The NAMA Republic

At a time with approaching half a million on the dole, 25% of mortgage holders in negative equity, the government borrowing nearly a billion every two weeks to stay afloat, and all public sector and PAYE workers facing the third round of cuts in their wages, what does this corrupt and shameless government do?

They bail out their developer pals to the tune of tens of billions we don't have.

Congratulations. If you are an Irish taxpayer, you have just been heisted to the tune of around 35,000 euro. And that will go to bail out Liam Carroll, Sean Dunne and their odious ilk, who gambled and lost on a punt that the property prices they inflated would keep ballooning forever.

They've done this by propping up the corrupt bankers who gave them the preposterous sums in the first place. No room for capitalism here - no chance of watching these banks and their shoddy speculator customers go to the wall.

No, when it's the elites involved, it's time to bail them out with YOUR money.

Don't buy for a minute the nonsense that they need to keep these banks afloat. They do not. There are other, cleaner, banks in this country already. I bank with one, and I urge you to do likewise.

See this for what it is - corporate welfare for the guys in Fianna Fail's Galway tent. The guys who charged you half a million for a thrown together house in the middle of nowhere two years ago. The guys who handed over brown envelopes to the likes of Liam Lawler to get the fields they were built on rezoned.

Do you want to give 35 grand to those people? Do you want to keep on supporting the likes of Rody Molloy's pension, or John O'Donoghue's half a grand taxi jaunts across Heathrow airport, or the likes of Sean Fitzpatrick's holiday home in Marbella?

Do you?

If you do, sit on your hands and say nothing. Do nothing. They'll rob your money with impugnity and laugh at your foolishness.

But if you object to this, the greatest theft in Irish history since the Brits invaded and took the entire island, then you need to take action now.

Sorry about that. You will need to turn off 'Fair City' and actually DO SOMETHING.

Go on the NO TO NAMA march this Saturday if you can in Dublin. Better still, get in your TD's face. You know the fellow - jowly red face from too many free lunches at your expense. Go to his clinic, call his office, and roar down the phone at the prick for voting in favour of your being robbed.

Remember what they want from you. Your compliance. Your fear. Your resignation. Fuck that. Demand their resignation instead.

You could start by voting down the anti-democratic Lisbon Treaty. They badly need you to pass that. It's a great start. Then when they're hurting, demand a general election. And keep demanding until the scum are out of government. On the hustings, ask for written assurances from every candidate that they will back legislation to reverse NAMA, no matter what.

Don't take mealy-mouthed BS like 'We had to', 'systemic importance', 'going forward', or any of that oul blather. Get an assurance in writing that they will reverse NAMA or else resign yourself to writing them a big fat cheque for 35 grand.

Or watch this and learn what they're doing to you and your country:

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?