Did the BBC invent a famine for ratings?

Everyone over a certain age (let's say 30) can recall the harrowing impact of Michael Buerk's first reports of a famine in Ethiopia in 1984.

The sheer biblical images of starving black children - their hollow eyes pleading for food to placate their empty, distended bellies, their ribs stretching their thin skins, their limbs shrivelled to mere bones and skin - shocked the West in our relative affluence.

What followed was Band Aid, Live Aid, and the growth of global consciousness in relation to the appalling poverty suffered on the African continent.

Since then, charities have reported 'donation fatigue' and the diminishing returns of shock footage of African carnage or disaster. Mass rape and child slavery in Darfur barely stirs us now. Burma is flooded, and we can barely bother to put a hand in our pockets.

But surely it is a new low in the quest for ratings to actually invent a famine where none exists?

This is the allegation a Norwegian TV documentary team have levelled at the BBC.

After the documentary aired in Norway, it won awards and raised serious questions about the BBC's role in reporting a famine in Niger in 2005. It accused the BBC and the United Nations of acting in tandem to create a climate of intervention where none was required.

That suited the UN, who apparently wanted into Niger, and suited the BBC who wanted a good exclusive story, as journalists are wont to do.

Niger is a desert land in the Southern Sahara. But it is rich with uranium and other resources, and its population are predominantly nomadic, like the Touaregs (see above). They are used to moving around to obtain food. It's not like the pasture lands of Ethiopia failing at all.

But after the documentary aired in Norway, the BBC pulled the rights to their own footage, meaning that the documentary had to air in Sweden in a shorter, much less impactful form. It hasn't been seen elsewhere yet.

Auntie Beeb pleads innocence, and claims all the Norwegians need to do is ask politely for the rights to the footage and they can have it.

So perhaps we might yet get to see this interesting Norwegian film, controversially titled 'The Famine Scam.'

I fervently hope that the buyers in RTE will make a point of picking up this documentary and showing it during prime time viewing.

Then we will be able to decide for ourselves if the BBC and UN were right and there was a famine in Niger.

Or we might find that 'Niger's prime minister, local residents, doctors working in the region, a US aid organisation spokesman and other journalists' are more plausible when they say that no famine ever occurred.

Blarney O'Leprechaun bites de Big Apple

Acccording to the ever-gorgeous Government Press Office, our glorious leader is off to Noo Yawk later this month:

The Taoiseach, Mr. Brian Cowen TD, will undertake his first official trip to the United States next month [sic].

He will visit New York for a series of engagements with key political and business leaders, as well as representatives of the Irish community.

The highlights of the visit are expected to be a visit to the New York Stock Exchange on Wednesday July 16th and a keynote address at the Wall Street 50 Dinner on Thursday 17th July.

In his meetings, the Taoiseach is expected to discuss the global economic situation, how to further develop the relationship between Ireland and America and the issue of immigration reform and the undocumented Irish in the US.

So Cowen will continue the ignominious whining and begging of the Irish government to make our illegals in the US legal. So far, so Bertie.

But the man who claims the Celtic Tiger credit is also set to share his wisdom with the gloom-mongers of the NYSE. It will of course not be fascinating to hear what turgid twaddle and covert FDI pleading that Cowen intends to serve up as his main course at the Wall Street dinner.

I just wonder how all of this will go down among the stockbrokers. They're already feeling the pain of the credit crunch. The Chinese are at the gates, their economy is bleeding money on at least two wars, and their reliance on cheap fossil fuel is utterly unsustainable.

Then Blarney O'Leprechaun, who's been boasting about what an economic genius he is based upon the long-gone Celtic Tiger phenomenon, comes along pleading the poor mouth, begging for investment, and asking that America doesn't ship the tens of thousands of Irish hiding out there back to our shores?

I bet it's just what they need to hear right now. It should give them a right good giggle.

Against the odds

The old man's still fighting.

I got back today after 36 hours of Qantas-sponsored travelling hell to hear that the oul lad's had another heart attack. It's not his first or near it. It's not even his first this month.

But he's always been a hard man to put down, and he's still in the game.

He might just beat this one. Again.

But now I'm getting worried about how long until the next? And how many more can he beat? The heart's not like the face. When it bruises it stays bruised, and when it's damaged it stays damaged, and that goes for both physically and metaphorically.

I'll know more when I see him, and that'll be later today.

I don't know who's most fearful of the insecurity to come. It's probably him. But it could also be a few other candidates too. Including me.

I'd feel a little more able if I'd managed to sleep anytime in the past 36 hours, but it doesn't feel appropriate to whinge about jetlag and insomnia and Aussie airlines right now.

Perspective is a pisser, sometimes.

Many belief systems consider death to be simply an extension of this existence in one form or another. Christianity and its sister monotheisms posit a hereafter which offers succour to many.

But I'm personally most persuaded by the Tibetan buddhist position that death, like this existence is simply one of a series of states of existence we cycle through on our way to something greater than we could comprehend.

The Tibetan bardos closely map what little science has uncovered about the phenomenon of near-death experiences, wherein people considered clinically dead manage to recover and subsequently can recall their moment of death.

It's easy I think to take succour from such a concept, which like the monotheist heavens, provides a sense of direction, continuation and enlightenment beyond the moment of death itself.

But perhaps it's easy to take that comfort on behalf of someone else. It's got to be something entirely different if it's your turn to face that reality, the one fate we all as living creatures share.

I don't know how the old man is thinking about this. I know one thing though. Like never before, he's thinking of it now.

But he's still fighting. You have to admire that.

Reason to secretly hate Aussies no. 295

Their winter is better than our summer.

Bastards.

Blog Wars postscript

I came late to the blog wars that erupted in the Irish blogosphere recently, largely because I was doing other things, like getting drunk down under.

For those of you who don't give a shit about such things, which is basically everyone reading this who doesn't have an Irish blog themselves, plus a majority of those who do, one blogger suggested that the happy-clappy community atmosphere of Irish blogging was somewhat incestuous and stultifying.

They named a couple of names, and claimed that the best blogs didn't necessarily win at the Irish blog awards.

Then some of those named, plus some of their pals, took umbrage and lots of people typed angrily on their keyboards for a bit until the letters C, U, N and T were worn down by the efforts.

I can now hear you yawning, so I'll get to the point quickly.

Blogging is what you make of it, and ultimately it only functions as a modern day speaker's corner, expressing the individual opinions of those of us without syndicated newspaper opinion columns.

As such, it is a democratising factor in new media. You can find out what a postman thinks of the Lisbon Treaty, what gig a secretary enjoyed last night, or what small businesses are trying to do for their customers. You can also hear perhaps too much about some people's sex lives or their cats. And in the darkest corners, perhaps some people's sex lives with their cats.

Ahem.

Some people blog for affirmation that their jobs or lives don't provide for them. And that's fine. Often, for me as a reader, those confessional type blogs are quite fascinating. And generally well written too.

Others provide more of a general entertainment purpose. Sometimes more successfully than other times. But again it seems churlish to cavil, especially when it's free to read them and no one is making you do so.

Some people seem to be cynically emulating popular blogs from abroad. Some people use it as an outlet for their writing talent. Some just rant, like me. All of that is fine, to my mind. The weakness of the blogosphere is also its strength - the fact that it permits anyone an audience worldwide.

But I do also feel that the Irish blogosphere has a few teething troubles as it enters its toddlerhood.

I read quite a few Irish blogs, when I get the chance, and have even met one or two of those behind them. I'm pals with the odd blogger too. And of course, I blog too. That probably puts me in the middle of what I'm criticising here.

There is a lot of backslapping, and there are people who are repeatedly credited and applauded among Irish bloggers without necessarily earning it, I feel. I concur that to my mind the best blogs didn't necessarily win in the blog awards. But that's simply my opinion and other people's opinions clearly differ.

I think it is healthy for people to criticise other blogs. Apart from holding people to account for what they write, it also encourages debate, which is never a bad thing.

Good blogs have lived and died in Ireland for want of a readership. It would be nice to see more blogs reaching a wider readership than the same handful that are repeatedly cited in the lazy mainstream media. (Especially when some of those cited are by people working in the mainstream media.)

The music industry model seems to me a viable one for the Irish blogosphere to emulate. U2 will always pack out Croke Park and sell out in 30 seconds. And that's grand. But there needs to be the equivalent of Whelans or Belfast's Rotterdam, or those regional music pubs where a local band can get a break and an audience.

I'm not sure how that can be achieved, but it does seem to me that Mulley's Post of the Month initiative serves that purpose a whole lot better than his calling people cunts.

But I'm glad the row broke out, and well done to the lassie whose post kicked it all off, even if I wouldn't agree with all she said. Because it had to be said by someone, and now it has been we're all better off for it.

It's unfortunate that the resulting debate more resembled schoolyard cliques handbagging each other than a proper adult discussion, but I'd put that down to the size of the Irish blogosphere and the novelty of the medium.

What's important now is that people take away from this the ability to open up to new blogs regularly, and criticise anything they disagree with, and foment debate as often as possible.

Finally, I'd just like to say that the most depressing thing resulting from this storm in a teacup was the desperate efforts of some people to put the genie back in the bottle. (Sorry for mixing metaphors like cocktail ingredients, but you know what I mean.)

The schoolmarm tones of those who basically said: 'I don't care who started it or who called who what. Just stop crying, kiss and make up and let's all get back to class, okay?'

Sorry, but it's better if we retain the right to disagree and criticise each other. I love nothing more than when someone calls me on one of my rants. It's brilliant, because when they shout back, I'm forced to challenge my own opinions, my own preconceptions, and the result is generally that we all learn a little bit.

Here endeth the sermon.

The power of positive thinking

Ten days sampling the Aussie media has left me pondering the power of positive thinking.

I recall how some years ago, ITN news presenter Martyn Lewis was laughed at for suggesting that British news was too negative and could benefit from being lightened up with positive stories. Images of front pages about cats saved from trees filled the heads of his cynical colleagues and they chuckled.

I did too.

But it is true that the British media environment is a profoundly negative and mean-spirited one. The Irish media climate is little different.

I've noticed this especially here in Australia, where they are prepared to put a story about a medical discovery or a community initiative on the front page without apology.

In some other places I've been, the positive news can seem seriously parochial. Israeli papers see little beyond their own siege mentality, as if everything on the planet related to the Middle East or Jewish affairs, even when the story is something light-hearted or positive, for example.

But Australia is a heavyweight country with a large, cosmopolitan, travelled, multicultural society. And if they can make positive news work, both on the airwaves and in print, then why couldn't we?

I'm slightly dreading returning to the land of scandal as substance and negativity news, now. I fear the face of Ireland I'll see in our media will seem scowling and mean in comparison to the optimism - tempered by reality and proper coverage of current events and affairs, of course - that is expressed in Australian media.

And without wanting to seem simplistic, I wonder if the media mentalities of both nations can perhaps be mapped onto the nature of the peoples who read them?

Are Australians outward-looking and positive can-do people inherently and that is expressed through their media? Or does the media perhaps encourage such an outlook in those who view and read it?

And by contrast, what does our own sour, negatively troped news say about us?

Lisbon voted down

Splendid. Truly splendid.

Let the political classes take note that the Irish people will not be bullied.

Let the other peoples of the EU, who were so egregiously denied democracy, take note and thank us.

And let us, as a people, be proud.

We have, for now, prevented what effectively would have amounted to a coup d'etats. But when that sleveen creature Barroso murmurs ominously that other countries should continue ratifying what, under the EU's own rules, is now a dead treaty, then there is reason to remain vigilant and concerned.

Why in the hell would any other country waste their time ratifying this trash now, when it has been rejected? If not, that is, for the reason that Barroso hopes to ignore our democratic voice at some stage in the future?

The EU parliament has already appallingly voted to ignore the Irish vote whichever way it went, and refuse to debate it.

Now we're seeing the petulant EU executive's response, which is no different, but significantly more concerning.

If anything ought to convince the waverers that we've done the right thing, then this response is it. These people do not have the interests of Europeans at heart. They have no inclination to respect the voice of democracy. They only want centralised power and will stop at nothing until they get it.

And because of that lust, I am forced to make a sad prediction here and now. This isn't over. They will be back with this treaty a third time to try to force us where they want us to go again.

But for now, we have given them the slap down they badly deserve in their hubris and arrogance.

Well done, Ireland. I'm feckin proud of yiz.

Uluru - big in Japan

What's wrong with Uluru?

On the one hand, nothing.
It's a big rock in the middle of the desert, just like it has been for hundreds of millions of years.

On the other hand, it's a bit odd when you can go days and not see a single Anangu, or Aboriginal person in the area.

All the hotels seem to be staffed primarily by Koreans. The tour guides are all white Aussies, with the exception of the dozens of Japanese guides who exist to ferry the hundreds of Japanese tourists seeking to climb the rock daily.

Of course the locals don't like people to climb the rock. Not that the Japanese give a shit. They're not interest in Anangu culture (just as well, as the locals and their culture are quite hard to encounter out here), they just want to conquer the big red rock.

Everything is preposterously priced, as you might expect in the middle of four deserts. But that is disappointing given the poor level of service going on.

I'm not like those pampered Yank tourists who go to Third World countries and whinge non-stop about the conditions. Really, I'm not.

But this is Oz, and the prices are eye-watering: $45 just for a lift to go the four kilometres from the accommodation to the rock and back in a bus. And that's the cheapest way to do it. Tours (with 22 year old Sydney born guides reading from scripts) and food (mostly fast) are also four times the price they ought to be.

Continually, I'm hearing and reading the lip-service paid to embettering the Aboriginals of the area with bemusement.

Why isn't there a college out here to teach the locals how to work their own land? How to run accommodation and tours without Whitey as middleman to claim all the profit? Why do they still live off handouts in a place that's clearly minting money?

And why does all the staff in the hotels and tour firms rotate with such frequency that a person here for 12 months is considered a veteran?

Uluru may be big in Japan. But for me, despite its awesome beauty, it has been a disappointment.

Australia could learn a lot from some so-called Third World countries about how to assist indigenous populations rather than simply throwing them a bone like token land ownership then going on to rape their history and culture for tourist bucks.

Photos to follow once I reach Melbourne.

Losing interest in Lisbon

I'm losing interest in Lisbon.

The right answer is so obviously 'no', that at this stage my only real interest in the result is analysing the 'yes' vote as a headcount of how many blindly-led party apparatchiks and buffoons who do what politicians tell them to exist in the country.

Anyone who spent anytime actually reading the Lisbon Treaty (no easy task, let me warn you), or the referendum wording, knows that it's got to be turned down. It's dangerous, impenetrable gibberish we're being ordered to sign or else.

There may well be enough simple followers and easily-bullied people in the country to carry a referendum though, which is a depressing thought.

So I've decided I'm not voting. I'm fecking off to Australia until this craic is over. But if Ireland votes in favour of Lisbon, I might just stay there. (That's not a threat intended to sway your vote in either direction, incidentally.)

Remember, whichever way you vote, make sure to make your voice heard. As we say in the Skinner household: Vote early, Vote often!

Right, anyone seen my hat with the dangly corks?

Plus ca change, plus c'est la meme Middle East policy

The overtly, embarrassingly pro-Israel Democratic party candidate is dead.

Long live, erm, the other embarrassingly pro-Israel Democratic party candidate?

No sooner has Zion's biggest fan, Clinton II, finally fallen as a candidate for POTUS, than the actual candidate-elect, a black sunnovaMuslim, goes and offers Israel a united Jerusalem as their capital.

Now, for those whose eyes glaze over at the mere thought of the mess that is the Middle East, I'll keep this microscopically brief:

East Jerusalem has been Arab, both Christian and Muslim flavours, for well over a thousand years. Israel conquered it in 1967 and won't give it back even though the whole world keeps telling them too, even America.

Instead, they built a ruddy big wall around it and are building a ring of settlements around East Jerusalem and kicking out the Arab residents of the city with a combination of eviction orders, refusals to permit sales to Arabs or permitting sales only to Jews, and the splitting of families by the wall.

And yup, that is the shortest I could make that.

Anyhow, those Palestinians look like continuing to roll ones in the craps game of life. No matter who was going to win the Democratic nomination, even the black sorta Muslim guy, is overtly, embarrassingly pro-Israel.

It's some state of affairs for Palestinians to know that the best they can hope for in the next half-decade is for a McCain presidency.

But hey, on the plus side for the good guys, a Sandinista got elected next UN general assembly president.

Yay.

Asbopop

It's a new word I've coined.

It could refer to a couple of different things, perhaps. The chavtastic pop of acts like Scooter, perhaps.

But I think the primary definition of the word 'asbopop' should be the sort of luminous, lurid pink or green sugar infusions of alcohol that scumbags get loaded on.

God knows I've tried to think of any other legitimate reason for the emergence of asbopops as a product type on the market for sale, and I cannot find one that does not involve the simple profit motive of selling drink to unruly minors, without anything other than a token concern made towards the social effects of doing so.

The Government have tried to curtail the adverse effects of alcohol in this country this week by pushing through a bill which will close early houses, require off-licenses to get certificates from the council, and a load of other irrelevant nonsense.

The aim is clearly only to make drinking more irksome for actual grown-ups, rather than preventing kids from loading up on alcoholic sugar water by the truckload and wrecking the neighbourhood.

I'd rather they just took the pisshead lemonades and banned the lot.

Is anyone else loving this weather?

But their enjoyment is marred with a nagging fear and suspicion that the Summer will turn out totally crap again and after fourteen weeks of solid rain, we'll still be talking wistfully about this weekend come September?

The other World Cup

No, not the egg-chasers World Cup.

Not the Women's World Cup.

Not the 'homeless' World Cup either.

(Which is a total swizz, because of course all the people playing in it have a roof over their heads. It should be called the 'Formerly Homeless' World Cup. But if they called it that, then I could enter. After all, I spent a night in a skip once. But that's another story.)


This is the World Cup for countries that FIFA refuse to recognise.

Now, let's be honest here. FIFA's concept of what constitutes a sovereign nation is odd enough to begin with. According to FIFA, Northern Ireland is a nation. According to FIFA, Kazakhstan is a European country. According to FIFA, so is Israel, although they used to be an Australasian country.

The 22 nations that take part in the Non-Fifa World Cup include some places whose secessions and right to autonomy have been denied by ongoing colonial powers, such as Chechnya, West Papua, Somaliland and Tibet.

It also includes less morally justifiable concepts of nations like Padania (North Italy), Monaco and North Cyprus. And some long lost national entities like Wallonia, Occitania and Zanzibar. And a completely cerebral idea of a diaspora nation - the Roma peoples of Europe.

Anyhow, the game was between Tibet and Padania, and Tibet lost 14-2 to the quasi-Italians, who won the Trophy for the Freedom of the Peoples.

I'm sure it was a good day out for all concerned. I hope all of the peoples win their freedoms soon.

P.S. Good luck to Trap and his team in their first game against Serbia tonight. I'll be there. Don't let me down, now.

The Department of stupid scientific research

There's always plenty of fresh product from the Department of stupid scientific research.

So widespread are studies into the bleeding obvious or the mind-bogglingly stupid that barely a week goes by without someone rolling their eyes in print at the latest research proving birds don't have bird-brains, or how teaspoons in the office go missing.

I don't really want to add to the plethora of print and posts sneering at scientific stupidity, as I think a lot of scientific research actually is useful and because I don't need to sneer at a scientific study in order to make myself feel smart.

But I did want to point out one small flaw, as I perceive it, in relation to this otherwise apparently useful piece of research into the effects of breast-feeding on the intelligence of newborn children.

If you're going to do a large study into the health of young children, don't do it in the most irradiated country on Earth, please? The results may not be replicated in countries without a major nuclear accident irradiating the nation in the past generation.

Time to cut taxi fares in Ireland to match the rock-bottom service

We have possibly the worst taxis in Europe.

Smelly, 92-C reg Toyotas, on their third lap of the mileometer, driven by smoking racists or immigrant ignoramuses, that's if they aren't actually also convicted rapists or a couple of years out of prison after serving time for mowing down three people under the influence the last time they had a licence.

Yup, rock-bottom service provided by characters of all sorts of dubiety, in cars that range from comfy new limos to stinking scrappers. That's the taxi industry in Ireland.

But you wouldn't get that impression if you listened to the industry, of course. Living up to rumours that they are riven with criminality, they took to blocking the streets of Dublin today, moaning as they always do about not fleecing the rest of us for enough of our money.

Well, I reckon it's time the rest of us spoke out about this appalling industry and demanded higher service rather than higher prices.

I suggest that everyone email the Taxi Regulator and send them a submission for the current public consultation on hiking taxi fares yet again. You can be sure that taxi drivers and their families are emailing the regulator asking for stupid money for their poor service. Well, it's up to the rest of us to put the regulator right.

Have a read of this. The taxi mafia want MORE money, again.

Well, it's time for the rest of us to mail the regulator before mid-June and tell them no. Here's the address: commission@taxiregulator.ie.

Put this in the title: Feedback on Consultation Paper Number 5 Taxi Fare Revision.

Then in the body of your email, tell the regulator that the current system doesn't deserve to hike prices. Tell the regulator that the service is so poor and poorly overseen, that in fact prices should fall and fall dramatically to truly represent value for the service offered.

If you don't fancy putting it in your own words, you could always adapt what I wrote:

Obviously the fares issue is one of the least pressing issues relating to the Irish taxi industry. The urgent requirement to ensure that drivers know the regions in which they drive, the need to enforce basic standards of car safety and cleanliness, the police vetting of drivers to prevent convicted sex offenders or those with prior motoring convictions from joining the industry, and the introduction of language proficiency testing are just four more pressing issues than the idea of hiking prices yet again.
Without these basic safeguards of professionalism in place, why should the public be forced, yet again, to suffer an unjustifiable hike in prices?
Frankly, without these elements in place, it would be more relevant to slash the current prices to account for the sub-standard nature of service within the industry currently.
I suggest cutting the minimum fare to a euro (1.20 during night time hours) for starters, and tarriffs should range from 40c per km to no more than 1 euro per km. No more than 1 euro is a legitimate booking fee, and extra passengers and luggage should be charged for in keeping with their addition to the weight being carried - therefore additional passengers ought to be charged no more than a 5% addition to the overall fare, and similar for luggage items.
As a post-script, it is essential that the regulator refuse all attempts by taxi representatives to enforce a cap on entrants to the industry, or any other form of protectionism. The regulator should not be bullied by stunts such as the blocking of traffic in Dublin today by the lunatic fringe of the industry. The public deserves better than for these people to be given into every time they behave in this sort of anti-social manner, disrupting the capital.
Currently, the taxi industry is a poorly performing industry with low standards and high costs to the consumer. What we want to see is exactly the opposite. It is imperative that the regulator place the consumer at the centre of all future revisions and changes to the industry.

Maybe if the regulator grows a set of stones and cuts their money, some of the scumbags will be driven out of the industry altogether.

Maybe the regulator might get some ideas from our emails and start implementing some basic police vetting for drivers, some basic knowledge and language testing for drivers, some basic hygiene monitoring of cars, and maybe the result of that would be some basic civility from the bolshiest and most dubious industrial sector in Ireland.

The Pacific is our dustbin

The Pacific Ocean is officially now our dustbin.


Look at the image here, drawn up by the nice people at The Independent newspaper.

Those two dark blobs represent much larger blobs of bobbing plastic, garbage, trash, rubbish, call it what you will. Our detritus.

Effectively, this floating bin now stretches from Japan to Hawaii, and from Hawaii half way to the US.

The amount of ocean fouled by this trash is twice the size of the continental United States.

It really is time to recycle, people. This is not a green fantasy anymore. What happens when we run out of ocean to piss, shit and dump plastic into?

When the earth moves

I was in Athens during the last Olympics. One mid-afternoon, I was sitting on a balcony with a Greek friend when, literally, the earth moved.

I have to admit to squealing like a girl. We were on the fourth floor of a somewhat shoddy apartment block, after all. And when the ground beneath your feet jerks and trembles like shook cloth, it is disconcerting to say the least.

Afterwards, my friend took me out into the street and pointed out the red X marks on some adjoining derelict buildings. Those, he explained, were signs of condemnation - buildings that were no longer safe after the last large quake. What we had just experienced, he said, was just a little shudder.

Well, what they've experienced in Szechuan today is no little shudder. At 7.8 on the Richter scale, it is only marginally less powerful than that which sparked the tsunami on 26th December 2004.

This is a breaking news story and we will hear more as time progresses. But I've been to Chengdu. It's a very large city of very recently built concrete structures of high density, poor quality housing.

And I've been to the smaller towns in Szechuan too. They're even worse.

We're hearing that six schools have collapsed trapping the pupils inside. We're hearing that tens of thousands of people have been killed. I don't doubt these stories. They tally with what I know of the infrastructure of the region.

Hopefully, unlike their puppets in Burma, The Chinese Communist Party will acknowledge the need for external help in the face of a horrific natural disaster.

Hopefully, the world will not turn their face away from the innocent victims of both these tragedies, purely because their governments are incompetent, totalitarian regimes.

Hopefully, these tragedies will shake our preconceptions of the peoples of South East Asia, and our response to their tragedies will shake their preconceptions of us.

The Culchie Coup D'Etat

Yes, I know I wanted rid of Bertie Bung. Be careful what you wish for and all. I know.

But still.

A culchie coup d'etat?

The BIFFO for Taoiseach we knew about. A man with no experience outside of politics running the country (into the ground) in a time of economic downturn. Fantastic.

What we didn't see coming was the near total eradication of Dublin influence in the governing party at the executive table.

With Bertie gone to the back benches, and Seamus Brennan jumping (for health reasons) before he was pushed, and his constituency colleague Tom Kitt bizarrely axed, the cabinet loses three Dublin ministers.

And with Mary Hanafin demoted for her mishandling of the autism issue (and for being from Dublin), the capital loses further influence.

In their place comes perennial non-achiever from Caaark like, 'Batt' O'Keefe, and Cavan-Monaghan slogger Brendan Smith, the man who has spent the guts of a decade ploughing a lonely furrow in the North-East defending the indefensible health cuts on behalf of the government.

And the indefensible herself, Mary Harney, remains at the trough, against all common sense.

We also saw the arrival of Pat Carey as chief whip, replacing poor Tom Kitt. This is the man who previously oversaw the national drugs strategy. No, not the strategy that led to Ireland becoming awash in cocaine. The strategy that tried to prevent Ireland becoming awash in cocaine. So, not much talent there.

And some of the other appointments are culchie-tastic too. Micheal Martin as Foreign Minister? We lose the urbane (but potential Taoiseach) Dermot Ahern as our international representative and have him replaced by Langerman? The man who launched a thousand health reports? Give me a break.

Dermot Ahern to Justice is another demotion, no matter how it's spun. That's Biffo's none too subtle method of de-fanging the main opposition to his leadership. Ahern must surely realise now that he should have had the stones to make a contest of the leadership.

Right now, he'd be better off as a disgruntled back bencher, leading the anti-biffo FF, than in his current ignominious position implementing Brian Lenihan's policy agenda.

But it gets better. Instead of sacking that useless oxygen thief Martin Cullen, Biffo has promoted him to Tourism Minister. Frankly, if this country was the sunniest, safest, and cheapest on Earth, I'd still think twice about visiting if it was his ugly lying mug asking me to. And Ireland is none of those things.

But the real 'fuck you' to city dwellers is the elevation of 'lovely girl' Mary Coughlan to Tanaiste. I mean, come on. Are we meant to laugh or cry at that? Are we now basking in mediocrity to this extent?

In fairness, it's been a bad day for Dublin South, losing two cabinet ministers at one fell swoop. I predict incinerators and sewage plants to be built in Dundrum shortly.

Tom Kitt may have been smarmier than Bob Monkhouse, but he was at least an effective whip, toiling away beyond notice, ensuring that FF maintained their ever-tenuous but ever-present grip on power for the past half-decade.

The loss of two ministers will go down well next to Harvey Nicks. Well, it won't, but it'll go down really well with the bogtrotters who bussed it up to Dublin from Offally and gathered outside Leinster House like gombeen groupies earlier to cheer on Cowen's elevation.

If I were a betting man, I'd go out and stick a couple of quid on Fine Gael to lead the next government. If they can't outpunch this bunch of gobdaws, they don't deserve to ever run the country.

How to boycott the genocide olympics

Here is where you can find the complete roll of shame - the list of corporate donors and contributors to the Genocide Olympics in Beijing.

To assist people in boycotting the services and products of those firms seeking to promote themselves at the expense of the liberty of Tibetans, the democracy of the Burmese, the hunger of the North Koreans and the right to life of refugees in Darfur, I've listed below their rivals who you can use intead:

Scumbag Sponsor Firm - Rival Firm you can use instead

Coca-Cola - Pepsi (or better still, avoid tooth-rotting cola)
ATOS Origin - Literally thousands of alternative firms
General Electric - Thousands of rivals depending on sector
Johnson and Johnson - Body Shop (or use natural/artisan products)
Kodak - Nikon for cameras, Lexmark for printers
Lenovo - Dell, Acer, HP all do better PCs anyway
Manulife - Thousands of financial and insurance firms
McDonalds - Burger King (or better still, eat healthy)
Omega - Rolex, Timex, Cartier, Tag Heuer, etc, etc.
Panasonic - Sony, LG, Pioneer, Phillips, etc.
Samsung - Sony, LG, Pioneer, Phillips, etc.
Visa - Mastercard, Amex.
Volkswagen - Ford, Renault, Mercedes, Toyota, etc.
Adidas - Gola, Nike (though they've a poor history too)
UPS - Fed-ex, DHL
Haier - Whirlpool, Siemens, etc.
Budweiser, TsingTao, Yanjing beers - Drink your local beer
BHP Billiton - BP, Shell, various metal processors
Great Wall Wine (It's truly muck) - Something tasty from France, Italy, Oz, etc.
Beifa Pens - Scheaffer, Cross, Parker, etc.
Schenker Logistics - Bax, DHL, Fed-ex, Geologistics, etc.
Technogym - Nautilus, Oemmebi, Weider, Weslo, York, etc.

Don't forget the Scumbag Suppliers too:

Education First - Study somewhere else instead of China
Der Floor - Respol, Hytech, Premfloor etc.
Liby - Daz, Tide, Total, Lenor, etc.
Price Waterhouse Coopers - KPMG, Ernst and Young, Deloitte and Touche

By the way, don't forget to also boycott subsidiaries. For example, Volkswagen also own Audi, Bentley, Skoda, Lamborghini, Bugatti and Seat. So don't just boycott the leading brand, boycott ALL the firm's output.

A simple background check of any of the firms above online, especially via wikipedia, should reveal a list of their subsidiaries.

Do let firms know that you're boycotting them and why. How can corporate scumbags be expected to learn if we don't tell them why we're withholding our custom?

Happy boycotting!

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?