in an ordered, efficient way on more than one occasion, or that slavery was used by Europeans so recently. Yet we still utilise slavery, except these days we call it "outsourcing", promtoting such massive population growth in Asia and Latin America that people have to work twelve hours a day to make the basic amount of money to live on.

I see Auschwitz not as an aberation, but as the apex of industrial civilistion. As a vegetarian, I'm aware that the death camps were modeled on Fordist Mass Procution factories, which were in turn modelled on Chicago stock-houses. But when I tried to explain this to my mum, she replied "I know the difference between a cow and a jew. Maybe you don't but I do." Sometimes I wonder why I bother.

Vegetarians are often accused of sanctimony but I'm not going to claim that just because I eat meat that the Holocaust has nothing to do with me. I'm the sort of person who can never stop realising that all the wealth and security that I enjoy, like the computer I'm writing this on right now, are the product of theft and opression. Sitting in a nice, warm library reading the Cambridge History of SouthEast Asia, I learned that when Europeans first arrived in those countries the people were just as well developed as themselves, yet as Europeans gradually took over their countries we became fitter happier and more productive while the exact opposite happened the victims of colonistion.

This is why periodic guilt-fests like the current Holocaust jamboree annoy me. But at least they piss off the holocaust-deniers no end. I've never understood why these people bother. They must imagine that everyone would think those nazis were absolutely spiffing chaps if it wasn't for that awful slaughter-of-six-million business. They cite the "evidence" of people like Fred Leucther, a non-German speaker who went to a gas chamber and said it looked more like a bomb shelter to him, then sent a big chunk of the wall for examintion and when it showed no signs of gas, concluded that there was no holocaust. The thing is, that after 50 years only a minute trace of gas would have been left on the surface of the walls and the fucking idiot crushed a huge chunk of wall into dust before sending it for analysis. That neo-Nazis use the work of such a plonker to justify their arguments shows how weak they are. The funny thing is that many neo-nazis actually call themselves nazis, when "nazi" is a bavarian word roughly equivilant to the Cork term "langer" (according to Micheal Burleigh). So every time someone says they're a nazi, their actually saying that they're a langer.

But I see the second world war like I did the last American election, not as a Manichean struggle between good and evil, but between the greater and the lesser of two evils. In the sixty years the less-evil countries that won the war have, variously, napalmed 5 million people in Asia, started dozens of other proxy wars all over the world, pushed the Earth to the brink of environmental catastrophe, given more money to feed cows at home than starving people abroad, and invented boy-bands. And yet the people they defeated were even worse. So if you call yourself a nazi, I guess the word "langer" is actually a compliment.

Turkey Coming home to Roost?

2005-01-26T14:21:00.000Z

I had a fairly trippy experience over Christmas, when I was reading Snow by Orhan Pamuk. It's an amazing novel, combining journalistic immediacy with literary grandeour, as if Tolstoy had written War and Peace in 1813, though in many ways it reminded me more of The Plague by Albert Camus, though he can switch effortlessly from existential angst to dark, Murakami-like humour effortlessly.

What made my experience with this book so exceptional was that I turned on my TV about an hour before I finished reading it. My TV doesn't work so well and it takes about an hour to heat up and as I was reading this novel set in Eastern Turkey I gradually started seeing blurry images coming through of the news that Turkey was being accepted for talks to join the EU. It was like I had two different windows into history at once, as if I'd been reading Rousseau or St-Just and next thing I saw live images of Louis XVI getting his head chopped off.

No-one can express the soul-searching going on in Turkey at the moment better than Pamuk. It's country that genuinely doesn't seem to know whether it's future lies with Asia or with Europe, with Islam or with securalism.

When EU leaders agreed to invite Turkey for accesion talks, someone in Copenhagen protested by draping the little mermaid statue in a Burqa. I wonder if our Danish friend was aware of the ironies. It's pretty obvious that The Mermaid legend is just as much about desexualising women as much as the headscarves that women are forced to wear in many Moslem countries. However, Turkey isn't one of those countries. In fact, wearing a headscarf has been banned there for quite some time. In Pamuk's novel, a group of girls in Eastern Turkey rebel against this law and their leader plans to commit suicide in a stage performance. The area has a particularly high suicide rate and the protagonist in the novel is a journalist sent from Istanbul to find out why this is so, but he never quite does.

My issue with Turkey is not that they treat women badly, but that they treat their Kurdish minority badly. One of the reasons that the US and Britain attacked Iraq was that the Baathists had allegedly killed 100,000 kurds in the 80's, mainly with chemical weapons supplied by Britain and the US. Yet they were willing to use Turkey, where at least 30,000 kurds have been killed, as a base for their invasion, citing the enormous strides Turkey had made towards democratisation. When Turkey told Uncle Sam that he wasn't allowed to use their bases, America suddenly changed it's tune, claiming that it wasn't really that democratic, because if it was, their goverment would support the US.

It's a little ironic that the US, many of whose citizens think the EU is the antichrist, is pushing for Turkey to be accepted as a recipient for our kinder, gentler form of imperialism. I'd be a little disturbed if George Bush really thought that people in places like Georgia and Belarus would prefer to have the crap bombed out of them and then have their shattered countries rebuilt by Halliburton than get the massive strucural grants the EU offers, but EU expanision is a form of imperialism nevertheless. One of the funny things about this form of Imperialism is that countries have to change before they are colonised rather than after, which is why headscarves have been banned for a while.

It's also ironic that the most anti-EU nation in the EU is Turkey's biggest chearleader within the Union. It's intriguing that there's a debate within the UK as to whether giving sterling the heave-ho and joining the Eurozone will lead to Britain becoming more social democratic or the continent Thatcherising. I think this debate might be a bit redundant as Gerhard Schroeder has gotten so Thatcherite that I expect him to start growing his hair and quiffing it back and carrying a handbag round the place. The debate on whether letting Turkey into the EU will make Turkey more secular or the EU more Islamic is a bit more pertinant.

Poor Old Europe. It seems so nice in here right now, with our governments exceptionally generous welfare states, our short working hours and many public holidays, we can go anywhere we want in the world and everybody loves us because we're rich and aren't Americans. But our demi-semi-paradise isn't going to last forever, as on either side of us are fundamentalist religous forces bent on imposing their way of life on us, whether it's the dog-eat-dog Calvinist hyper-capitalism of the US or the bleak, life-denying dogma of Islam.

Birth rates are so much higher in the US and the Moslem world that Europe is eventually going to get squeezed. In Europe many women have careers and don't marry that early and use contraception and have smaller families. In moslem countries, they're generally not allowed work so have bigger families. In the US, many are marrying early and having more kids, spurred on by sinster, Republican-funded abstinence programs even though many of them still have to have jobs to make ends meet, and pay someone else to take care of their kids. It's this sucking of every aspect of life into the cash ecomomy that is responsible for Americans economic pre-eminence.

Faced with this problem, it seems the EU's leaders are trying to secularise the Islamic countried on our fringe, not just Turkey but Morocco and Tunisia as well. Apparently, Morocco asked to join the EU a few times but there never seems to be anyone there to return their calls, though if there was, they'd probably say really slowly, that Morocco was in A-fri-ca. It's a pity, because Morocco is probably a more democratic and open society than Turkey. Whether Turkey is a European country or not is a more complex question. Up to the first world war, it was considered part of Europe because it had a big empire like most Western European nations. Two world wars and quite a few world cups later, the definition of being a European nation has changed radically.

Many in the EU, especially France, are sceptical as to whether Turkey really wants to be a tolerant, democratic nation or whether they're just pretending so they can get lots of money out of us. This debate is familiar to many of us in Ireland because we've had to do our own soul-searching over the years about whether we wanted to be an isolationist nation where everybody danced at the crossroads but not to any of that nasty rock'n'roll stuff or an outward-looking, progressive European nation. The difference is that while we were looking inward, to a fantasy, catholicised version of our own past, the conservatives in Turkey have more extreme nations to their East to look to. I think that we realised that the fantasy de Valera was feeding us was just that, whereas the emperor does have some clothes in the fundamentalist muslim nations, and the empress has even more clothes.

There are analogies, though; the irony that a culture that created Sheela-na-gigs becoming a fundamentalist theocracy replicated in the culture that gave the world harems and belly-dancing forcing women to cover up their faces in public.

My own feeling is that while many people in Turkey, especially the west, are willing to sign up to the whole tolerance thing, many in the East and in rural areas would rather die than admit that their narrow world view might not be the only way of looking at things. Then again, while the oracle at Delphi imprecated us to "know thyself", how many of us really do? I'm sure inside every muslim fundamentlist there's someone who'd prefer an iPod (especially one of the ones that plays videos - they are so cool) in this life to the promise of 40 virgins in the next. So in a way Turkey's plight is all of our plight. None of us know for sure whether the scientific view or the religous view of the world is right, and the more people insist they do, the more they reveal their inner doubts.

What? The Land of the Free? Whoever told you that was your enemy!

2005-01-24T14:28:00.000Z

Since George Bush made his evil second inaugural speech last week, everyone columnist who lives in the reality-based universe has been shaking their fist at it (See Here).

Although I can sense a great deal of anger at his hypocrisy, sanctimony and righteousness, I've yet to come across a piece that can express the bile I feel towards this monster who's undoubtedly the worst thing to happen to the human race since Hitler.

The conventional view on the two figures is that the guy with the moustache was an evil genius while the one who inherited the presidency is a bit of a buffoon, but George Bush, or whoever it was that wrote his speech, knows one thing that slipped Adolf One-Ball by, and that's that if you're trying to take over the world, the very, very last thing you do is tell people this, which the Nazis did in extremely unsubtle ways.

By doing this the Nazis only won a few allies, mostly among countries that had little choice but to support them until they lost the war, like the perverted old Italian man in Catch-22. In contrast, if you tell people that you're on a mission to spread freedom, some leaders of other countries might be gullible enough to believe you.

This is why George Bush mentioned the words "Freedom" and "liberty" so many times in his speech, without ever mentioning any specifics. It's hard for anyone to disagree with the notion that freedom is, generally speaking, a good thing, but it's sickening for anyone who's aware of what an opressive country the United States is in many ways to hear it's leader telling the world he's on a divine mission from God to spread freedom around the world.

According to Dubya, all Americans eventually hear the call of freedom in their soul. This is a good thing for many of them, as the soul is about the only part of their being in which they can enjoy freedom.

Lots of Americans are in jail. Some of them are on death row, many of them in increasingly brutal, privitised boot camps. In fact, at any given time, one out of every 100 Americans is in jail at any given time. For Ireland, the corresponing figure is one out of every thousand. One of the archly ironic things is that it's one of the few unique freedoms that America enjoys, that right to bear arms, that causes crime to be so high. What's even more ironic is that many of those in jail are in there for things that aren't a criminal offence in many European countries, like smoking marajauna. Even more bitterly ironic is that in many states, anyone who's ever been to jail can never vote, a key factor in Dubya's first election win. Many of them are never allowed to leave the state in which they were incarcerated. Of course, you're far more likely to be put in jail if you're a part of an ethnic minority, which is why so people listening to Dubya quoting Lincoln to the effect that those who deny freedom to others do not deserve it for themselves will have been so sickened.

Americans love to boast that there's complete freedom of speech in their country, but this right, allegedly protected by the first amendment, is being increasingly eroded by legislation like the Patriot Act and increasing consolodation of the media. Astonishingly, in the so-called land of the free people have been arrested and put into jail on the mere suspicion that they might be terrorists, and people have been barred from boarding a plane for carrying left-wing books. I hope these people were able to smile when Bush claimed that when the Liberty Bell was sounded in celebration, a witness said, "It rang as if it meant something." In any case, whatever freedoms they do have in this regard are more honoured in the breech than in the observance, as a survey shows that most Americans would rather get their news from TV than from independent media.

I normally put up hyperlinks just to make myself look web-savvy, but that survey from people press is well worth checking out. Flick through it and you'll find out astonishing stuff, like that 15% of Americans don't always have enough money to buy food, and 26% don't always have enough to pay for health care. In the Czech republic, country with around a fifth of the US' GDP per capita, the corresponding figures are 8% and 6% respectively. Even more staggeringly, only about twice as many people in the Ivory Coast, a country wracked by civil war, say they often don't have enough food as Americans. Of course, there's many in America who'll tell you that by protecting us from starvation and disease, European goverments are meddling in the lives of their citizens, and that the fact that more of them are dying of starvation or preventible disease is a sign that their society is more free than ours.

But there's the rub. Freedom means different things to different people. To an American, the right to buy a gun to protect yourself from other people who exercise the same right might be genuinely more valuable to right to smoke Marajauna or have an abortion, a freedom American women are soon going to lose. During the American Civil War, both sides sang a song called Battle Cry of Freedom. The Yanks claimed they were trying to free Negroes from slavery, the rebs to free themselves from a federal government that imposed it's abolitionist laws on them.
Dubya never tires of telling the American people that "Terrorists" hate "freedom" but does he really think that Arabs see it that way, or is he smart enough to realise that many of them see Americans as occupiers in their land and themselves as the forces of liberation? That's what's so scary to the rest of the world about Bush's speech, the idea that they have a monopoly on the definition of freedom, and that many of them genuinely don't appreciate that other nations may not want to have a social system that results in so much excess, inequality and incarceration imposed on it. Trying to downplay the scale of the conflict in Iraq, one fox news reporter pointed out tha the homicide rate in California was higher. To which people might legimately ask, why are the Americans trying to export such a flawed social model, though the only answer they're likely to get is "Shut Up!"

Meanwhile, Cheney and Condoleeza Rice are busy filling the rest of the world in on the specifics of Bush's policy. It's hard to argue with Rice when she claims that the Burmese government aren't so nice, but where is the criticism of places like Uzbekistan, where around 30,000 people have been brutally murdered? It's possible that when America no longer needs that country's bases to attack Iran and Iraq, they'll become part of the Axis of evil as well.

Cheney, as is his forte, has been coming out with more scaremongering. Apparently he's been lecturing European leaders on the danger from Iran. Apparently we don't understand these dangers ourselves, as Europe has never been attacked by anyone from Asia in the course of it;s history. Cheney says that Europeans tell him that Russia was pointing nuclear warheads at them for forty years and we're all still here to tell the tale, but he insists that Iran is different.

Of course it is, as Russians are people with low pigmentation who practice a form of Christianity, while Iranians are hot-headed, dark-skinned people who're willing to attack countries with independent nuclear deterrents at the possible risk of annhilation.

I wish there was a European leader brave enough to ask Cheney to his face what a fat, bald Wyoming hick is doing lecturing Europeans on their security, especially when his information on Iraq was so blatantly false. He has his work cut out, though. Scaring Americans is like shooting fish in a barrel, as fear was the thing that led many of their ancestors to leave for America in the first place, and scaredy-cat genes have been reinforced and strengthened over the generations. Even the religous people there describe themselves as being "god-fearing", which is fair enough, I'd be fairly shit-scared of any transcendental deity that would do something like that tsunami as well.

We're not that easily scared over here, knowing that if there was an attack of 9/11 magnitude in Europe, our chances of being killed would be infintissimal. In any case, Europe has had enough real theaths to it's peace and security to know the difference between danger and irrational fear-mongering. And to paraphrase Rosie O' Donell, I may not know that much about Cheney, but as A European, I know he's lying.

One final statistic from that survey which really astonished me. One freedom Americans really do have more than most countries is the freedom to borrow money to invest, which is why they lead the worlds of music and movies. Yet it seems other nations enjoy the fruits of this freedom more. Asked if they enjoyed American movies and TV, as much as 80% of people in various countries in Europe, Asia and Africa said they did. In America the figure was a mere 48%. 37% said they didnt, a little lower than the figure that said they were concerned with "moral values". How many of these people want more censorship? Quite a few, I'd wager. And yet Dubya wants us to believe that all Americans are bound in Unity and Frienship

The adventures of Red Ahern in Red China

2005-01-21T16:03:00.000Z

About a year and a half ago I came across this book called Who will Feed China? in a second-hand bookstore in Kathmandhu. Though I'd heard of it before, I looked up some reviews on Amazon, which kind of gave away the ending. This is often the case with non-fiction books, when I was a second-year history student I came across this fresher reading The Origins of the Second World War by AJP Taylor and I snuck up behind him and said "Guess what happens at the End? Germany invades Poland!" but he didn't seem remotely fazed.

The author of this book, who'd obviously done a lot of research into the subject, didn't know any better than I where China's growing, urbanising, westernising population were going to get the meat or the grain to feed their animals. The book was a wake-up call to the dangers of exporting the Western way of life to Asia, though the people who run the IMF and the World bank still seem asleep to me.

Since this book was written in the mid-nineties China has grown exponentially, in almost every sense of the term. Their appetite for grain and oil has grown, their skylines have grown, their waistlines have grown. Most of all, their economy has grown, so much so that at least in part, the answer to the question posed by that book is, um, us.

Bertie Ahern has been in China trying to drum up some business for the Irish economy. China is doing so well that soon there might be an Irishtown in Shanghai with an arch with Celtic Crosses and Sheela-na-gigs.

It's apposite in some ways that Bertie is doing business with the Chinese. Both Ireland and China are ancient civilisations that more recently have been victims of imperialism and then some disasterous, self-imposed socio-economic systems. Now we're both "Tiger" economies, though of course in China they actually do have some real, honest-to-god tigers.

Bertie is doing a little better than George Bush Senior in his efforts to drum up business in East Asia, which is to say he hasn't thrown up on anyone yet. That's a little surprising, because it appears that they have much stronger to stomachs than us. Apparantly we don't eat offal in this country, which leads me to wonder if Bertie has been in the English Market in Cork any time lately. Those Chinese can't get enough of it, though, so we're going to be sending bucket loads of the stuff over there.

Ah, yes, the noble Irish tradition of feeding tyranous regimes. We fed Sadamm Hussein's soldiers at the same time they were gassing the Kurds, now we're going to be feeding the Chinese army who've been occupying Tibet for the last 50 years. It's a pretty safe bet that Bertie hasn't used the T-word in his time as a guest of the Chinese government. Tibet is a sort of cause celebre for hippy types like myself, who walked way up into the mountains outside Darjeeling to visit a refugee sanctuary for those lucky enough to have escaped the Chinese jackboot. I bought a big, colourful, wooly jacket, which I still have and, oddly enough, has turned out to be a total babe magnet. I think of it as positive karma. I saw an old woman knitting something similar on an old hand loom, she tols me that she fled Tibet in 1959 and will neve be able to go back.

But she's one of the lucky ones. Those ethnic Tibetans that remain face gradual ethnic cleansing as Chinese move into their land and do what they do best - breeding. Many try to flee to India where they can practice their religion in peace, though an awful lot of them get stuck in a Nepalese limbo.

None of this is going to bother the likes of Michael McDowell. His heart was bleeding on Monday for the victims of IRA crimes, but he's able to overlook the destruction of monasteries, slaughter of innoncent men, women and animals as long as we can send the Chinese some pigs bellies and make ourselves some more money and buy bigger houses and SUVs.

He's not going to worry about the environmental impact of importing grain and soya from Latin America, force-feeding it to pigs and then sending their innards all the way to China. The minds of those of us who worry about the future of the planet boggle at this profligacy, though I'm unsure whether all the oil consumed in this process count towards the nations CO2 emissions.

Complying with Kyoto has never been a priority for our government, though, when it was revealed that we were 3rd worst nation in the EU for doing so, Fatty Harney told the EU that they could ram that fucking Kyoto accord up their asses (I'm paraphasing slightly)

The best thing to do for the people of Tibet is to boycott Chinese products, which is incredibly hard as almost every manufacturing concern has outsourced there. I'd like best if our athletes organised their own boycott of the next olympics. After all, we never win anything, and China has a bitter history of Westerners bringing drugs over there.

It's all a bunch of Bush-huggin crap, godammit!

2005-01-19T15:23:00.000Z

When South Park came out first, I was a big fan. It seemed like a quantam leap in terms of what broadcasters could get away with, something that even people who'd been brought up on stuff like the Simpsons might shirk at.

It seemed like few people could watch it who'd been born more than 30 years before, whereas the appeal of the Simpsons and King of the Hill was more universal. I liked the fact that I was still young enough to get the jokes and not be offended. For a while there at the turn of the last century I was doing more Cartman impressions than I was making Simpsons references.

But somewhere along the way my entusiasm waned. I noticed that episodes didn't stand up to repeated viewings the way Simpsons episodes did. After the initial shock value dissapted, it seemed there wasn't much to laugh at. These days, while I still wait eagerly for every Simpsons episode, I only casually watch South Park when channel-surfing.

Nevertheless, I caught up with the South Park teams latest cinematic offering, Team America: World Police, the other day. I figured I had little to lose, apart from an hour and a half of my time and €5. It got reviews on both sides of the Atlantic, but what made me want to see it was that either Parker or Stone had said that he found it was easiest to satirist the extremists on both sides. One of the things I used to love about their show was that they showed no-one any mercy. It's easy to offend the religous right in America, and to be fair, a lot of people here found the Uncle-Fucker song a tad risquee as well. Offending the left takes a bit more effort, as we're generally open-minded sorts who belief in freedom of speech, but that time they went to the Amazonian rainforest and Stan and Kyle concluded that biodiversity wasn't worth saving did rankle a bit.

But usually the Colorado setting of the show made it perfectly placed to satarise the growing split between left and right in the contemporary US. As I found out from reading Fast Food Nation, Colorado is a state that used to be populated largely by alternative types in towns like Boulder but is experiencing an influx of Right-Wing suburbanites fleeing the growing multiculturalism of places like Orange County. In the TV show they were just as good at portraying the right, in the shape of the two hunters who'd been to the 'Nam and one of whom needed a voice-box, as the left, in the shape of the politically correct mayor.

Post-9-11, this seemed to change. The attacks on what they percieved as PC intensified while the right seemed to get an easier ride.
In an episode dealing with protests against the Iraq war, Cartman ended up concluding that America could accomodate both shades of opinion, which was fair enough, but that the Hippy, Rock-music loving protestors needed the red-meat-eating, fox-news-watching country music fans to protect them from "terrorists... or China". I thought this was really irresponsible as I would have thought that the authors would have known better than to suppose that the war in Iraq had anything to do with terrorism. It made me think differently about how they'd portrayed Sadamm Hussein in the past, especially in the first big-screen movie. I thought when I first saw it that they were satirising America's demonisation of the Iraqi dictator by comically exagerating how evil he was, the man who wore the pants in a gay relationship with Satan. I began to think, to my horror, that they'd been helping to soften up America for an attack on Iraq all the time.

Still, I was willing to give the new movie a chance, especially after promises that the extremists on both sides would be satirised. I don't take the Manichean view that seems to have taken hold of much of the world at the moment, and I'm of the opinion that a war can be between two sets of bad guys. I really don't thinkl the Christian Right in the US are that much better than the people that they wage war against. Their "moral values" seem incredibly twisted to me, a person that thinks attacking a country with the loss of 100,000 lives is worse than having two men who love each other get married. I was looking forward to having them have the piss taken out of them.

Some people are fed up with Bush-bashing, not even opening the latest email attatchment that portrays Dubya as a monkey. Me, the first thing I do when I open the paper is look for an article that tells me the latest thing that his gang of thugs and idelogues have done to the planet so I get can indignant and thankful that I don't live in the US.

Unfortunately, Team America did nothing to satiate my addiction for anti-GOP invective. Despite the promise that they were going to satirise the extremists, it was actually the moderates in the US that took the brunt of their humour. An inordinate chunk of the movie was spent taking the piss out of supposedly self-regarding Hollywood stars who opposed the war. What sort of intellectual gymastics allow Parker and Stone to regard anti-war Americans as "Extremists"? They're clearly not in favour of a victory for Islam in the supposed Clash of Civilisations, and their opposition to the war is based, at least I'd hope, on a knowledge that the Iraqi war had nothing to do with the war on terror. But by muddying the waters and implying pretty clearly that the people who opposed the Iraq war were on the side of the terrorists, the makers of this movie show that their sympathies are actually with the extremists on the American side. As if to ram the point home (as it were) there's a speech at the end where where they use the sort of language that may shock some readers where they actually state fairly transparently, that while the Good Guys may do damage they're still the good guys. The opening scene where the terrorists are foiled only at the expense of knocking the Eiffel Tower into the Arch de Triomphe seemed a lot less funny after that.

In another scene Alec Baldwin is seen at a loss for words and just blurts out "Corporations... global warming..." How ironic is that? It's the Bush admistration that's been ramming home the same vapid soundbites about the war on terror and the fight for freedom for the last three years, while people like Baldwin have tried to open up a debate, however egregiously, about the Bush admistrations real motives for the war.

To top it all, one of the opening scenes is in a Broadway theatre where the play is about AIDS, which panders to the predjudices of Red-Staters about both the the city of New York and the acting proffesion and their association with the mythical "liberal elite"

On the other hand, there were no caricatures of George Bush and the people around him, all of which should be ripe for satire. Also, the events that took place in Abu Gharib were too ghastly for the sensitive souls who weren't afraid to get some cheap laughs by showing some puppets butt-fucking.

I'm aware that America is a big country with more shades of opinion than the simple red/blue dichotomy might suggest. I know that the republicans draw their support from a wide coalition, many of whom might have been genuinely offended by this film. But Parker and Stone are clearly on their side. I want my €5 back.

Republic of Britain?

2005-01-17T14:27:00.000Z

It seems the British Tabloids have found yet another subject to get themselves into a tizzy about, and I'm not talking about the "15p a pint" headline that almost got squeezed out of the People on Sunday by the appositely monikered Abi Titmuss.

No, it seems that they're all shocked that a member of the Royal family, who aren't allowed marry Catholics, let alone Jews, was photographed wearing a Nazi Uniform.

From my republican perspective I can't see what all the fuss is about. He comes from a family of Germans who dress up in silly costumes several times a year to show how much better they are than anyone else, so he must be wondering the same thing.

Every columnist has their given their two cents about why Prince Harry acted the way he did. I remember a few years ago a poncey English guy came on to the Late Late Show and blamed the Royal Family's decline on the fact that they started marrying "commoners" a few years ago. So it's all his mum's fault, the same Diana that campaigned for land mines to be abolished, it would seem.

Others claim that he was acting the role that all offspring of leaders act and that he was drinking from the same bowl as the likes of Euan Blair and the Bush twins, who, even though their dad is no great Intellect, know better than to wear the insignia of a regime that invaded many countries, stole their resourses and tortured the locals.

Others say that it's because his mother died when he was young and that his father doesnt spend enough time with him, though I don't suppose Big Ears will getting any visits from the social services soon.

Me, I blame the crowd he hangs out with. Anyone that starts a party with a "Natives and Colonials" theme is eithercompletely out of touch with the times or else of the conviction that the rules don't apply to people of their caste, or a combination of both. So it's hardly surprsising that one of them would wear an insignia of an 80-year-old foreign group who believed they were the master race.

The curious thing about the British class system is that not only do English people think they're better than anyone else, the upper classes think that they're better than the working and trading classes as well. Watching the early episodes of Seven-Up, which examined people from different social strata at seven-year intervals, you get a chilling sense of the superioity complex they have, as one of them, all of seven years old, starts ordering a working class kid around. It's unclear whether he acts this way because he's been taught to do so or whether he just has an innate sense of superiority.

It's curious, too, that when the Germans were trying to take over the world, they had to keep telling their population that they were better than anyone else, whereas in the days of the British Empire the ruling classes would already have been preaching to the converted.
It's no secret that the Nazis were actually big fans of the British aristocracy, that concentration camps were invented during the Boer war by the British, that the Germans wanted to train a group of James Bond-like spies modelled on MI5 because the English "had such a long history of being a master race"

It's also true that while 6 million Jews were being gassed, in India, of which Harry's grandfather was Emperor, four million Bengalis were deliberately srarved while Churchill kept their grain impounded.

Yet people are shocked to see him wear the Nazi armband. It's shocking to me that the Germans would have felt the need to appropriate an image that comes from Hinduism, (which is a bit of a shock to the many Israeli tourists who visit India's inexpensive shores today) when their own history was so filled with icons.

On the other hand, most of Britains' symbols were imported from somewhere else. St. George was originally from Catalonia, St. Andrew from Israel. The Prince of Wales' motto is Czech. Their religion is a German version of a Roman version of a middle Eastern religion. Lions aren't indiginous to Britain either. So it doesn't come as that much of a surprise to me that one of their royal family should appropriate an image from his German cousins.

Still, they feel they need to discipline him, and he's going to have some sensitivity training from the chief Rabbi. Hopefully he can introduce him to some nice Jewish girls so he can see what a loss Austwich was to humanity, though if he brought one home people would see that his act wasn't all that out of character for the royal family.

Then he's going to have a spell in the Army. Well, that certainly sorted Hitler out. He was wearing Nazi armands and making anti-semitic remarks with total impunity until he signed up for the Austrian army in 1914, and they weren't long beating it out of him. This is the same British army of course, which executed hundreds of Irish soldiers who naively thought that by fighting for the colonial overlord they might get some sort of autonomy.

Harry's misemenour can only be good for the burgeoning republican movement in Britain. Hardly anybody there is going to want the eightieth aniversary of Austwich to be presided over by this obnoxious little prick. I'm all for a Republic of Britain, which would pull the carpet from under the Ulster Unionists and hopefully the money saved could be sent to people who really need it instead of spoilt brats like Harry.

Britain only changes really slowly, though, but the trend in the media is away from gossip about the royals to people that the public can relate to. The end of the aristocratic sport of fox-hunting is another welcome development. Yet the sad fact is that many of the wealthiest young people in the country are old money. Until this changes, then many young aristos will naturally feel that they're better than anyone else.

Kill all SUV owners

2005-01-14T16:59:00.000Z

A documentary on Channel Four the Other day achieved the rare feat of making me hate SUV owners even more than I did before.

What would Jesus drive? was largely preaching to the converted, in my case at least. I've always regarded people who own these monster cars as greedy, selfish, sociopaths who're either ignorant of the impact their cars have on the environment or just basically don't care about anyone besides themselves and their immediate families.

But some of the things I saw in this programme made my jaw drop. One family in Huntingdon Beach, CA, told the camera without a trace of irony that they collect cars the way some people collect stray animals because they're "inexpensive and fun"
I want to kill this person, slowly and painfully. First of all, I want to see all his cars crushed and then converted into tractors for hungry communities in Africa.
When you see people like this, you're reminded of Theodore Adorno's comment about the banality of evil. He didn't come across as being a malovent person, yet he ought to be aware of the destruction that his lifestyle wreaks on the planet and many of those people who're misforunate enough to live in countries that have more oil than they can use. And he's got to be aware that most people in the world can't afford a bicycle, let alone a car.

But he wasn't the person that I hated the most. At a motor industry event in Anaheim where they were selling Hummers that get 11 miles to the gallon, one cunt told that camera that he wanted George Bush to get his act together. I couldn't have agreed more, until he said "We own Iraq, and Oil is $50 a gallon?"
I'm going to let his failure to comprehend the subtleties of imperial conquest pass. The important thing is that he seems to know that Bush invaded Iraq to secure it's supply of cheap oil, and that he actually wanted 100,000 people to die so he could drive a bigger and more dangerous car. What sort of people think like this? The sad answer would appear to be Americans.

One smugly asserted that when the California Earthquake strikes, SUV drivers will survive while all the people in "Little Cars" will be killed.

Another was trying to convince us that Global warming would be a good thing, leading to an increase in foliage. Even if the specious, oil-industry-sponsered "Science" behind this assertion were true, the sad fact is that oil is going to run out in fifty years time and then we'll be reliant on bio-fuel, which means more rainforest depletion.

It's not all bad news, though. A series of ads has been shown across the US informing people of the consequences of their choice of motor. Others are taking a more direct approach, spraypainting and even firebombing 4x4s and painting messages like "One more Dead Iraqi" on SUV owners driveways. We need more commendable, civic-minded behaviour like this. If it's justifiable to attack Iraq on a mere suspicion, it's right to attack SUVs when it's demonstrable that they're expediting the end of the world as we know it.

The easiest and most risk-free way to vandalise an SUV is to scratch it with a key, though this usually backfires as it leads to more spraypainting and concomitant environmental damage.

Or you could download some fake parking tickets from www.wastemonsters.co.uk. They're configured for certain central London areas but if you're good with computers (I'm Not) you may be able to redesign them. Put them on as many SUVs as you can, just don't get caught.

Alexander the not-so-bad

2005-01-14T15:40:00.000Z

Oliver Stone's latest movie didn't go down too well with the critics in the US. It's funny how they seem to achieve so much unanimity when their all the sort of independent minded free thinkers that become employed as film critics by quality newspapers. (Here's an article that suggests why this may be so.)

Culture is dissiminated around the world a little quicker than it was in Alexander's
day, but I just got to test my own reaction against those of the American elite yesterday.
Among the biggest bones of contention are Colin Farrell's hair, and, disturbingly, his Irish accent. I can't even be arsed, as we say here, finding out if the same critic criticised Brad Pitt for not talking in a Greek accent in Troy, but I'm suspecting that this wasn't the case. It seems this last reviewer missed the whole point that the Macedonians were outsiders within Greek society and that the accents of the mainly Irish cast sybolise this. I notice that they weren't afraid to go to Morocco to make this movie like Pitt & co. were, but then there've been so many bombings on our island that we all have immunity, so why would we be worried about Al-Queda?

Which brings me to my main gripe about the critics response to the movie. It's alarming to me that only one of the reviews I came across interpreted the film as an allegory about modern America, and even then he didn't mean it as a compliment.
Yet this movie is as cogent a warning about the dangers of imperial overstretch and the sort of hubris that's gripping the American Right as is likely to be made in America in the current climate.

I noticed one poll conducted among people in EU nations about their opinions on the US war in Iraq. The country that was most opposed to the war was not France or Germany, who both know a bit about the dangers of imperialism, but Greece, who know from way, way back that trying to conquer Central Asia is a troublesome business. Many have tried, even before they found a use for the slimy black stuff under it's sand, recognising it as the gateway to the riches of India, China, and South-East Asia.

It's fascinating to watch the young Alexander being brought up to believe that his people are inherently better that anyone else, much as American children are today by being forced to recite an oath of allegience every day. The paradoxical thing was that back then, it was the Europeans who saw the Arabs as being licentuous and ill-disicplined, whereas now it's the other way around. It's ironic how Alexander was able to defeat a much larger army with little more than a zealous belief in his own destiny with little more than the sort of swivel-eyed fanaticism that characterised the crusaders a millenium and a half later, and Some Arab terrorists today.
And how did all those critics not notice that Alexander repeatedly insists that he's trying to spread freedom, when it's more than obvious that he wants to plunder the wealth of what the narrator Ptolemy calls "occupied territories" (!) and convert them to his way of life?

A lot of the criticism that the movie has solicited concentrates on the influence of Alexander's family on his life. Perhaps it's apposite that this film was made when America was led by a man who spent $200 billion of the country's money trying to catch the man who killed his wimpish dad. More than once in the film Alexander is told that he was not fulfilling his father's will, just as George W Bush did the opposite of what his father recommended in a 1995 book.
That this movie bombed at the box office is hardly an indication that Americans don't want to be warned about the dangers of imperialism, after all, Fahrenheit 9/11 was a smash. It's surely not that the allegory was too subltle, after all this is Oliver Stone we're talking about here. I'd hate if audiences spurned the movie just because the critics told them to, when one of their main complaints was how long the movie was, after all, if you pay 8 0r 9 bucks, you want to get your money's worth.

The movie isn't without faults, particularly when Ptolemy, played by Anthony Hopkins, skates through a large part of Alexander's early career. It's hard to disagree with the critics who accuse Angelina Jolie of camping it up and not aging until the very end. Stone doesn't do anything original with the battle scenes, keeping to the old Alexander Nevsky template. Actually, the whole movie is a traditional hollywood sword-and-sandal epic in many ways, though there are some neat Oliver Stone touches, like when he juxtaposes scenes from Greek myth with events in Alexander's life. It's a shame that he feels the need to give us a course in Greek Mythology 101 when so many of their archtypes are still our archetypes, but then this film was aimed at the multiplex.

Some critics criticise Stone for skirting around (as it were) the issue of bisexuality. Oh, please, give the guy a break. You know he couldn't risk either alienating the American right or the Greeks who still haven't come to terms with the fact that one of their heroes may have occasionally attacked via the rear passage.

Perhaps it's that I was so mesmerised by Stone's work as a teenager that I'm always going to be loyal to him, so maybe all the critics are right and I'm wrong. That he's been able to make counter-establishment movies for so long is an indication that the freedom which the US boasts about isn't completely non-existant. It's my hope that America will eventually realise the folly of it's current policy in the middle east and that this movie will be seen, like High Noon, as a brilliant historical allegory

Apres le deluge, Ou est-que Dieu?

2005-01-12T15:34:00.000Z

In my predictions for this year, I migh have said some facetious things about the Tsunami disaster in South-East Asia and the responses of some western governments.
I really didn't think that the US were going to try to pin the blame on Iran, though they had just as much to do with it as Sadamm did with 9/11.
The truth is that the US government has pledged $350,000,000; an increase on it's original pledge of $10,000,000, which sounds like a lot until you realise that they've already spent $200,000,000,000 on the war in Iraq, though they claim, after finding no WMD that the war was for huminatarian reasons.
George Monbiot has already pointed out how hypocritical this is. John Pilger has had his two cents as well

Meanwhile people of various faiths are grappling with the question of how an Omnipotent God would allow such a thing to happen with various degrees of intellect and logic. See here,
here , here , and here.
One woman on Sky News argued that we shouldn't blame the big man upstairs for this as we don't blame him when something wonderful happens (sic).
It's hard to muster up any contempt for a woman who can't formulate a coherent sentence or and has probably never had an orgasam (think about it) but she does represent the views of a large number of people.

I think she was probably an Anglican, which I've always thought of as a form of bet-hedging rather than a faith. One Church of Ireland minister in Today's Irish Times argued that God didn't have anything to do with the Tsunami but had everything to do with the relief efforts, which is a totally anglican way of looking at it.It's nice to know that when I donated money to world vision and all those collection boxes around town I wasn't acting of my own free will but being pushed to do it by the same deity who allowed the earthquake to happen in the first place.

The response by Muslims is a bit more sinister. Again on Sky News, a young boy of about 15 years from Aceh thought that Allah was punishing Muslims for not being fanatical enough, which only made me wish that an Earthquake had hit Mohammad when he was counting how many odours women have. Then in Today's Times, a Muslim cleric says that it's not for us to question the ways of God, which again is just what you'd expect him to say.

On the other hand, I saw a Businessman in Sri lanka, who'd be either Hindu or Buddhist, taking a more philosphical view and saying that though all his shops were destroyed he still had his health.

What this seems to demonstrate is that the debate about where God is after this disaster takes place mainly in newspapers and on the net and not so much in the minds of believers, who're all able to rationalise this to fit whatever beliefs they have.

Religous people are pretty good at rationalising stuff. In the Bible the plagues that hit Egypt are a punishment for the shitty way they treated the Jews, whose bad fortunes are always a test of faith. It's depressing to me that this sort of thing still goes on when we have such a better understanding of how the Earth works. The best thing that could have come out of this tragedy is a weakening of Religous fundamentalism in The US and the Muslim World, but I don't think this is going to happen. When a big Earthquake hit Lisbon in 1755, it accentuated a trend towards secular humanism that led to the enlightement and the French and American Republics. Today the trend is away from secularism and towards fundamentalism, and I'm afraid the Tsunami isn't going to have mcuh effect on this.

I'm a bit annoyed that some people are pointing out that people need things to believe in, as if secularists believed in nothing. We believe in reason, in understanding, in tolerance and in respect for the environment, when the only thing many religous people believe in is how much better they are than people who don't believe the same things as themselves.

I'm also annoyed to hear tourists described as "modern rapists of Paradise" as this tars babckpackers like myself with the sort of people who stay in $1000 a night hotels with air-con and swimming pools. When I went travelling I stayed in the most basic accomadation and went trekking in nature parks and snorkelling, all of which provide the locals with an incentive to maintain the existing ecosystems, which are under threat from farming and fishing. This is the case because so many people have been kicked off their land to make way for industrialised agriculture, which feeds the West's (and China's) insatiable desire for meat products. In Asia, as in Latin America, it's the likes of McDonalds that are responsible for the destuction of paradise. But I don't expect to hear any clerics pointing the finger at them

Steal a little and they put you in Jail, steal a lot and they make you King

2005-01-10T17:36:00.000Z

It seems the peace process has broke down in the North again. You can tell from all the bluster in the Sunday Independent and it's ilk. When the peace process used to break down during the Balkans wars in the 90's people would start to get killed again, but in Ulster it seems that they just fire even more obnoxious insults at each other.
In fairness, the IRA have really pushed the envelope this time. All those bombings were one thing, but robbing a bank? There's no excuse for that sort of thing, after all it's not like banks ever rob us, is it?
Robbing a British Bank of British banknotes isn't going to win them any friends in Westminister or among the loyalist community, but my suspicion is that if they were to do something similar down here, robbing banknotes from the AIB and selling them back to people on the street at a knock-down price then it would actually win them votes. Of course, we use the Euro down here, so the governent wouldn't be able to put them out of commision.
It's unlikely to lose them any votes up north either, though there's the slight catch that the votes are for a non-executive assembly which won't have any power unless they give up all criminal activity.
Sinn Fein's denials of involvement in this incident strike me as being a bit half-hearted. It's obvious that everyone of a criminal bent up there is involved with some sort of parimilitary organisation and that the loyalists hardly have the requisite grey matter to pull off something as intricate and complex as a bank raid. On the other hand, there are plenty of people in the province with an interest in keeping the conflict going who all know that the provos credibility is at an all time low after the Columbia debacle.
It seems though, that they don't seem to care all that much about how much they've alienated the British goverment as they know that nationalists will be the majority within 15-20 years anyway and that the last straw holding the ill-concieved Ulster statelet will fall apart as this becomes more apparent. Down here, though, it will only increase the outlaw chic which draws a lot of their support.
Micheal McDowell, the man who insisted on the clause about "criminality" must be wondering why he didnt get the same sort of bounce in the polls when it was revealed that he was up to no good when building a new house. Then again, it seems mildly hypocritical for him to criticise Sinn Fein for involvement with criminals when he's been breaking the law himself.
But where would democracy be if any political party which was involved with criminals wasn't allowed participate in the democratic process? Fianna Fail have been involved with dodgy property developers who've robbed far more from the Irish exchequer than the IRA did from that Belfast bank, but you don't see Michael McDowell calling for their heads. Over in Britain, many of the Tories will still hunt in defiance of the Ban, but their party will still be allowed to oppose Tony Blair's goverment after the next election. Blair himself supported the miner's strike, which was technically illegal, in the 80's, and since he's changed sides, has supported an illegal war in which the death toll for the Northern conflict has been dwarved many times. Yet he remains Prime Minister. Only in Northern Ireland, it seems, are parties which have criminal associations barred from holding office.
At least for the meantime.

Where's me Serpent?

2005-01-10T17:12:00.000Z

Our uneleceted President came down to open the festival, as promised.
She told us that our enemies had been vanquished, and that everyone would get a new donkey this Christmas, our something along those general lines.
The Exile John Creedon returned from his sojourn abroad to preside over the festivities.
The fireworks went off, and we were all impressed by the bright lights. We pushed up against the barriers to get the best view.
But... where was the serpent?
All the buzz about in the weeks leading up to the opening of the Cork 2005, City of Culture thing that you may have heard of, promised us a big serpent leaping out of the River Lee. Instead all we got was some tail-like things sticking out of the river and shooting off more fireworks.
Peasants like myself who aren't involved with the Cork 2005 organising commitee are always impressed by bright lights and that sort of thing as we don't have any televisions or computers in our houses and therefore lead very dull lives. But, heck, we were promised a serpent, and I expected one to come splashing out of the river, fire blowing from it's eyes and venom rasping from it's tongue, and this is all I got.
I couldn't be arsed getting up on new years day to aquire a ticket so I ended up buying one on the street. €3 was the price I was quoted but he didnt have the right change so just handed me a big handful of coins. So I paid the best part of a fiver to see a serpent, and this was all I got. I must say I'm really disenchanted.
It's a genuine pity, because there really was a good buzz around town for the rest of the day, with more musicians and performance artists than you could shake a stick at, and there was a genuine carnival athmosphere. It's a shame that at the end, the "organisers" felt they had to herd us all behind barriers so we could see this horribly anti-climatic finale.
It's hardly surprising, given the attitude the "organisers" seem to have, which is that the people of Cork have little capacity for producing anything of value themselves and have so little appetite for high culture that they need to put on some fireworks to keep us amused.
Take a look at their website and all you'll see is links to their corporate sponsers and no potential for interactivity.
On the other hand, go onto Mick Hannigan's alternative Where's Me Culture site and see the buzz being generated, with all sorts of wierd and wonderful ideas being put forth. (one of them is mine. Can you guess which?)
Having been to their opening party in the mardyke which was generated by people from Cork for people from Cork, I'm going to be investing alot more faith in this than in the official Cork 2005 organisation.

2005: Let Me tell you how it will Be

2004-12-31T16:15:00.000Z

Predicting the future is a dangerous business. Who would have thought a year ago that George Bush would have been reelected in dubious circumstances, in spite of Michael Moore’s efforts to topple him, that Chelsea would be top of the league by eight points, that people paid to kill people in Iraq would also torture them, or that David Blunkett would do something colosolly stupid? Or that U2 would release a new album that was respectfully received by the media? Nonetheless, I’m going to stick my neck on the proverbial block, dust off my crystal ball, drill a hole in the top and use it as a kettle and see what the tea leaves have in store for humanity.

January

Ralph Nader declares himself a candidate in Iraqi election claiming that Shia and Sunni are basically the same religion. Bertie Ahern seen wearing Che Guevara T-shirt. Jose Mourhinho tries to buy striker, claiming that God told him to switch to 4-4-2 formation. Dick Cheney mentions Asian Earthquake and Iranian Nuclear Weapons programme in Same Fox News interview. Dollar drops to $1.41 against Euro.

February

Nader urged to soften anti-gun stance. Claiming to stand for disenfranchised, visits Fallujah, subsequently disappears. Bertie Ahern walks into health food store wearing Kaftan and buys some Granola. Chelsea reach final of Coca-Cola cup after beating Man United. Wayne Rooney dropped after missing chance; video footage shows him eyeing up babes in OAP section. Condoleeza Rice points out that earthquake epicentre roughly equidistant from Iran and North Korea. Dollar drops to $1.63

March

Sadaam Hussein reelected unanimously. Lawyers challenge verdict, Baathists buy “Sore Loserman” posters on eBay. Iraq sees levels of violence unmatched since previous week. Bertie Ahern joins in M20 protest in Dublin. Mary Harney moves to tackle Irish obesity crisis by applying for foreign nationality. Donald Rumsfeld claims that aerial photography shows Iranian nuclear scientists trying on some scuba-diving gear. Dollar drops to $2.04

April

Sadaam’s appearance deteriorates, US military deny trying to poison him by adding subliminal messages to his Britney Spears albums urging him to eat the dirt under his toenails. Michael Moore points out that no such accusations had been made, ignored by mainstream media. Mary Harney applies for US citizenship. Sent home from Boston airport after temperamental response to “Are you or have you even been a communist?” query. Paul Wolfowitz claims that evil laughter has been heard emanating from University of Tehran seismology department. Dollar drops to $2.21

May

Sadaam found dead in cell. Baathists claim North Korean precedent for having asentient leader. Mary Harney applies to become German. Berlin says it would prefer Michael McDowell. Bush mentions war on terrorism in speech about plate tectonics. Chelsea win premiership, FA Cup, Champions league. Roman Abramovich buys Labour Party, elected Prime Minister. Mike Skinner releases new 3-CD concept album Waterloo, about the time he lost some toilet roll. The Guardian hails it as a “White-Knuckle ride into a Dostoevskian underworld” Dollar drops to $3.35

June

After Iraqi recount, Dick Cheney elected president. Single cheering Iraqi repeatedly shown on Fox News. Cheney moves to Baghdad, given harem with forty comely maidans. Arnold Schwarzneger appointed Vice President of US. Mary Harney applies to become Brazilian but told would fit into tight speedoes. Bertie plans to spend summer in Calcutta feeding hungry children. Hears about monsoon season, changes mind. Dollar drops to $9.99.

July

Iraq renamed Halliburtonia. Hating freedom made capital offence. Incarceration rates reach US levels. One comely maiden turns out to be a lesbian. Given phone number of daughter, name of good barber, instructions on how to wear baseball cap backwards, and US citizenship. Bush declares that war on terrorism and war on Earthquakes are inseparable. Prime Minster Abramovich agrees, foreign Minster Mourhinho dissents, gets sack. Bertie Ahern stands outside Brown Thomas Naked in protest against sale of fur coats. Dollar drops to $14.92

August

Mary Harney becomes Halliburtonian citizen. Irish obesity levels drop by 8%. Record Heatwave hits France, killing 100,000. Bush responds by announcing new “Save the Trees” initiative in which any American who lives near a wooded area is given free chainsaw. Minor tremor hits California, Bush declares that time has come to invade Iran. Dollar drops to $50.

September

George Bush asks congress for half a trillion dollars to fight war in Iran. Head of finance subcommittee says he can’t work out if this is viable as he only has eight digits on his calculator. AIB lend Bush money, financing the loan by selling three repossessed houses in Foxrock to Chinese industrialists. Shocked by violence in country, Mary Harney tells Cheney that she knows someone who can sort out this mess. Value of dollar falls to 2 Vietnamese dong.

October

Abramovich warns Bush not to Invade Iran at this time of year, as it gets nippy there in winter. Bush dismisses claims. Donald Rumsfeld shows American public computer-generated images of the Iranian governments secret under-water earthquake-making machine, urges American mothers to knit woolly jumpers. Bertie buys guitar and sits in a tree outside the US embassy singing “Masters of War” repeatedly. China declared world’s pre-eminent economic power, rubs hands together gleefully.

November

Invasion of Iran begins. Rumsfeld dismisses claims that American soldiers are underequipped, arguing that the crossbows sold to them by Navajo tribesmen are more than a match for the armour they sold the Shah in the 70’s. Dollar bills sold on eBay for use as wallpaper by Europeans. Germans stop making stuff altogether. ECB considers rate cut. Michael McDowell appointed Hallibutonian minister for justice. Seeks to ban drinking and smoking. Cheney checks to see if Halliburton have interests in Brewing or Tobacco. Brian Cowen announces substantial welfare increases. Unemployed Dubliners buy small American villages on eBay. Ian Paisley dies of Heart attack after being sent envelope with “decommissioning photos” stamped on it, which turn out to be pix of chix with dix. Gerry Adams tries to deny responsibility, bursts out laughing.

December.

Smoking, drinking, dancing and watching funny stuff on TV banned in Halliburtonia. Former Baathists call McDowell a fascist and are publicly shot in Baghdad, which has been renamed Freetown. US military get bogged down in Iran. Asked if the country is becoming another Iraq, Rumsfeld says he can’t remember which is which. America renamed eBayland. Dutch government buy New York for E24 and rename it New New Amsterdam. Tulips planted in Central park. Jose Mourhinho declares self God, Frank Lampard his representative on Earth, tries to decide whether Duff or Robben is best suited to Holy Spirit role. Meditating nakedly on the Beach in Inchidony, Bertie sees bandwagon and jumps on it. Bush tells world that God told him to invade Iran. Mourhinho says he recalls no such thing. Ebaylish Christian right become disillusioned and commit mass suicide. Power Vacuum ensues, Michael Moore becomes president after coup d’etat. Promises to pay off national debt by having lipsuction and selling body fat as bio-fuel. Promises to pull Ebayish troops out of Middle East. Soldiers refuse to come home, set up own military state, declare war on eBayland. Moore wonders how he got into such a mess, falls asleep on nuclear button. Armageddon averted after it turns out eBayland’s nuclear arsenal was sold over web. Mystery buyer turns out to be Osama Bin Laden. World says “Oh Shit!”