The Pope's divisions have been repulsed. Once again we are saved from "popery, slavery, knavery, brass money and wooden shoes." The Catholic church's attempt to blackmail the Government has failed. This means extra scourging for Ms. Ruth Kelly and three Hail Marys for Tony Blair's penance.
We await the Church's declaration that it will cease all involvement in child adoption, as promised.

Judges releasing paedophiles, so what's new? Judges have always had a soft spot for child abusers. There are those who believe that there's a paedophile mafia, or freemasonry, and some judges belong to it.
Now they can blame John Reid, averring "I was just obeying orders." Funny, when other judges state that they won't stand for politicians compromising the independence of the judiciary.

A quote from the American journalist, Christiane Amanpour -
"The right questions weren't asked in the lead-up to the
Iraq war, and now the whole world is paying the price."
This crap by politicians and journalists that they were fooled by the lies of Bush and the oil-slickers, and Blair and his spin-doctors, won't work. There were plenty of people who weren't fooled, but they weren't being well paid to disseminate the lies.
After the first Iraq war the hacks complained that they'd been lied to, but they wouldn't just repeat the lies next time. Second attack on Iraq, the media go into cheerleader mode. Now they are claiming that things would have been different if they'd known that they were being lied to by Bush and Blair.
It would be nice if we could believe them. Unfortunately we see them going along with these proven liars, now on Iran, regurgitating the disinformation they're been fed by the propaganda machine. Warmongers at the beginning, peacelovers in the aftermath, accessories throughout.

So now bills introduced by the government have to be vetted by the Pope's representative in the Cabinet - Ruth Kelly, the fully-fledged flagellatrix of Octopus Dei. Will the Pontiff get his way? Well, Blair the crypto-catholic will do his damnedest for Holy Mother Church.
That's another Blair lie, that he is not yet a catholic. Any catholic will tell you that nobody but a catholic can receive Holy Communion. Yet Blair was doing so regularly a few years ago, until the press got wind. But even then nobody pointed out that Blair the recipient of the eucharist = Blair the Roman Catholic. Not even, to my knowledge, the sleuth-hounds of the Orange Order. Can it be that non-catholics are not aware of the significance of this act, and that catholics kept Shtum for fear of an almighty row?
When I was being educated at catholic schools we were told that there is an unwritten rule in this country that a catholic cannot be Prime Minister. Whether or not this is true I don't know, but it appears that Blair has heard that story and is not taking any chances.

The humorist Art Buchwald, who died last week, once wrote, "Every time you think television has hit its lowest ebb a new programme comes along to make you wonder where you thought the ebb was." Who can argue with that?

More on the news about "black holes" in pension funds. Black hole is journalist's code for stolen money. If it's found that money has been stolen then there should be a hunt for the thief and an attempt to recover the loot. The thieves in these cases are employers and managers who have stolen money from their employees, and that, after all, is capitalism - the rich and powerful fleecing the poorer, powerless majority. What journalist is going to call these people thieves? No, a black hole opens up and swallows millions in workers' savings; it's like an act of God.
As the IWW columnist, T-Bone Slim, wrote, "The poor break the laws, the rich merely evade them."

I watched "The Trial of Tony Blair" last night. The critics were not impressed but I enjoyed it.
What was difficult to swallow, though, was the idea that (pernicious) T.B. was subject to hallucinations about the countless lives he has snuffed out in the course of his sojourn as Prime Minister. That man, that person, has no doubts. Did we ever see a man so full of hubris, of chutzpah, of shit? "You're all wrong and I'm right, and, even when I'm wrong and you're right I'm still superior to the rest of you. I'm a Christian, I talk to God and tell him what I'm going to do. He has never yet ordered me to desist. I also talk to George Bush, and God tells George what to do. My arse is divinely covered."

Jade Goodfornothing's mother has gone on record with the claim that her daughter can't be racist because she's of racially mixed parentage. That reminds me of the time a mate of mine was arguing with two Israelis. Their racist remarks about Palestinians, and their description of the treatment they felt Palestinians deserved, led my mate to call them fascists. "Oh no, we can't be fascists" they assured him, "because we are Jews."
Tensions and rivalries between different ethnic minorities, for example Afro-Caribbean and British Asian, have led to violent incidents in the past. These could not be racial in origin according to the Essex Gobshite theory of race relations. Cultural, I suppose.

Congratulations to Ms. Marina Hyde of the Guardian; the only British journalist who knows that the singular of paparazzi is paparazzo.

Big Brother is watching, but not listening
Everyone has an opinion, here's mine.
Racism, yes. Note that the weasels of Channel 4 state that there has been no OVERT racism on their piece of shit programme. Translation - yes, there's racism, but we're not seeing it.
Then there's this word "culture" that's suddenly become fashionable. Not racism, it's a clash of cultures. Cobblers! Haven't the BNP been using this expression lately in reference to their anti-Islamic propaganda? It's not racism, it's cultural. Pure coincidence that 95% of British Muslims are Asian in origin.
I have to confess, shamefacedly that I was one of the alleged million extra viewers who tuned in on Tuesday evening to see what was going on. The answer - nothing. I've always avoided the Big Brother bearpit/cesspit before, and it seems I haven't missed much. I kept switching back and forth but all I saw was people sitting around looking bored; all I heard was a hissing noise intended, I think, to prevent the public hearing what was being said (covert racism?).
Neither Enemadol, the makers, nor Channel 4 are expressing any regret, contrition or intent to reform. Ofcom says it's up to Channel 4 to listen to the public. Is that it, Ofcom? What a parcel of moral bankrupts. All the public can do is switch off en masse. We won't miss anything. The liveliest parts get shown on the news.

The above statement that 95% of BritishMuslims are Asian is just a guess on my part, but it can't be far wrong. I daresay it's as reliable as the pollsters' count of Big Brother (Big Bully) viewers.
Tuesday's Guardian had a good headline; "One in five Home Office statistics are unreliable, says department head." Confusing, n'est-ce pas? Leaving aside that it should read, one in five ... is unreliable, it has to be a leg-pull. The head of the department of unreliable statistics issues a statistic on the unreliability of its statistics. It's like the Cretan claiming all Cretans are liars, or Pascal (was it he?) claiming that all generalisations are false, including his generalisation about generalisations. That way lies madness.
Luís Buñuel on statistics -
"It is impossible to read a single page in a newspaper without finding at least a dozen of them, most of which are blatantly false." Was he exaggerating? Was he generalising?
I'm no fan of Buñuel. I find his output rather seedy, but I'll except "Los Olvidados" and "Nazarín", to avoid accusations of generalisation.

Today is reckoned to be the tercentenary of the Act of Union of England and Scotland, though, as the change from the Julian to the Gregorian calendar occurred in 1752, I'm not sure of the exact significance of the date.
The event was later commemorated by Robert Burns in his poem "Parcel of Rogues"

We're bought and sold for English gold,

Such a parcel of rogues in a nation.

A list of the rogues and the gold they received can be found here

http://www.siol-nan-gaidheal.com/history.htm

From the Earl of Marchmont, £1,104/17/7d, to My Lord Banff, £11/2/0d.

Blair's back and all's well. The airline companies can carry on destroying the ozone layer. I bet Ian Pearson (who?) feels a fool.

In yesterday's Guardian I read of a woman named Jackiey. I assumed that it was a Grauniad misprint, but just in case, I googled that outlandish spelling. No mistake, that's how the woman spells her name.

Environment Minister Ian Pearson - never heard of him - has gone off message. He described the airline Ryanair as, "... not just the unacceptable face of capitalism, they are the irresponsible face of capitalism". Back to New Labour School for you, Sonny. Capitalism doesn't have an unacceptable face, capitalism doesn't have a duty of responsibility. "A corporation cannot be ethical; it's only responsibility is to turn a profit." Thus the late, unlamented Milton Friedmann. So if Ryanair is turning a profit it's acting responsibly. Thatcher thought old Milt the canine's cobblers, and Blair, as we know, is "the bastard son of Margaret Thatcher" (Class War), well, her heir and adulator anyway.
We can expect a correction as soon as Tone gets back in front of the cameras. Blair and Brown are the one's who talk about climate change. Pearson's job is to be the whipping boy when New Labour are exposed as liars and hypocrites - once again. In the meantime he should be telling the menu peuple, people like me, to switch off the standby on our tellies, and not flush the lav when we've had a piss. That's New Labour's strategy for saving the planet.

As a veteran of the National Service era, I wonder about the army of today. They are sent out to war zones and some of them get shot. So they want to sue the government for putting them in danger. They are supposed to be professionals, their whole job is to kill and to be killed. Didn't anybody tell them that?
During World War II conscripts, poorly paid, were sent out to die for their country, and they did. No doubt they complained about their lot but nobody listened. They were followed by National Servicemen, sent out to sweat and suffer, and sometimes to die, in some fly-blown or leech -ridden corner of the empire. When they lost their lives in the service of their country they were buried where they fell. If their parents or wives wanted them buried at home they had to pay for their bodies to be flown home.
Did those conscripts complain about their lot? Damn right! And with good reason. Did anybody listen. Of course not. Who gave a rat's arse about conscripts? Korea, the forgotten war, one the Yanks dragged us into. How many national servicemen were killed and wounded out there? Not to mention the men who were captured and imprisoned, and had their health ruined as a result.
Malaya, Kenya, Cyprus, the Suez débacle; the list goes on. Not forgetting those poor bastards sent out to Christmas Island to be exposed to atomic radiation. I don't suppose they even got a General Service Medal for seeing active service.
Another trend that I find disturbing is this business of generals getting up on their hind legs and publicly bollocking politicians. We all know these people are lower than snakes, and they don't care who dies for the advancement of their personal ambitions. We don't need the military to step in.
One of the first things we learned when we started our basic training was that the British Army doesn't get involved in politics. This was stated as a matter of pride. It was a mark of the United Kingdom's superiority to some South American and Middle Eastern countries. So what has changed?
Fifty years ago nobody listened to the military, now the Prime Minister has to agree when some general tells him he's a dick.

The rope that extinguished the life of Saddam Hussein has been presented to Muqtada-Muqtada! as-Sadr. Fitting, as it seems that, thanks to his Mahdi murder squads, he is now the one they all fear.

"Muqtada, Muqtada!" It's Arabic - it means "Death to the mass-murderer! Long live the other mass-murderer!"

Arise Sir Wiggy!
Now that Robin Gibb has joined the list of Blair's super-rich benefactors can we expect him to feature on some future honours list, or has the Right Honourable charity case kicked the arse out of that one? Having left his erstwhile friend Lord Levy to face the music, has Blair done enough to get the Metropolitan Muskers off his case? I hope not. Until we can get him before a war crimes tribunal this illegal huckstering will have to do.

So farewell then, Saddam Hussein. You were an ardent advocate, and practitioner, of capital punishment. What fitter way to for you to go?
A pity though that Saddam's successors were unable to eschew his methods and make a clean break with the past. What, give up torture, imprisonment without trial, judicial and injudicial murder? Not while their American masters encourage the use of the old and tried methods of government by despised puppets.
One problem, now that Saddam has gone, who will replace him as the embodiment of evil for Fox-ridden Americans? They need a hate figure and Usama seems to have left the building. Ahmadinajad! Give him a snappy name and he'll fit the bill. A five-syllable monicker is too much for any Anglophone.

Neoliberalism and Global Justice

This report is lifted from December's Industrial Worker. The terms "Wob" and "Wobbly" refer to members of the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW). "Chooks" are chickens.

Melbourne Wobs participated in the
Second Latin American and Asia Pacific Solidarity
Gathering Oct. 21-22 at Trades Hall.
The conference sought to widen the cracks
in neoliberalism by building bridges between
grassroots organisations around the world,
which are fighting back in new and ever more
inventive ways.
IWW delegate Margaret Creagh spoke on
the opening day, beginning her talk with the
Wobbly Doxology. Excerpts follow:
“When the IWW was founded in Chicago
101 years ago, they said: ‘There can be no
peace so long as hunger and want are found
among millions of working people.’
“We were made criminals then and the
capitalists have plundered ever since.
“Ten years ago 176 bullshit world leaders
at the World Food Summit pledged to halve
the number of undernourished people by
2015. Yet 850 million are still hungry – some
18 million more than in 1996. ... Six million
children die from hunger each year, yet we
... have enough food to provide everyone
in the rest of the world with at least 2,720
kilocalories per person per day.
“Naming The Bastards: Monsanto’s empire
includes Dow Chemicals, infamous for
giving us the Vietnam War chemical Agent
Orange. ... Monsanto are now patenting
indigenous foods as privatised corporate
property; and genetically engineered soya
beans grown in Argentina are shipped here
to Melbourne for feeding chooks.
“Every year more of our class die due
to work-related illnesses and accidents.
Yet asbestos is still exported from Canada
and ‘Australian’ company James Hardie has
moved offshore to avoid liabilities here.
“Corporate crooks run amok. Climate
changed governments and capitalists are rebranded,
green-washed sustainable exploiters
of the planet. There is no right to food and
no right to water. In South Africa’s economic
apartheid slums you must get a pre-paid card
to get water from a tap in the street. That’s
profiteering in the 21st century. ...
“Military spending has gone ballistic
which means there is no more pretence at getting
rid of poverty in this world. When there
are ‘natural disasters’ ... the poor suffer the
most. ... Poor people who start climbing the
ladder to better conditions are outnumbered
by people who are facing worse conditions,
because of unemployment or more informal
employment. The abyss between rich and
poor increases daily in all countries.
“Where could be global justice?
“What if we join our community and
union forces to meet all the challenges of
today – we are millions, billions in fact.
Health and safety are the priority at work – we
cannot improve conditions and wages if we
get maimed and die. Here in Australia, April
28th is industrial work deaths and injuries
day. In the lead=up to May Day, May 1st, it is
a time to remember the dead and fight like
hell for the living.
“The International General Strike is coming
– Latin America can do it and Central
American can do it. In the USA, on May Day
of this year, millions of migrant workers went
on strike.
“Here in Australia the General Strike
defends and extends hard-won conditions
now under siege by the corporations and their
puppet governments.
“Before the invasion of Iraq began, several
unions, most notably in Italy and the UK,
made efforts to use their power as workers
to stop the transport of war materials. As an
IWW poet said years ago, ‘Without our brain
and muscle not a single wheel can turn.’ The
ruling class – international capitalism – needs
us to do its bidding. When we organize and
refuse its orders, we can start to define an
alternative to the ‘New World Order.’
“We can take over and lock out the employing
class and transform production to be
in harmony with Mother Earth, so six million
children do not starve to death again next year
and 850 million others are no longer hungry
and the bloody plunder wars cease.”

So farewell then, Pinochet - asesino, ladrón, hijo de puta. We mourn the thousands you murdered, but for you we feel only contempt. You evaded justice in a most cowardly way.You seized power in a cowardly way, bombing the presidential palace from the air. Did you ever in your life act like a man?
We remember also your British friends, Thatcher, Lamont and Jack Straw, a man whose reputation for cowardice vies with yours.

L'Wren, isn't that the most ridiculous name ever concocted, and it's real. There is someone going around with this name. What I want to to know is, did her parents foist this name on her, or did she just adopt this exotic spelling? Perhaps she thought it was "kinda classy", as Kirk Douglas did his nom de guerre. The apostrophe is the icing on the cake, gives it that little extra.
I've always wondered who sent the name Lauren out into the cold world - I'm assuming L'Wren is a "classy" version of Lauren. But that name seems to me to be synthetic, one with no genuine roots . The first of the name, to my knowledge, was the actress Lauren Bacall, but she was Betty Perske in the real world. I'm guessing that the pseudonym was imposed on her by some agent/ manager/PR person who thought it "kinda classy".
Then there's Lauren Hutton who's really called Mary Hutton; and Ralph Lauren, who's real name is Ralph Lifschitz. So when do we get to the genuine article?

Remembering my copy of Leslie Dunkling and William Gosling's "Dictionary of First Names" I looked up Lauren. It seems that the individual who renamed Ms Bacall and gave this name to the world was Howard Hughes, though Lauren was found occasionally as a male given name for a few years prior to Howard's stroke of genius. She, it seems, was the first female Lauren.

Blair apologises for slavery, which was abolished 200 years ago. Well, not quite an apology, but he feels bad about it. How long will the Iraqi people wait for an to apology?
What is the point of apologising for something for which one is not responsible, something that happened hundreds of years ago? A Tory MP, Greg Clark, said recently of the Thatcher years, "Ignoring the reality of relative poverty was a terrible mistake." A Tory criticising Thatcher, that's more like it. Maybe one day the Conservatives will issue a full-blown apology for the Poll Tax, Mad Cow Disease, the destruction of the mining industry (virtually all British industry, in fact). Then it will be Labour's turn to apologise for Blair. Let's witness a little contrition for what the malefactors have done to us, the living, to our institutions, and to our communities.

Litvinenko, who worked for Berezovsky, met Lugovoy, who works for Berezovsky, then he died. Goldfarb, who works for Berezovsky, produces what he claims is a deathbed statement by Livinenko, blaming Putin for his poisoning. Putin, Berezovsky's bete noire. There's something missing from this investigation, and from the media's reporting of it. What can it be?
Meanwhile, in Lebanon, the investigation into the death of Pierre Gemayyel has turned up two names; the mass murderer Samir Geagea, and Sami Gemayyel, brother of the deceased. Both Maronites, both, presumably anti-Syrian. This is not the way things were meant to work out. Time for a change of tack.

The Farepak swindle is a demonstration of our economic and political system at its purest. The rich steal from the poorest sector of society and it's all legal, nothing can be done. What's more nobody in the government wants to do anything. Apart from that prick McCartney, "Let's have a whipround, but let's not disturb the thieves while they're tallying up."
Blair stands up in Parliament and states the government's intent to ensure that this will never happen again. Later a spokesman interprets this statement. "It doesn't mean that the government is going to do anything."
http://www.thisismoney.co.uk/news/article.html?in_article_id=414536&in_page_id=2

Statements in Parliament are no longer to be taken seriously, it seems. Margaret Beckett gets up and declares that British Forces will start pulling out of Iraq in the Spring. Later a government spokesman clarifies, "This doesn't mean that troops will be pulling out in the Spring."
Well of course not. I remember when John Profumo had to resign from the government for lying to Parliament - such quaint old customs.
The past is another country. I sometimes wonder if my presence in this one is legal.

SADDAM COMEBACK
My semi-serious remarks about a rehabilitation of Saddam may not be far off the mark. According to a report on commondreams.org James Baker has been talking to one of Saddam's lawyers. The lawyer was informed that Tariq Aziz is to be released to negotiate with the Baathist resistance, presumably to cut ties with the Sunni Fanatics if any such ties ever existed.
Meanwhile Tony Blair mourns the death of one Pierre Gemayyel. OK Tony, tell us all you know about this political giant. I'm betting he'd never heard the name before the assassination. Pierre was one of the anti-Syrian faction in Lebanon. That means pro-American, that's the America that sent the Israelis into Lebanon to kill as many Lebanese as possible, and to turn the country to rubble. I can see why he might be a target for people other than the Syrian Mukhabarat.
Lebanese politicians are assassinated with regularity, usually by other Lebanese, and its my opinion that the Maronites, Gemayyel's own confessional group, top the assassination charts. Observers are pointing out that Pierre was killed in what should have been a relatively safe area for him.

Another claimed political murder, that in London of Litvinenko, raises some questions. He is supposed to have upset Putin with his claims about the Moscow bombing, that it was done by Putin's people, not Chechen terrorists. Well this story has been in the public domain for some time and the western media and western politicians have chosen not to hear it. Why should Putin worry? As long as he pays lip service to Bush's "war on terror" he can do what he likes to his own people.
We are supposed to sympathise with this Litvinenko, yet he was once part of this state terrorist set-up. That's how he knows so much. He chose to transfer his allegiance to the gangster, sorry oligarch, Berezovsky; doubtless a much more rewarding post, financially speaking. I can't swear to this but I'm sure I heard his friend Nekrasov say that he knew he'd been poisoned because he was once part of the department that carried out these operations.
I have to ask, who are these people, Litvinenko, Goldfarb, Nekrasov? What are they doing here? Russian politics and gangsterism are so closely linked that we should treat all these people with suspicion. At the moment the Berezovsky boys are having a free run in the British media, and they are muddying the waters in my opinion. Their activities merit closer scrutiny.