No more conspiracy theory crap please

This blog is now a crappy conspiracy theory-free zone. (Well, it always was on my side, but one or two regular visitors need to get with the programme.)

Any more posts about British military intelligence, the CIA, MI5 or 6, collusion between paramilitary groups, the New World Order, Zionist Occupational Governments, the Jesuits, or shape-shifting lizard people will be removed.

Same goes for nonsense about what 'really happened' in relation to 9-11, the bloodline of Jesus Christ, the conflict in Northern Ireland or the English royal family.

I lost patience for all that crap a long time ago, and I'm going to delete it any time I see it because those sort of contributions only serve to derail actual interesting debates.

I don't mind a topic going off-topic, so long as it's heading in some interesting directions. But the welcome mat is no longer out for anyone who's sole interest is to derail every single thread they post on with the same paranoid conspiracy theory crap.

Real Estate in the virtual world is pretty cheap. Go build a temple to the madness somewhere else on the interwebs. This blog ain't it. Sorry.

Miss Alaska for Vice-President?

Or maybe even for President in four years time?

It seems that John McCain has decided to go with Alaska Governor Sarah Palin as his vice-presidential candidate.

It's a superlative choice that's really going to let the Democrats know they're in a fight for the Whitehouse.

She is a dream candidate for the Republicans - she's extremely photogenic (even now, as opposed to her beauty queen heyday, right), married to an Inuit (there goes a slice of Obama's ethnic vote), the mother of a Downs' Syndrome kid and a soldier on active duty, and she has actual experience of governance (unlike Obama, Biden or McCain).

She'll appeal to the ethnic vote, to the swing vote and to the still disgruntled Clintonista sisterhood vote.

An election that ought on paper to have been a Democrat landslide is now blown wide open. They have the wrong candidate, the wrong vice-presidential candidate and the wrong election strategy (Roman pillars for the acceptance speech? WTF?)

By contrast, McCain is quietly playing a blinder. Palin is a genuine heavyweight candidate, despite her beauty and relative youth. Alaskan politicos allege that the political landscape of the territory is littered with the corpses of those who've opposed her in the past.

She will give Biden a good debate and she will shore up the demographic holes in the McCain vote.

Despite the Obamania of the convention, the much-awaited bump in the polls has not materialised for the Democrats. McCain remains doggedly in touch.

It will be interesting to see the polls following the Republican convention. I suspect by then McCain will be neck-and-neck with Obama if not in front.

Certainly, the media agenda hijacking of the Democrat convention by today's announcement is a genius move by the GOP that the Democrats have nothing to respond with.

If they keep boxing clever like that, no amount of waffly Obama rhetoric will be able to propel him to the Whitehouse come November.

What's worse for the Democrats is that if the McCain ticket does get elected, then Palin can run against Obama or Hilary or whoever the Dems choose in 2012 with four years of executive experience under her belt.

The real nightmare for them would be for McCain to die about three years into a term of office. They'd be looking realistically at eight years of Bush junior, followed by three of McCain, followed by nine of Palin.

Civilisation is crumbling

Jade Goody naked here.

'Civilisation is crumbling,' said Bill the Butcher (right) in 'Gangs of New York.'

Bill was correct, of course. Just a century or so premature in his diagnosis.

But two news items today indicate that Bill's prescient prediction is now coming true.

Firstly, a book written by a chimp has been nominated for a best first book award.

Now, I'm going out on a limb here, but I reckon that the monkey didn't write the book. No matter how many years he was chained to a typewriter. I'm guessing it was written by a bunch of marketing scum, seeking to 'create some buzz' around nothing by billing their verbal silage as being the product of a monkey.

Every year, tens of thousands of debut novels emerge onto the market to a resounding silence from the media, the review pages, the awards lists. This is how it must be, when there is so much output and so little space for promotion or endorsement.

But could you blame each and every one of those dedicated writers for feeling outraged that some piss-poor marketing fluff, advertised as being written by a chimp, gets shortlisted for a prestigious award while they struggle on, creating art in a vacuum (or freezing garret)?

For added irony, the book has been listed even though it hasn't been published yet. That's right, this book which no one has read, which was allegedly written by a chimp, is so brilliant that it has been shortlisted for an award.

In case you're still not convinced that the end of the world is nigh, let me refer you to Marina Hyde, who is in her own little way despairing about the fate of humanity.

The reason for her concern is the opening this week of a finishing school for reality TV show contestants.

I'm afraid that's not a typo. There really is now a college in New York dedicated to teaching people how to become the next Jade Goody.

If anyone's looking for me, I'm spending the rest of the day in my nuclear bunker.

Pervert Central - South Belfast

South Belfast is pervert central.

Of the nearly 900 people on the Northern Ireland sexual offenders register (ie, child abusers, rapists and assorted other perverts) a terrifying 774 live in the community, free to strike again.

Unfortunately, you don't get to know if they're living in your neighbourhood or not. The Government and the police don't think you deserve to know if a paedophile lives at the end of your street, or next to your child's school.

But at least we have this breakdown.

It seems that the place to avoid if you want to live far away from nonces and pederasts is leafy South Belfast. There are 116 convicted sex offenders living freely and openly in South Belfast.

If the house prices weren't falling there already, they'll be tumbling now.

I'm just surprised that there weren't even more in West Belfast, given its long-standing reputation as an incest hotspot.

Obama becoming more unelectable by the day

Apparently it IS possible to make Barack Hussein Obama even more unelectable than he already is.

Ladies and gentlemen, I give you the next never-will-be-vice-president of the United States, Joe Biden.

Okay, he's an aged white man, just like the Obamaniacs wanted (though one wonders why.)

But he's also one of the wettest eco-liberals in US politics. Not exactly the sort of person to mitigate and soften Obama's own hyper-lefty tendencies so much as exaggerate and amplify them.

Biden's pro-environment, pro-choice, anti-tax cuts, pro-gun control and pro-gay civil unions. Whatever the merits of any of those individual positions, they certainly won't endear the Obama ticket to the MOR Republican-lite voters and undecideds that they need to get over the line in November. If anything, the opposite.

He is vaunted for his foreign affairs knowledge, however. Again, his positions seem unelectable to me. He's in favour of dialogue with Iran and North Korea, the so-called axis of evil, for example. He wants American troops sent into Darfur.

While his pro-Israel views might align him with the US mainstream, they're hardly a standout issue. After all, is there ANYONE in American politics who doesn't give the Zionist regime a carte blanche?

According to the Washington Post, who analysed senatorial voting patterns, pretty much the only Senator with a more liberal voting record than Biden is - Obama, of course.

Response in the States has been predictable:

Glee from the McCain camp, who are delighted to see Obama pick such an unelectable running mate.

More dark murmurings from the Clintonistas and the sisterhood that they don't feel comfortable voting for the Obama ticket, especially without a woman on it, and double-especially without Hilary.

Forced cheer from the true believers, whose initial JFK hysteria is subsiding into an 'Omigod, what have we done?' hangover more and more each day.

What does it all add up to? Another Republican president, of course, albeit a one-termer.

I don't mind adding my voice to the cliche - the Democrats really are set hard on grasping defeat from the jaws of victory, and it looks like they've managed it now.

Gary Glitter's new runaround

Apparently, Gary Glitter has now agreed to return to the UK, after faking a heart attack to avoid his flight and trying to flee to Hong Kong instead.

Now that he's accepted he must return to Britain, he's already gone and bought a new motor. If you're in London any time soon, look out for the new glittermobile:

Asian babes not good enough for marketing mongs

Apparently Asian babes aren't good enough for the marketing morons at chav outfitters, the incorrectly named Top Shop.

When they decided to foist their tacky, ill-fitting clothing on the people of China, the advertising wonks didn't think to hire some local models to try to make their clobber look wearable.

Nope, instead they spunked 24 million euro on ageing addict Cocaine Kate.

According to one fashion victim, the reason why people keep giving this human car crash so much money for effectively just standing about looking bored while wearing clothes is because of her 'look.'

Now, I'm no fashion expert. So I rely on those morons who are to inform me as to what this magical 'look' is (since to my untutored eye she looks exactly like what she is, which is a skinny, coked-up chav from Croydon.)

And here's what they say:

"Kate Moss was so different when she first arrived on the fashion scene," says Jen Stevens, editor of U Magazine. "At the time the catwalks were filled with six-foot goddesses and then suddenly along came this short, pretty ordinary girl from Croydon. It was this 'difference' that drew everybody's attention and upon which she managed to build a career."

So it isn't her look, because she looks short and ordinary. My eyes weren't actually lying after all. Even the fashionistas think she looks like a chav.

Okay, let's try again. Maybe it's her winning personality? Nope again. In fact, she almost never speaks in public and barely ever in ads. One assumes her paymasters in the fashion industry are aware that the sound of her grating estuary tones would shatter the glamorous image they've spent a fortune on creating.

Is it perhaps her life story that inspires people? That's definitely what one fashion victim believes:

"Maybe it's because she's fallen so low and fought her way back up again," says model agency boss Celia Holman Lee. "She's shown a vulnerable side that people can relate to."

Yes, you heard that correctly. Cocaine Kate's tabloid fall from grace, not to mention her house-trashing antics and association with hard drugs and hard druggies, is something that we can all relate to. What a load of shit.

Which brings me back to the news item I began with. What the fuck are Top Shop paying this cokehead chav tens of millions for?

And if they really must pay people preposterous amounts of money to stand around looking bored while wearing clothes, what's wrong with paying some stunning looking Chinese babe who doesn't do tons of hard drugs and isn't closer to forty than twenty?

Baldy Blogger dies

RIP to the Baldy Blogger, the award-winning, brave Adrian Sudbury who died in his sleep last night.

Adrian did more than anyone to demonstrate the validity of blogging as an activity.

His online testimony of his illness helped to demystify the medicalese surrounding leukaemia and cancer in general.

And his selflessness in sharing his experiences, and explaining and contextualising them for the lay person, is some feat given that he was suffering a terminal illness.

He died at the age of 27. But he achieved more than most people do in three times long a life.

Baldy blogger, RIP.

Your boys took a helluva beating...

Yes, that really is a man in South Ossetia riding a tricycle through a war zone wearing a Tyrone GAA jersey.

No, the picture is not photoshopped. It was taken by an Associated Press photographer and was published on the Guardian website last Wednesday.

I can only assume that while the lad is somewhat unhappy about Russia invading his country and looting and destroying it, he might be just a little pleased to hear that his adopted Gaelic football county slaughtered the Dubs at Croker today.

Okay, maybe 'slaughtered' isn't quite the most appropriate word.

Sorry!

Ireland is the most socially networked country on Earth

Social networking sites have been found to be national entities. And Ireland is the most socially networked country on the planet.

What do I mean? Sites like Bebo, Facebook and so on are in fact limited by national interests. Not one social networking site is genuinely global, with most limited from expanding into other countries by language barriers.

This study found that, inevitably, Ireland had the highest usage of social networking sites of any nation on Earth, as well as being Bebo's spiritual home.

But the study also reveals that social networking sites are becoming nationally limited in scope. Irish people use Bebo, Americans use MySpace (remember that?), Facebook is biggest in Turkey and Canada, Google's Orkut is big in Brazil, whereas India is the most LinkedIN.

What the study sadly doesn't reveal is why so many people still persist with such a moronic method of interacting. Maybe the Aliens will enlighten us when they start posting on Bebo.

Global warming presents cool animal deathmatch

Aren't you just fed up with hobbits and hippies going on about global warming?

Isn't there a large part of you that loves driving cars with big engines, flying off to Europe for the weekend and heating your home?

And don't you secretly yearn for the day when the globe actually does warm a bit so that Ireland doesn't seem like it's lost in a permanent monsoon mist all the time?

Well, feel guilty no longer. If it were not for the global warming phenomenon, we wouldn't be having cool animal death matches like this one.

Be honest - who wouldn't pay good money to see a shark fighting a polar bear?

Apparently the bears are heavier with longer reach, but the sharks are older and faster.

In the blue corner, sporting the fin and razor-sharp rows of meat-shredding teeth...

In the red corner, weighing in at one tonne...

Ossetia War - three contexts in pictures

Here's the first context - the Caucasus is a messy place, ethnicity-wise. Lots of different peoples living cheek by jowl:


Here's the second context. Let's call it the Russian version of events. The key to this map is to look a little to the right of the conflict zone in Ossetia. Yup, that really is Chechnya right next door:


One final context to this conflict. Let's call this the Georgian version of events. Key to reading this one is awareness that all other pipelines go through Russia to the West, with the obvious knock-on effects on Western Europe's energy security:

there are more interesting maps relating to the energy issue and the Georgian conflict from Nosemonkey, well worth reading on this issue.

Now I wanna be your dog

Spam is certainly getting stranger. Of course, I still get as many offers to extend my cock with surgery or Viagra as I ever did.

But the 419 scams are definitely branching out from the usual Nigerian general seeking someone trustworthy to mind his millions.

I mean, I assume this is a 419 scam. In some ways, things would be much sadder if this were in any way genuine:

I WANT TO BE YOUR HOUSE GIRL

Monday, 11 August, 2008 9:20 PM

From:

"balissunm@yahoo.com"

To:

undisclosed-recipients

I WANT TO BE YOUR HOUSE GIRL

hi master/ mistress,

My name is magret kabore,i live in burkina faso ouagadougou,i am 22 years age,i will like to be your house girl and i will live with you in your country,if you considerring my world to live and work with you,i will be very happy to be your savant,i will send my picture after your respon.REPLY ME BACK TO THIS PRIVATE EMAIL ( magret_mu@yahoo.fr) PRIVATE TELEPHONE NUMBER/ 00226-76-24-21-55

i will be waiting to hear from you soon.

Thanks

magret.

New sponsor for Rangers

Apologies to genuine fans, but seriously, if you can't beat Lithuanians, you shouldn't be in the tournament.

Some people aren't taking the news too well, apparently:

What a bunch of bankers

So the national pay talks fell apart as everyone succumbed to recession fever.

So far, so predictable.

The trade unions threaten to pull out and start cutting individual deals with employers. The employers are warned by their representatives not to do any individual deals with unions. These are standard negotiating positions in a stand-off.

Someone sensible in government suggests everyone go and have a holiday and calm down for a couple of weeks. And everyone does so, happily. Except for one bunch of greedy unionised bastards who just aren't prepared to wait, and who want to kick off their pay claim at a truly stratospheric 10%.

Who are these cheeky bollixes?

Why, bankers, of course.

Yup, the very sector who ballsed up the world economy are the first in Ireland with their hands out for a bumper payday, now that we're entering a downturn.

The same people who inflated the property bubble, engaged in ridiculously risky lending, and who ran their own businesses like it was a casino crap-shoot are now talking about the need to 'inflation-proof their terms and conditions'.

You can see why they might need to 'inflation-proof' their capacious earnings by perusing this Daily Mail article on how London bankers are having to tighten their belts in these straitened times.

You couldn't make it up. Never mind the fact that everyone else (even the public sector) is looking at job losses and pay freezes, the people working in the single sector most responsible for the current economic carnage want a bonus for ballsing it all up.

I hope the banks, whose share prices have fallen between 50% and 70% in recent months, respond appropriately.

With mass sackings.

Show me the women

It's a harsh demand, I appreciate.

I should, no doubt, be more unquestioning, more simply accepting of the horror stories constantly presented to me.

I too should clamour for more funding for those fine organisations telling us of these horrible tales of kidnap, deceit, people-smuggling, slavery and rape.

Yet instead, there's a little voice at the back of my head asking, where's the evidence?

Where are all the women being smuggled into Ireland to become sex-slaves in brothels?

Or indeed, where are the native single mums, plunged into the murky world of seasonal prostitution because of the cost of sending their offspring back to school? (Ruhama's latest press release.)

Ruhama keeps telling us incessantly of these tidal waves of women's woe. And if a fraction of what they claim really does exist, then it's truly an appalling set of circumstances that requires police intervention, arrests, prosecutions.

But yet the years go by and never, not once, not ever has Ruhama ever produced a single person ever to validate their increasingly shocking and outrageous claims.

Thousands of women and girls have been trafficked into the Irish sex industry, they claim. Well, where are they? Hidden, claim Ruhama. Accessed only by their kidnapper pimps and the seedy Johns of Ireland who care not whether they rape for money or not.

Yet the Gardai, who have a special inter-agency unit dedicated to people-trafficking, have found only a handful of people trafficked into sex in Ireland.

What the police have found a lot more of, is women from Eastern Europe especially who have voluntarily smuggled themselves to Ireland to work either as prostitutes or in lapdancing clubs.

In other words, illegal migrancy into the Irish sex trade exists, but it doesn't involve coercion and it doesn't involve underage girls, according to what the Gardai have thus far uncovered.

Sex slavery exists and is a real problem, currently in places like Darfur, formerly in places like the Balkans. Basically in any place with an ongoing civil war, rape and sex slavery are used as weapons of conflict.

People trafficking exists and is a real problem too. One need only recall the tearful image of the shipping container full of the dead and dying which was found at Rosslare some years back.

But I'm not convinced that there is a major sex-slavery people-trafficking issue such as Ruhama and their fellow feminist travellers constantly proclaim. There is simply no evidence to support the scale of their incessant claims.

It is perhaps no coincidence that Ruhama receives hundreds of thousands of taxpayers' euro, and need to justify their existence on a regular basis.

This overstating phenomenon is not exclusive to Ireland however. The ever-entertaining delusional behind 'I blame the Patriarchy' is inevitably convinced by similar overstated claims in America, despite acknowledging that a massive investigation in the Dallas Metropolitan area into sex-trafficking uncovered only three women.

A massive investigation lasting months and involving hundreds of officers in Britain led to all sorts of scary tales about women being auctioned off in slave sales held in pub backrooms for a grand.

Yet oddly, when it came time to charge people, nearly all of those prosecuted were done for immigration offences. They did manage to rescue seven girls who claimed to have been held against their will, which was something.

But they provided no evidence that those girls had been trafficked into the country. And not one was underage.

Don't misunderstand me - raping people is wrong, sex with underage children is wrong, kidnapping people is wrong and holding people against their will is wrong.

But we're being told there are a tidal wave of cases where all four of these sordid and appalling crimes meet. And we're being told that by organisations who rely on the shock headline publicity in order to justify their mountainous state grant funding.

So, let's put the issue beyond discussion at long last. Could Ruhama, or some similar organisation, please publish some actual factual data to accompany the shrill claims they make?

Or alternatively, we could just accept that this problem, like the threat of SARS, has been completely overstated, and that the men of Ireland are not complacent rapists happily screwing children smuggled into the country in containers for the financial benefit of kidnapper pimps?

Something for the ladies

A few questions for the ladies, inspired by a perusal of the London Times features section on a Saturday, which seems even odder than usual.

Is it really rubbish to be single if you're a girl?

Could you ever imagine going to a brothel to pay for sex with a stud?

How comfortable is too comfortable?

And finally, this is bang out of order, yeah?

Blogs CAN make a difference!

I stand corrected.

I have been languishing under the delusion that blogs were a time-killing online goof, something that people slightly too intelligent for Bebo read and post in between checking their email compulsively and viewing hilarious clips on Youtube during the quiet times at work.

For sure, there is the odd blog in America or someplace that breaks news about political scandals. Or there's the occasional one by some British chick talking about her sex life or living in France, who got to turn her blog into a book.

But basically, apart from these rare and well-known exceptions, it seemed to me that blogs don't really make an enormous impact in the world. I can see their potential, the benefits of the medium and the format. But at this point in time, they're below the tipping point where they might genuinely be said to make a difference.

Generally, most blogs seem to be about people's private crazy thoughts or their cats, or their crazy thoughts about their cats. And they're about as Earth-shatteringly relevant as most people's crazy thoughts about cats might be expected to be - ie not remotely relevant or important at all.

Certainly not something you might describe as making a difference to this world.

Boy, was I wrong.

One English blogger has just made history in this regard. It appears as if his blog about pop twiglets Girls Aloud may have been instrumental in helping to prevent the kidnap, rape, murder, torture and mutilation of the band members.

Well done, that blogger.

What? Oh, the blog was his sick fantasy about murdering the girls in the band and he was the would-be killer that his blog brought to police attention?

Well, it still makes a difference in my book. Carry on with the crazy thoughts, people. Just make sure to keeping blogging about them too. The future of slutty pop music could depend on it.