The cult of AGW

It's been the coldest winter since 1963 here in Ireland, apparently.

And we're not unique. Most of the planet has been experiencing exceptionally cold weather this winter.

This goes quite a long way towards explaining why you don't hear the words 'global warming' being bandied about so much any more.

These days, the buzz words are 'climate change'. I'd be inclined to refer to climate changing by its old-fashioned title, 'weather'.

But plenty of the true believers in the cult of anthropogenic global warming are still keen to claim that armageddon is imminent, and it's all your fault and mine for, well, existing basically.

Global warming, yesterday.

On BBC Radio 4 today, they were covering the British parliament's grilling of the lying scientists who conspired to fabricate data, cover up the truth and twist the results of research.

They then turned to some invited 'expert' to respond. I didn't catch his name. I wish I had because he should be added to the list of lying scumbags banking research grants for peddling this tosh.

He hummed and hawed about his lying colleagues getting busted, then went on to insist that, of course, none of this should impact at all on the need to reduce carbon emissions, the pressing need for carbon taxes, and so on and so forth.

Amazingly, the presenter didn't call him on any of this crap. But that's the nature of religious faith. One cannot question under any circumstances.

Yes, oil is running out and we need to be smarter about how we use it (ban SUVs for a start), and we need to find replacement sources of energy.

But that is no reason to seek to tax the developed world to the point of penury. There's a perfectly simple and indisputable reason for our cold weather. It's called the solar minimum.

When the sun flares up with nuclear force on its surface, it sends waves of additional heat and light our way. These flares are called sunspots, and they occur in cycles. We're at the bottom of the cycle currently, so there are virtually no sunspots and as a result, much less heat for us.

When there were plenty of sunspots a few years back, the world was exceptionally warm, and that's when this global warming crap began getting propagated.

So, since we know their scientific underpinning for AGW (man-made global warming/cooling/change/whatever you're having yourself) is not only junk science but deliberate lies, the only remaining question is why is the cult still propagating this?

Well, what is the result of a carbon tax? It's a penalty on the developed world for being developed. It's a glass ceiling on the prospects of the developing world to continue improving the lives of those living there. In short, it's a charter for reversing development.

In other words, it's more back-to-hobbiton fantasies from the Gaia-brigade, who'd like nothing more than to see mankind reduced to a few hundred thousand people living in an imaginary vegan wonderland without machinery, transport, or anything that might interrupt their fantasy idyll.

It's a cult, and it's time to stop pandering to them. They're more dangerous than any other bunch of crazy faith-based loonies right now, including the Roman Catholic paedo-clerics, the Islamo-fascist suicide bombers or the Judaic imperialists.

These people want to end the world as we know it. In proposing one spoof Armageddon, they hope to bring about a real one.

They need to be stopped. This nonsense has gone too far and for far too long already.

It's time we repudiated their ever-changing anti-human, anti-development lies and stopped letting them take us for sheep that will believe any old rubbish, and happily pay to be returned to the middle ages.

Oh, not again!

Algeria's police chief has been shot dead this morning.

The authorities are now searching for half a dozen Irish citizens with ringlets and little black hats.

Trevor caught by the Cutting Crew

Fianna Fail were never going to take the axeing of O'Dea lying down.

It didn't take long for them to wheel out some dirt on possibly the cleanest TD of all, Not-so-clever Trevor Sargent.

The government is rocking, right now. The gaps are opening up. Cowen can't keep it together much longer, especially with Dermot Ahern bootboying around the place as he has been.

Trevor's gone, and will eventually be the focus of the Greens again when this regime falls and the Gormley era is consigned to the unrecyclable bin of political failure.

In the meantime? Why not do as I do and crack open some popcorn and a nice beer and watch another government minister forced to quit.

Death by a thousand cuts

With a title like that, you're possibly expecting another economic rant from me.

Nope, it's option two on this occasion - this rancid government.

I wish I didn't feel compelled to pen my outrage on these two topics so often. It's wearying and depressing to return again and again to stare into the abyss and yell back what I see.

God only knows what you lot feel about it.

(Well, actually, Statcounter knows. And he says you're way more interested when I write about dead porn stars, or tattooing in Goa, or music piracy, or Irish whiskey, or the farce that is Ulster-Scots. Anything, in other words, other than the above two conversation-stoppers.)

So I'll try to think of posting about tattooed porn stars pirating Ulster-Scots albums or something similarly gripping later this week.

Remember when John O'Donoghue got forced out of his cosy, parasitic sinecure?

It felt like something had shifted in the universe. A senior politician in Ireland quit? That hadn't happened since forever.

But now that lying lowlife Willie O'Dea is gone too.

And Brian Lenihan, the last intelligent member of cabinet and the only one with any sort of respect outside a cumann singalong, is way more ill than they are publicly letting on.

And hoppity shortarse Martin Cullen is soon set to depart, what with his back finally caving in (likely due to his utter lack of spine.)

That leaves three seats at the top table soon to be empty,and let's not forget that Harney is only in her supersized chair because nobody else in government is taking enough hallucinogens to think running the Department of Health is a good idea of a career move.

And a level down the greasy pole, their margin is wafer thin in the Dail due to two by-elections and the distaste of panic-stricken backbenchers to continue supporting the insupportable.

Never mind the ever-skittish Greens, and the collection of allegedly Independent village idiots and parish pump attendants their every vote is now reliant on.

Finally, this has roused Fine Gael, many years later than it should have, and we have the riveting sight of blustering Enda in the Dail.

Obviously, with their huge poll lead and the almost unimaginable dream of possible one-party rule, they want to deliver the knockout blow as quick as is humanly possible.

After all, who knows when Labour will cop on and disassociate themselves from the unions' ruinous and publicly unpopular campaign to exempt overpaid, underworked public sector workers with job security from sharing the burden of the recession?

But thus far, the blueshirts remain utterly ineffectual, reliant on the Continuity Greens (the ones still technically in the tent, as opposed to McKenna's Real Greens, De Burca's Official Greens or any of the others who've already walked in disgust) to do any real damage.

The only thing that seems likely to prevent this government limping along, dying the death of a thousand cuts as one rat after another speeds for safety, is the incompetence of the incumbents.

God forbid that a government in Ireland changed because the public got disgusted by its corruption and incompetence and demanded its removal.

No, instead we must have, as we always do, some ridiculously irrelevant issue to get collectively mental about for a week, until before you know it, someone's off up the Aras and those fecking posters sprout on the lampposts all over again.

When O'Donoghue resigned, he whined that others in government had done much worse and seen no harm come to them. Why, his baffled mutton head seemed to ask, am I being picked on?

This week, we've seen O'Dea moaning exactly the same tune.

And so it will go, on. Some of them will slip out the backdoor, pleading illness. But those which remain will face a scrutiny that comes many years too late.

None of them will withstand such scrutiny. All of them will feel aggrieved, to have their past behaviour judged by proper standards of probity at last, when for years they quite rightly believed they could get away with anything, because they always did.

Then they'll be gone, with big cheerio cheques in their pockets, and we'll be left with blustering Enda, a prolonged recession, no jobs and a huge deficit.

And it'll happen all over again in another few decades, unless we start jailing people.

We should start with prosecuting O'Dea, who is guilty of perjury. We should go back to Ahern, who cannot explain away his financial shenanigans to the taxman, and prosecute him too.

Until these people are held accountable, they're beyond the law and will act accordingly.

And exactly the same principle applies to the banksters too.

(Oh, look! This post is about the economy after all!)

It takes a thief to spot global theft

The name Darius Guppy probably doesn't provoke much recognition in Ireland, even though he lived here for some time.

A brief precis of his life thus far might run:
Privileged schooling at Eton,
followed by more of the same at Oxford where he chummed around with top Tories David Cameron and Boris Johnson as part of the odious Bullingdon society,
followed by his father's spectacular bankrupcy,
which in turn led to Guppy Jr scamming Lloyds insurance to make up for the cash he believed Lloyds had stolen from his family.

Guppy was caught, prosecuted and jailed, then vanished into obscurity on release, firstly in Ireland and latterly in South Africa.

In short, he's the sort of rum bloke that the British aristocracy churn out all the time - the well-spoken crook.

But he's no fool and no idiot. And his introductory essay as a journalist for the Sunday Telegraph today is one of the more important articles to be published today or any other day.

Guppy's not the first to argue as he does, that the core problem with our global economy is the banks and how they invent money out of nothing in a form of alchemy that better resembles a card sharp's sleight of hand.

But few others have ever made the case so convincingly, so accessibly and so simply.

He argues clearly that you cannot allow banks to invent ever more amounts of money when the planet itself is finite. But this isn't an eco-hippy argument in favour of culling children so that the whales may feel free. This is a warning to everyone - the global economic collapse isn't over; it's barely started.

Perhaps it takes a thief to tell the rest of us that the banks are thieves on a truly colossal scale, and that a root-and-branch overhaul of the entire way money operates is now needed to prevent global meltdown.

His article is essential reading for anyone with a bank account, mortgage, personal loan, savings or property. If you haven't dropped out of society entirely, he's speaking to you.

Or, like the banksters, you might prefer to embed your head back in the sand and hope for business as usual to resume. It won't of course.

Money is debt, and allowing banks to create unending supplies of it is what's wrong at the core of our world. If you've got more time, perhaps you might like to view the following documentary, which expounds even further on the same points Guppy makes so excellently.

Britain has the wrong Bullingdon yobs running for office. Guppy would make a much better PM than Call-me-Dave Cameron. Because his criminality is so much less serious, and because he at least is prepared to acknowledge the real wrongs.

Do you know any of these Israeli Assassins?

These are the passport photographs used by the Israeli hitsquad that murdered a Hamas leader in the Gulf last month.

At least three, possibly four, posed as Irish, thereby putting at risk every single genuine Irish person on the planet who travels to the Gulf or indeed any other state with sympathies for Palestine.

These people are extremely dangerous and need to be found and tried.

And the terrorist government of Israel must issue an apology to the Irish people for hiding behind our good name while they go about their spineless murders.

That extra F

I've blogged before about how parents who give their children stupid names should be up on child abuse charges.

It's a global problem, generally committed by the lumpenproletariat whose imagination, stunted by a childhood diet of smokes and deepfried food, leads them to brand their offspring with the name of whatever pop star, white wine, car model or city happens to be in front of them at the time of birth.

But surely there must be a special ring of Hell set aside for people who, given perfectly reasonable names by their perfectly normal parents, jettison that in favour of some eye-popping nonsense.

I'm not talking about actors and writers assuming stage or pen names. I'm talking about Celtic Tiger eejits who decided to 'rebrand' in order to feed the ravenous monster that is their attention-seeking ego.

That extra F did it for me. Malcontent with being just another Aoife, some balloon off some RTE reality show (another ring in Hell dedicated to anyone involved in making those, I'd have thought) decided she needed an extra F in there 'to be different'.

Note to Aoiffffffe: Adding random letters to your name isn't 'different'; it's illiterate.

Graduates of advanced level Celtic Tiger naming idiocy include people who call themselves 'Puffin', 'Turtle', 'Doodle', 'Vogue' or 'Gavin Lambe-Murphy'.

By no coincidence whatsoever, all of these people can be found on the southside of Dublin 'working' in jobs that don't sound like jobs to people who work 9 to 5.

You know - they're models, or in PR, or they simply consider themselves to be celebs. Some such shit.

These people need to realise that it's not big or clever. It doesn't make you look different, or special. It makes you look like a self-important tool who can't spell and has industrial sized attention issues.

A kid like Rocco Ahern I feel sorry for (in more ways than one.) It's not their fault. But the adults who insist people call them by the name of exotic animals? I simply feel contempt for them.

It's not 2007 anymore. Change your name back to Mary or Padraig or whatever normal name your parents gave you before you copped a double dose of Celtic Tiger delusions, you planks.

Bury the dream with this poor girl

I've been to Turkey, and I've nice memories of the place.

It was full of beautiful ancient Ottoman buildings, and earlier remnants of other awe-inspiring eras like the Greeks and Romans and Persians.

The people were urbane and friendly, the beer flowed freely, the transport infrastructure was impressive by Irish standards and the food was wonderful.

So I can see what people mean when they claim that Turkey is a European nation, that deserves to take its place in the European Union.

But of course, when I was in Turkey, I didn't leave Europe. I was in Istanbul, a city under its previous incarnations as Byzantium and Constantinople that was for long periods European in culture and still is by geography.

But on the other side of the Bosphorus is another Turkey - the real Turkey. The huge Asia Minor bulk of the country. Their cultural practices are not so obviously in tune with European norms as those in Istanbul are. Unless, of course, we're talking about European values back in the Dark Ages.

Turkish police found the dead body of a 16 year old girl in a pit in a village. She had died through inhalation of large quantities of soil, indicating that she had been alive when buried.

Her own family did this to her, to preserve their 'honour', because she had been seen transgressing their cultural rules.

What was her crime, this unnamed creature of woe? She was seen talking to boys.

There may be room in the EU for Istanbul, should it and it's Euro-hinterland ever choose to secede from Turkey, not that it seems likely.

But there will never be room in Europe for the redneck lunacies of the hillbilly Anatolians.

Application denied.

Sympathy for the daddy devil at last?

Obviously, men are evil and wrong. We already knew that.

Even when women murder their own children in cold blood, it's not their fault but that of some man, somewhere, who drove them to it by callously leaving them, or having the audacity to sleep with someone who isn't a crazy child-killer.

Yup, somehow, it's always a man's fault.

We've seen this in some of the commentary about this sad case, where an upper middle-class affluent mum lost the plot and killed her two toddlers.

Not one article has failed to mention that her husband left her insane ass before Christmas, as if that was the causative reason for the death of these two poor kids, and not their crazy knife-wielding mother.

And plenty of online comment has sought to exonerate her entirely in the context of the allegedly clear and obvious distress she was under due to the break up.

Well, what about the distress of the father? He's had to answer a knock at the door from the plod and hear that his children have been killed by their mad ma. He'll be struggling to contain his grief right now, wondering why he didn't take them with him when he split from their mother.

Maybe in future, the next time a crazy bitch decides that her children must die in order to hurt her ex-partner, the media and the public will lay blame where it actually belongs.

When Arthur McElhill burnt his family to death, no one would have dared suggested or implied that somehow his utterly innocent partner, who tragically died along with her children, had any responsibility for his despicable act of murder.

So why the eagerness to transfer some of Fiona Dennison's blame onto her former partner? Does anyone seriously believe, as he mourns his two children, that he isn't suffering enough right now?

This is how the patriarchy myth unfolds in such circumstances. Since, obviously, our society is cruelly dominated by the evil patriarchy, it stands to reason that it is the patriarchy and not the woman with the knife in her hands and the bodies of her children in the boot of her car who is to blame.

For some people, not to mention the legal system, mummy's always right, even when she's a latent killer.There is no court in Ireland or Britain prepared to grant sole custody to a father unless the mother is already in jail or a chronic substance abuser.

One hopes that one day people will see through these double standards. Hopefully one day we will mature to the point of Scandinavian nations, who rightly see parenting as a joint task performed by two people - mother and father.

In the meantime, there is a single glimmer of hope for devil daddies. Britain's bringing in a right to six month's paternity leave for new dads. It's not much. In fact, it's pathetic in the context of what children and fathers ACTUALLY need in terms of new legislation.

But it's a start.

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?

Karma in its most overt form

Tiger Woods and his many skanks.

All the Olympic sprinters and their designer doping kits.

That Hans Ritter UN weapons inspector chap who just got busted trying to seduce what he thought was a kid.

Why do they do it? What makes them think they're going to get away with it?

Ego is obviously one reason. (Because I can.)

That at least accounts for the first skank, the first steroid injection, the first - um - inappropriate internet contact with a minor.

But why keep doing it (whatever it is)? Why not quit the cheating (or whatever) once you've tried it and satisfied the curiosity?

Perhaps the answer lies in Mr Ritter's back history. This is not the first time he's been found trying to arrange sex dates with minors, it seems. In fact, he's been at this crack for years.

He's no moron. He almost-singlehandedly took on the Bush Administration at one point. So what made him think he could possibly get away with continually behaving like he has?

Probably the same reason that made Ben Johnson and the other sprinters keep taking the 'roids, even though they have to undergo regular and unannounced drug tests.

The same reason Tiger kept chasing hoochie-mama skirt even though there was a press pack never far away.

Because they got away with it once, that first ego-driven, curiosity-spiked time. But they don't think 'God, I was lucky to get away with that. Better not risk it in future, since I've so much else to lose.'

These people believe they are so intelligent, so smart, and so powerful that they will NEVER be caught. Having got away with it once, they are almost compelled to repeat, because they genuinely believe they won't be caught.

Which makes them get sloppy, which gets them caught.

And that, ladies and gentlemen, is how karma functions in its most overt form. What the ego drives us to do, the ego ensures we make amends for.

Nostricles in my frostrils

I woke up with nostricles in my frostrils this morning.

That's when I realised the boiler had packed in again.

I really, really am getting bored with being freezing all the time.

Having to undergo a crash course in boiler engineering by mobile phone in the dark in sub zero temperatures was not one of my resolutions for 2010.

But at least it's working now.

Global warming, where are you?

Looking back at the forecast

Okay, I made a few predictions about where 2009 was heading before it happened, so let's take a look back and see whether my crystal ball was on the blink or not.

1. A severe crash in the housing market of Britain and Ireland, even worse than what's already occurred. The governments forced to intervene with banks to prevent massive scale repossessions and defaults.

Half-right. Bizarrely, the British market rose slightly due to so little properties being on the market. Nevertheless that's only an indication of a delayed further crash.

2. The credit card lifestyle bill finally lands on the mat. Plenty of people with no assets other than a few payments on a 08-D car are going to find themselves defaulting on some very expensive credit loans. The problem of arranging refinancing, from semi-bankrupt banks who themselves cannot get credit, for these unsupported loans is going to stretch the banking sector beyond breaking point.

I think we can note this down as correct.

3. Multinationals use the excuse of recession to relocate to Eastern Europe. Cue 100,000 redundancies next year in Ireland.

Dell, anyone? And we got way more than 100,000 redundancies last year.

4. Euro or no euro (and given that 40% of our trade is with the sterling zone even today, the euro is not currently helping), we might actually have to call in the IMF if the government cannot raise the funds to deal with their income shortfall AND that of the banks, especially if the credit card bill arrives too.

They've avoided complete collapse so far, but then again all sorts of zombie economies are currently being propped up around the world. Faeces meets fan time has therefore been delayed until even worse culprits like Greece and the Baltics are dealt with first.

5. Empty shopfronts in high streets. Cars with for sale signs. Travel agents, estate agents, motor retailers all going bust.

Tick, tick, tick, tick, tick. 100% correct.

6. A general election in Ireland after either the Greens grow stones and pull out of Government or they lose a crucial Dail vote, an election which Fianna Fail lose quite significantly to a Fine Gael-Labour coalition.

Pure fail. We should have had an election but we didn't. Blame the spineless Greens. When we do get one in 2010, I expect the same result as I predicted will finally occur.

7. Obama's Clinton re-run presidency gets off to a poor start with a series of foreign affairs crises that even Bill and Hill can't solve for the noobie. For potential flashpoints, think Pakistan, Israel/Palestine, Ukraine, Indonesia and as usual most of Africa.

I think buyer's regret has definitely kicked in by now. And foreign affairs has been the locale for most of Obama's poor performance, even if he is being criticised over his (very good) health plan and the economy.

8. Britain definitely starts pulling out of their occupations. Troops to start leaving Iraq and Afghanistan. As recession bites, there will be a further round of culls in the Northern Irish public service sector.

We've seen the start of this already. Much more of the same to come this year.

9. Chelsea for the league, with Liverpool nipping their heels in second. United a distant third. Fergie to quit at long last. Perhaps Wenger to join him in walking from the Premiership.

Wishful thinking on my part, perhaps. None of the above occurred.

10. The beginning of the end of low cost air travel. As airlines consolidate, and routes decrease, and more and more craft are parked in the Nevada desert, the consumer ends up with the worst of all worlds - prices like the luxury days of the 1970s with service of contemporary Ryanair.

Sadly, this has come to pass. Hundreds of airlines went belly up last year, prices are rising, routes are being reduced and service standards across the board are abysmal and hardly helped by ridiculous (and pointless) security measures at airports.

I make that around 6/10 right. Meh. I always was a B student.

A spectre is haunting Europe

Not communism, but the spectre of fake Europe.

Fake Europe is the penumbra of countries that pretend to be European when they clearly aren't. Imitation may be the greatest form of flattery, but it gets irksome when these people are indulged in their delusions.

Is anyone else annoyed that this year's European city of culture isn't even in Europe, never mind in the EU?

It's just another example of a mouthy demanding country outside of Europe seeking to associate itself with a continent it doesn't belong to.

Previous exponents of this include Israel, who despite blatantly being part of the Middle East nevertheless are in the European Broadcasting Union and compete in UEFA.

And the EU has had to entertain hilarious membership applications from both these countries, plus other distinctly non-European places like Morocco.

I really wish the EU would produce a map of the world and give some of these people a basic lesson in geography instead of indulging their reality-defying fits of pique and envy.

Here's to you, Mrs Robinson

Ok, let's leave the schadenfreude to one side for now. Iris Robinson is, apparently, an ill woman with a recent history of suicidal ideation.

Of course, she's now utterly ruined as a politician and probably in her personal life too.

Her husband, the first minister, is hanging on tenaciously after a heart-rending performance on TV. But with the fundie Free Presbyterian Paisleyite moralists in his party to answer to, not to mention more questions coming about his family finances, that may not last long.

So where does this leave us? What have we learnt?

Well, firstly we now have first class proof, as if it were required, that the DUP are NOT holier than thou. They are not more upstanding or of a higher moral calibre. They are just as prone to sin, sex, and screwing up as everyone else.

We also have evidence of the dual standards operating in terms of gender. If a 59 year old man, who had been entrusted with the care of a teenage girl by her dying parent, then went on to fuck the girl for a period of time, what do you imagine the headlines might look like?

If the genders were reversed, and it were Peter and not Iris who'd had the affair, he'd be pilloried in the streets of conservative, religious, judgemental Northern Ireland. In fact, his life might even be at risk.

No matter how ill Iris is or claims to be (now, ten months after her apparent suicide attempt), her mental condition cannot excuse how she manipulated and abused her relationship with a much younger man who was effectively under her guidance and care.

I don't think it's too strong to say she groomed this young lad. Looked at through the prism of gender reversal, the scale of her wrongdoing becomes clear.

Finally, we have the prospect, in a British general election year, of NI's three biggest parties all changing their leadership.

Gerry Adams has been fighting a rearguard action for sometime against those in Sinn Fein seeking a change of leadership. But revelations about his child-abusing brother have stuck fast, and will be hard for him to shake off. Plus, there is a lot more to come out about Liam Adams. So Gerry may be forced to step down sooner rather than later.

Peter Robinson, who does appear to have been seriously wronged by his wife's behaviour, is also on a knife edge. He must explain his involvement in his wife's financial shenanigans, which comes on top of criticism of their lavish expense claims - the 'Swish Family Robinson' tag.

And then he must talk the fundies in Unionism into forgiving and forgetting. Meanwhile the TUV will snipe from the wings, and recent DUP converts will sigh and return to the UUP fold. It seems like he is a dead man walking.

Only the SDLP actually are choosing to change their leader.

Now is a moment of transition and possibility for NI, but also a dangerous time therefore. And there are still a lot of guns out there, especially UDA ones, despite their little PR stunt this week.

So here's to you, Mrs Robinson, for blowing holes in all the known assumptions about Northern Irish politics. If you achieved nothing else in your political career (and you did achieve nothing else) at least your sordid abuse of a young man has led to a moment of potential positive change.

And that change involves the eradication of pocket-lining big house Unionism in its modern DUP form - the Swish Family Robinson with their massive expenses and multiple luxury homes, or their predecessors the Paisley clan, with their multi-million church and dodgy property dealings.

Can Unionists turn their backs on such representatives for good? Or how many more such sordid revelations of DUP improbity can they stomach?

Does spouting about Christ in front of a Union Jack really excuse the dodgy pocketlining and sexual predation on a young Catholic man in the eyes of Unionism?

Let's hope so.

PS: I'm surprised to see that www.DUPcougars.com has not yet been registered by some enterprising porno king.

New Year's Revolutions

Happy nearly New Year, y'all.

Hopefully, you realise tomorrow is just another day, and you don't need to make lifechanging decisions while drunk tonight that will transform into mid-January bouts of guilt as you fail.

You could stop smoking, lose weight or try to get a new job starting any particular day. Why do it alongside the rest of the herd? Is there camaraderie in failing en masse? I don't know.

What I do know is that I think New Year's Resolutions are about as pointless as those 'Caution: Hot!' warnings on takeaway coffees - they're really only needed for the truly remedial.

So I've decided to go with some New Year's Revolutions instead. Here are the revolutions I'd like to see in 2010:

1. A Chinese counter-revolution. Seriously, fuck the Chinese Communist Party. I'd love to see them overthrown and subjected to a quick round of real people power, the human-abusing thug junta. This same prescription also applies to the scum ruling Belarus, North Korea, Burma, Zimbabwe and a host of other thugocracies.

2. A drugs revolution. The war on drugs is lost. Why are our governments still fighting it? Increasingly, world leaders, health experts, religious minorities and influential commentators have come out in favour of a complete reversal of current failed policies.
I hope that either the lawmakers start listening, or else a proper grassroots movement comes along and makes ongoing prohibition unworkable for good. If the EU reverted to the Portuguese model, we might finally get a handle on drug crime and on harm reduction for addicts.

3. An economic revolution. The return of the gold standard? The end of fractional banking? Back to barter? Jail for banksters?
I'm no economist (and am suspicious of that pseudoscience in any case), so I will refrain from being prescriptive.
But since the current system just went pop for the umpteenth time, you'd like to think we might rebuild with some new method that doesn't unerringly result in a bubble and collapse every decade or two.

4. A democratic revolution in Ireland. Take a look at the Dail. Do those people really represent you? Do they look after your interests? Well, why keep voting for them?
I'd love to see an end to the cronyism, the parochial parish pump politics, the gombeens, the brown envelopes and the nepotism in Irish politics.
But that would require an electorate to grow up and take responsibility for those they elect.

What revolutions would you like to see next year? And are there any that you're prepared to man the barricades to bring about?

Tis the season to be clairvoyant

It's that time of the year again, when most people defer cynical normality until the New Year, eschew common sense and start spouting goodwill to fellow men.

But not Skinner, no sirree bob.

For me, it's the season for casting a gloomy, pessimistic, jaundiced eye over the year to come, read the runes, scatter the entrails, gaze into the crystal ball and attempt to predict what the year ahead has to offer.

We'll hold fire on last year's predictions until this year is officially up. (Though nothing's stopping you checking now.) Instead, it's full steam ahead with what's ahead in 2010.

1. I can haz double-dip recession? Sort of inevitable at this stage, really. Credit card debt should do it for Ireland, which is tragically appropriate for what has happened to us as a nation in the mass delusion of the 'Celtic Tiger'.
In America, it will be the ongoing slide in dollar value, while Britain will simply run out of cash. China is hamstrung by its dollar exposure, lack of Western demand for plastic tat made in sweatshops and the fact that the rest of the world will be slow to forget how China stitched up Copenhagen for its own ends.
In short, more red lines on the charts, more capital flight to precious metals, more lost jobs, more housing price decline, more negative equity, more foreclosures, more unemployment and more excuses from those responsible.

2. What does Africa need right now? You were thinking 'major soccer tournament', weren't you? Isn't that top of their list of needs?
Africans agree, of course, which is why they're having two in six months. Never mind the HIV epidemic, the grinding poverty, the neverending wars, famines and disease. I must haz mi football. Right?
South Africa 2010 will see predictions of violence against the occasional drunk affluent visitor sadly fulfilled. Stadia will be full of white people flown in for the occasion. A European team, likely Spain or Italy, will win, though an African team, likely Nigeria, will get to the semis.

3. General election in the Republic of Ireland.
Seriously, this government wouldn't even have lasted this long were it not for the dire standard of political opposition in the Dail, and the utter disorganisation of political opposition outside of it.
Enda Kenny is as effective and reliable as the Billings method, while the beards running the unions have already shot their bolt and allowed their campaign to be cleverly cut in two by a government sneakily talking up public sector V private rivalries.
But to hold together an administration this flimsy, talentless and aimless would require both the cunning of a natural alliancemaker like Bertie Ahern and endless pots of overflowing gold to pay everyone off and keep them all happy.
Cowen has neither Ahern's touch nor any money whatsoever, since Ahern spent it all already. So it's inevitable that sooner rather than later the faeces will fly into the fan.

4. Result of election? Fine Gael and Labour, that unhappily married couple, back in the saddle again, this time minus the self-exploded Greens.
Stasis for the Shinners, though a few new faces in their line-up, including Joe McHugh. A move against Churry as leader of the party finally coalesces around someone other than the unelectable Mary Lou. Toireasa Ferris, perhaps?
Fianna Fail to regroup around a new leader - with Martin facing off against Dermot Ahern for the job and Martin winning. Most of the current cabinet retire to count their ill-gotten gains.

5. A general election is already scheduled for next year in Britain and the North, so they're already in mid-campaign.
The toff Tories to edge it in a surprisingly close-run thing after an initial rally of the British economy in the Spring. But they will claim no seats in the North, leaving their alliance with the UUP in tatters.
Lady Sylvia to win as independent in North Down, taking their last seat, leaving them behind the TUV, for whom Allister will ascend Paisley's old throne in North Antrim.
Alisdair McDonnell to become the next SDLP leader, and subsequently hold South Belfast. A resurgence for this party might then finally be possible, especially if a Shinner generation shift starts to coalesce.

6. Post-Lisbon, the EU will grow ever more important. Initially in Ireland this will either not be noticed or welcomed when spotted, since it will come alongside support for our comatose economy or will be warmly contrasted with our indigenous mismanagement of our political affairs.
But elsewhere, the twin-track Europe does begin to finally emerge. Eager to push on with the long march to federalism, the elites of Brussels will seek to seduce an inner circle to move faster. Welcome to the beginning of a Europe of the centre and the fringes again, just like the Roman Empire.

7. Poor ole spook kid Barack just won't catch an even break in 2010. With the messiah sheen of his election campaign long lost in most memories, Americans will get on with the fact of confronting growing poverty and unemployment, a reduction in international relevance alongside a growth in international danger, not only in current war spots but also in some new ones too.
I'd expect more Islamoterror next year, likely of the old Nineties format of attacks on foreign -based US troops. And that will of course stabilise Pakistan hugely.
Not.

8. China realises its dollars are worthless and we don't want their tat anymore, and there's only so much African resources and commodities you can stockpile for future good times, so it belatedly decides to spree its dollar mountain on Western assets.
This overt accumulation of Western trophies, akin to the Japanese intervention into California in the Eighties, will be the first sign for many of the Chinese century everyone was suspecting might come about.

9. Chelsea for the league, Barcelona for the Champions League, Rafa for Real and Mourinho for Anfield after an Arab buyout of the bankrupt Yanks.

10. Russia will play silly buggers with the gas pipeline to the West again as it tries and largely succeeds in splitting both Georgia and the Ukraine in two.
Everyone talks tough, but the Kremlin ain't listening. Once again, decadent old Europe realises too late that the Eastern threat to its stability has never gone away but merely morphed into yet another totalitarian guise, following the Tsarism and Sovietism of the past.

Should be a good year.

Sinn Fein Unionist Outreach Programme

Churry gets hands on and grapples Unionism at close quarters during a recent visit to Knutts Corner 'international' airport.

I'm no scientist

But I know a good bit of science.

It's the universe's way of punishing me, I think, for all those semi-smug, semi-idiotic moments when I thought in school: I don't need to pay attention to this - I'm going to be an ARTIST.

Hey, we were all arseholes at 15, you know?

Anyway, I know a good bit of science. I don't know when I last read fiction, or even fact that wasn't science-related. I do it for work, I do it for fun too. Right now I'm reading one book about zero-fields and another about medicine, for example. They're the books by my bed.

I've come to realise that this stuff, inexpertly presented to the public, is actually all that we can be assured of in relation to our existence on this planet. Everything else, and I mean everything else, is supposition at best.

That includes art, soul, music, passion, emotions - all the good stuff, in a way. But while those things continue not to be measurable, they continue to be perplexing.

We can be sure about light in a way that we can't about love, for example. But that won't stop most people anguishing about love at some point in their lives, of course, and nor is it any succour to be aware of the fact that you can in recompense understand what photons do, even as your better half pursues pastures new.

So science is no succour, but it's all we've got. And surprisingly, we have more than most people think.

One question is how did the general public become so divorced from the currency of scientific thought to the point today where almost nobody now knows, for example, that we do not see, but imagine, since our optic nerve conveys light information received on the eyeball as information which it sends to the brain where it is recreated?

Is it the media's fault? When Einstein came up with E=MC2 it was quickly popularised, yet today it's still the best known theorem. What happened to the media so that it dumbed down below science?

Or did science become so difficult that it transcended simple translation into concepts that the public can understand? In the West at least, we have a better-educated general public than ever in history. So why the assumption that they can't understand science?

Is it because of the fact that they generally don't, even on the rare occasions in which it is presented to them?

For example, a great nuclear reactor in the sky showers us from close range with radiation, light, heat, solar energy and a number of other things too. It is many, many times larger than this planet, and it provides all of our energy sources. We call it the Sun.

Yet the vast majority of people genuinely believe that burning fossil fuels is the main cause of change in our planet's weather system, even though we have plenty of evidence that the planet has experienced big weather changes in the past.

But even scientists are buying into that one (literally, in many cases, since their research funding so commonly requires them to posit a 'global warming' or 'climate change' thesis to gain grant aid.)

So what about something self-evident, like evolution?

How come a huge proportion of people in the richest country on Earth are able to coherently believe that evolution is wrong and that an imaginary daddy in the sky planted evidence of a vast pre-human history on the planet in order to test the limits of our imagination, or faith, since the two terms are effectively interchangeable?

In short, how come Americans with all their resources, freedom and affluence, believe in 'intelligent design' (itself one of the least appropriate monikers for an idea ever, since there is nothing 'intelligent' about the ideology)?

I wish more people knew more science. That's about the only thing I agree with the government about, actually.

Science has taught me how to tell truth from lies. For example, we have the Greens in government pushing through a 'carbon tax' on carbon-based fuels in this week's budget.

On the surface, to the unscientific layman, this seems like a painful but legitimate response to combating climate change. But even let us assume that climate change is indeed being caused by us burning carbon fuels, science still tells me that this move is nonsense. Why?

Because firstly, there is no alternative. We don't have wind or solar energy feeding the grid yet. We don't have alternatives for driving our cars or heating our homes. Therefore, science tells me that this cannot stop people using fossil fuels. It will only charge them more for them. Therefore, it's a government revenue raiser.

But science also tells me that whether climate change is caused by burning fossil fuels or not, oil is definitely running out. It's a finite resource, and while we may still find quite a bit more, we really have to quickly learn how to use it a lot more sensibly, because we're definitely running out.

And while penalising people for utilising a finite resource could be a disincentive, that can only work when they can avoid the punishment by switching to alternatives.

So a carbon tax is the worst of all worlds - a punitive law designed to raise revenue with no positive benefit to society. It's today's version of the window tax introduced by an English king in the Middle Ages.

If more people knew more science, there'd be a lot more anger about that budget, I reckon. When people cease staring into their wallets and lamenting, they could usefully look at the small print hidden in the budget and see just how bankrupt of ideas this government has become.

How to ruin places with architecture

I'm fed up of architects ruining perfectly good places with their architecture.

Let's try not to think, for the moment, about the Sixties monstrosities that were erected on the ruins of beautiful old Georgian and Victorian buildings across the cities of Ireland and Britain.

The Sixties really have quite a lot to answer for in retrospect. For more on this argument, feel free to track down BBC 4's splendid documentary on why the Sixties were actually total shit.

No, I'm more animated about contemporary architecture, which despite knowing almost nothing about it I tend to quite like, largely because it so often is used to replace dreadful concrete Stalin-baroque Sixties architecture which I loathe.

However, plonking some cleverly shaped, interestingly lit building on the site of a half-derelict tower block or concrete wall of council flats is one thing.

But erecting preposterous constructions in scenic environments where they totally destroy all of the existing ambience is another entirely.

Examples? It's probably easier to say what's good than what isn't sometimes. The London Gherkin is good - eye-catching yet functional and fits into its environment (the financial city) while still being quirky enough to attract attention.

What else is good? Much of the Dublin docklands, actually. Wandering around that end of town a decade ago was to take your life in your hands.

And when the Flugeltent is in operation, or in the middle of Octoberfest, it probably still is a bit hairy down there.

But few could claim with a straight face that the buildings of the docklands and IFSC area haven't improved immensely what was a rundown and decrepit area.

And what's shit? There's a lot of shit actually. Most of the ghost estates and apartment blocks are empty for more than the simple reason that they were built in the middle of nowhere in a ponzi boom. They're also empty because they look shit and no one sane would want to live in buildings looking like that.

Of course architects will smugly claim that those estates and blocks were actually designed without reference to their stellar professional abilities, and were lashed together by builders with no sense of design.

And they'd be right. But in response, I generally just show them this picture of a winery built by superstar architect Frank Gehry in Spain, and then they go very quiet indeed.

Here is how to ruin places with architecture:

Fucking horrible thing to do to a beautiful landscape, isn't it?

Architects - they've a lot of crimes to answer for, you know.