The limitless powers of the banksters

There's been little point posting about the toing and froing over the treacherous sell-out of Ireland. The minutiae are so much less important than the Dail vote on the budget on December 7th.

Either the Dail votes that crap down, and we get an election and the chance to renegotiate this gun-at-the-head bailout of billionaires, or we become a serf-nation of slaves in debenture perpetually to big banksters.

Anyhow, I've been more concerned about the true extent of big banking's powers. Ok, we now know that they hold more sway with the IMF than sovereign nations. But we knew that decades ago. What's new is that they hold more sway with the EU than with its constituent nations. That's disturbing to say the least.

But what's really concerning is the Interpol warrant for the arrest of Julian Assange of Wikileaks on charges of sexual assault. The details of the charges aren't the issue - Assange is accused of raping a woman in Sweden during sex which began as consensual - so much as the timing.

Wikileaks has been involved in some major leaks of secret documents in recent times. Lets review the biggest ones:

1. The files on US torture of Iraqis. Response? Virtually nothing.
2. Details of the occupations of Iraq and Afghanistan. Response? Some PR posturing by the US.
3. The recent release (after a lengthy warning it was coming) of US diplomatic documents. Response? Angry statements by Hilary Clinton.

And now? Wikileaks threatens to release secret documents from a major US bank. Response? Interpol arrest warrant.

The more paranoid out there suspect all sorts of things, from Assange being a CIA plant to the victim of a deliberate honey trap. My response to the conspiracy theorists is to file away their crazier ideas for future thriller plots.

But there is no doubt in my mind whatsoever that the timing of this Interpol intervention stinks. Assange has been interviewed by Swedish authorities who repeatedly (ironically?) leaked the details to Swedish tabloids. He spoke to them recently from Britain by Skype, offering to conduct further interviews in a Swedish embassy. They refused.

Now, almost as soon as Wikileaks threaten to blow the lid on a major US bank, there's an Interpol warrant issued for his arrest.

It appears that the powers of the banksters truly are limitless and that they have sway over not only national but supranational agencies like the EU, IMF and Interpol.

Things are looking bleak, not only for Julian Assange, or for the Irish people, but for everyone on Earth who is not a major bankster right now.

Who raped Martin Cullen?

Who raped Martin Cullen?

According to the Minister for Fun and Junkets, media intrusion into his life has been like being raped.

Obviously, no cabinet minister would dare belittle victims of aggravated sexual assault by comparing their suffering to being written about in a paper, so presumably Cullen would only make such a statement if he was genuinely capable of comparing the two experiences.

Hence my question: who raped Martin Cullen?

Because frankly, if he has never been raped, then his statement is a thundering disgrace and a slap of contempt across the face of all victims of rape.

But did anyone ever expect any better from the poison dwarf of this feudal court ruling the country?

Boycott fashion

Amid the acres of newsprint of what's hot to wear comes at last a fashion story that people should actually read.

The advertising posing as journalism which makes up most fashion articles leaves me, as a man, cold. My mammy doesn't get to tell me what to wear, and I don't let anyone else do so either.

I've got a basic sense of appropriate dress (no pyjamas in public, no footie shirts at posh dinners, no tuxedos down the pub) and that does for me.

But it is a multi-billion euro industry, and the evil embodied within it goes a lot further than scamming women out of cash for overpriced clothing made in Chinese sweatshops.

We already knew about the models forced to starve themselves in order to get work, and the feminists (who are ever concerned for White Western Woman) have of course declared fat to be a feminist issue.

But fewer people are perhaps aware that the catwalk industry, which feeds on stick-thin post-pubescent girls, luring them in with the promise of travel and fame, is driven by sexual abuse and rape.

The casting couch is hardly new, but the scale of abuse suffered by models and wannabes is truly shocking.

Hadley Freeman in the Guardian rightly points out the hypocrisy of a media and society which witters endlessly for a week about a model's teeny roll of fat and entirely ignores the conviction of a leading fashion photographer on dozens of charges of sexually assaulting underage models.

Leading psychoanalyst Edmund Bergler once identified the core problem at the heart of the fashion industry: it is dominated, he says, by gay men who subconsciously hate women and therefore set impossible standards for women to aspire to that coincidentally also mimic the bodyshape of young boys.

What's really scary is that he was writing in the FIFTIES. How much more now is fashion dominated by the vision of gay men?

Into this toxic industry, add addictive stimulants and appetite suppressants like cocaine to keep the little girls thin and boyish. Fly them around the world half-starved, and treat them peripatetically like cattle or heroes, depending on circumstances.

Is it any surprise then that the industry attracts vile sexual predators like Anand Jon Alexander? Access to young, confused, underfed, drugged girls and women, whose egos are veering like that of a bi-polar sufferer from zero to hero at all times - that's manna from Heaven for a career rapist like Anand Jon.

Where the feminists are right is in identifying the fashion industry as toxic to women.

It's toxic because of the vision imposed on women by gay men, and because of the use that evil hetero perverts like Anand Jon make of the fashion industry to sexually abuse young girls.

Women need to ditch their Vogues and their Marie-Claires. They're nothing more than hate literature aimed at their gender by a tiny cohort of female-hating men, and they facilitate the rape and abuse of vulnerable young girls.

It's time to boycott fashion.

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?

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.

Do you laugh, cry or recolonise?

It's hard to know what the correct response is, when you encounter a story as bizarre, shocking and innately tragic as this.

To summarise, dozens of 'witchdoctors' in the 'democratic republic' of the Congo have been arrested on suspicion that they have been using 'black magic' to shrink people's penises.

According to a report from Reuters correspondents:

Rumours of penis theft began circulating last week in Kinshasa, Democratic Republic of Congo's sprawling capital of some 8 million inhabitants. They quickly dominated radio call-in shows, with listeners advised to beware of fellow passengers in communal taxis wearing gold rings.

Purported victims, 14 of whom were also detained by police, claimed that sorcerers simply touched them to make their genitals shrink or disappear, in what some residents said was an attempt to extort cash with the promise of a cure.

This isn't just a Congo phenomenon. Previous outbreaks of penis-thievery have occurred in Benin, Ghana, Nigeria, Cameroon, Zimbabwe, in most West and Central African countries, in fact.

How do you respond to this in the 21st century? Do we laugh at the stupid, ill-educated, superstition-ridden Africans?

Do we lament their ill education, their superstitions, their poor democratic structures and their silly belief systems as we have done for decades?

Or should we maybe start looking at the weeping wound that is Africa, the prevalence of Aids, malaria, demogogues, lynchings, rapes, civil wars, famines, plagues and general horrors, and think about that great taboo - direct intervention by the West?

Recolonisation runs against the liberal principles of many people in the Western bubble of affluence. But they - we - don't have to live in the reality, in the squalor, under the fear of random murder, or rape, or incarceration in a squalid torture prison.

Not to mention the real and present danger of having your penis stolen.

Perhaps if we did, we'd be calling out for Africans to come and liberate us from ourselves?

Feminism V Multiculturalism

In a deathmatch, which would win?

Only kidding.

Here's a question that's concerned me for some time, though.

Given that 65-70% of rape on white women in Scandinavia are committed by Muslim men, who make up around 5% of the population ...

And given that a majority of all rape of white women in America is by ethnic minorities, who in total make up only 32% of the population ...

(especially black men, who commit one third of the rapes, despite making up only 12% of the population) ...

... is feminism, or at least the privileged white Western feminism that's primarily concerned with white Western womens' interests, on a collision course with multiculturalism?

Obviously not. But why not?

Feminism in the West generally shows precious little concern for the really important issues globally. Women go without the vote, go without being allowed out of the family home, go without being allowed to drive a car, go without all sorts of basic rights in all sorts of countries around the globe.

But these things affect black and brown women, not white Western women.

You wouldn't know they affected anyone if you listened to most Western feminists. Once you get past the 'all men are rapists' nonsense, you're generally left with handwringing about being fat, or shrill demands for more taxpayer funded childcare. White western women's interests.

But the colour factor in rape is one issue that they don't ever acknowledge. Because there is a simple, though unpalatable fact at the heart of it.

If white Western women could take one simple precaution to protect themselves from rape, it would be to avoid the company of ethnic minority men, especially Muslims and Black men.

If feminism really cared about the needs of white Western women, maybe this should be on the agenda somewhere.

The multicultural experiment is predicated on the assumption that when cultures mingle, everyone benefits. These concerning statistics indicate, that at least in terms of sexual predation, white women are not benefiting from multiculturalism.

When liberalisms clash, it's never pretty. That's why it never happens. That's why it gets brushed under the carpet.

I bet you never heard a feminist refer to the colour or ethnicity of rapists. And I bet you never heard a multicultural theorist acknowledge the problem of rape by ethnic minorities either.

Now, I don't know why ethnic minorities are raping white women so much. It may be that, as disenfranchised people, some seek a semblance of power through sexual predation. But that's just a theory I heard. I simply don't know why it happens.

However, it's not because ethnic minorities are more sexually violent by nature, because they're not. Perhaps some feminist could examine this and come up with a better theory? Perhaps some multicultural theorist could research it and find some conclusions that could help reverse this appalling trend?

I won't hold my breath.