Let's ditch England

As I wandered around the sunny squares of Glasgow today, I couldn't help but recall that once upon a time Belfast sort of looked like this, before it all got blown up.

As I wandered the redbrick Victorian squares and terraces, I remembered that Belfast has much in common with this town, just as Dublin and Edinburgh architecturally are so reminiscent of each other.

Outside the Buchanan galleries, laden with bottles of whisky, I overheard a lost Japanese tourist ask two smoking old dears how to get to the Holiday Inn.

'Sure we wouldn't know,' they told him apologetically. 'We're not from this part of the world at all.'

After I pointed the Japanese lad in the right direction, I corrected the two old ladies.

'You're from Ards or Bangor, I'm guessing' I said to their astonishment. 'To my mind, that's definitely this part of the world.'

Sure enough, they were indeed from North Down. Their accents - effectively lowland Scots with an Irish lilt - gave that away. It's one I'm fairly familiar with.

And that got me thinking about the sphere of influence that goes back all the way through the medieval kingdom of Dalriada to the Red Branch cycle of mythology and Cuchullain's time with Scatha the Witch on Skye.

The same sphere of influence that the descendants of the Scottish planters of the Hamilton-Montgomery plantation of 1609 now wish to parlay into a quasi-nationhood - the so-called Ulster-Scots.

But the links go further and deeper than the ongoing and divisive effects of that particular plantation. The Scotii were in origin Irish themselves.

A deep shared culture, encompassing forms of the Gaelic languages, whisk(e)y distillation, croft farming, and continual cross-pollenisation of people and culture has created a bond between the two nations that is perennially sublimated by the fact that both remain culturally and politically dominated by England.

Just as the riches of Ireland - its great forests, its manpower, its food - were denuded for English benefit, so have the Scots suffered greatly through that unbalanced power relationship with their southern neighbour.

The highland clearances are no less a holocaust than the repeated attempts at Irish genocide concocted in London in the 17th, 18th and 19th centuries. And the daylight robbery of their massive North Sea oil reserves parallels the lengthy theft of Irish resources for English gain during the past umpteen centuries.

It's self-evident to all but the Tory rump of the UUP that partitioning Ireland hasn't worked and never will. Even the self-denying Ulster nationalists within the DUP are coming to a slow realisation that their economic future and well-being is utterly and inextricably tied up with that of the rest of the island.

The question remains how to square the circle - how to encompass the stern and implacable opposition to the perceived 'Rome rule' of a unified Ireland that unionists espouse with the undeniable reality of their Irishness?

Perhaps the answer is a union of a different sort. Scots and Irish, Ulsterman and Highlander, Aberdonian and Corkonian can all agree on one simple fact - England never did you a single favour, but used you to their own benefit.

Maybe the answer is to ditch the English. Would the unionists accept a different type of union - one with our historical brother Scotland rather than the isle of Britain as a whole?

Those who espouse Irish unification always point to the fact that unionists would be kingmakers in Dail Eireann - driving coalitions from the minority position as the PDs did for the past decade.

But this is not sufficient for our unionist brethren.

So why not ditch the English?

We could have a union of over 11 million people, with stunning natural resources, and benefit from the boosted economy of scales that would provide. A true Celtic homeland, one made up of Protestant, Catholic and dissenter in even enough numbers to threaten no one.

The poor lost hybrid souls of Ulster would have both their parents back together, married for the first time without a third abusive and dominant partner involved in the relationship.

The Scots of Irish descent could finally feel truly at home in their homeland, no longer sickened by football thugs telling them to 'go home, the famine's over.'

The Scots do not benefit from their association with England under the British banner. They never did. Many, likely a majority, would support independence from London and the English yoke.

The English will always be with us. We are both, Scotland and Ireland, firmly within London's sphere of influence. But England's greatest fear has always been a coherent and strong rival culture located on its Celtic fringe.

Why not have a new unionism - a marriage of Scotland and Ireland - and find out just what it was that has been frightening England down through the many centuries?

We asked the Japanese tourist what he thought.

'If you say you are from Ireland, then you are Irish,' he answered slowly. 'But you sound like the Scots do to me. You look like them too.'

Even outsiders see the family resemblance, it seems.

20% swing in Lisbon vote

So now we have a figure on what proportion of the Irish electorate are easily scaremongered. I suppose the 17 million euro we spent on Lisbon II was worth it to at least find that out.

I hope everyone who made the mistake of voting 'yes to jobs' and 'yes to recovery' noted that not one of the grinning politicians mentioned jobs or recovery in their self-aggrandising speeches today.

That's because Lisbon won't be leading to any jobs or recovery, obviously. The Irish Times business section (about the only bit of the paper worth reading) published a very astute article recently detailing seven reasons why we'll still be bolloxed when the rest of the world is booming again.

The really scarey bit? They didn't even refer to the NAMA black hole that Fianna Fail are cooking up for you and your children to pay for.

Declan Ganley promised to return to the RDS next October with some 'Yes for Jobs' posters and see if the jobs had materialised. He may or may not turn up next October, but you can be sure the jobs definitely won't have.

Another potential plus of this referendum is the Donegal vote. That surely has to undermine Sweary Mary Coughlan. Biffo's government is already on life support, and will face a torrid two days explaining itself over Rody Molloy's golden handshake in the Dail next week.

And then on Saturday, the hobbits will gather to decide what magic beans they'd like to get from Fianna Fail in order to stay in government. And the NAMA banker bailout is yet to come.

So there are a number of potential banana skins there for Biffo. The last thing he needs right now is someone lobbing more of them onto the path in front of him.

He should heed the words of the 'most cunning, most devious of them all', Bertie Ahern, who pinpointed Sweary Mary as a wrong un in his autobiography. He made a mistake in appointing her as Tanaiste, but clearly couldn't resist the culchie coup.

Well, here's his chance to ditch some of the dead weight. Even the meeja think it's time she went. She failed to carry her own county in the referendum. That's a reason the grass roots gombeens will accept for dumping her. It diverts attention from the mistake he made in appointing her in the first place.

On a personal note, I'm inclined to agree with Pearse Doherty (probably a first) in paying tribute to the people of Donegal who were not bullied into doing what the Euro elite wanted.

The rest of the country may have voted to be serfs, but they did not. Fair play, Donegal. Stand tall tonight.

The most dishonest political campaign ever

That's what Lisbon II has been.

It's as if every single campaigner on both sides of the debate have been possessed by demons making them lie. In the case of the professional politicians, that's business as usual. In the case of Mick 'low fares plus huge charges' O'Leary, it's to be expected.

But when Intel and fundamentalist Christians start in on the spoofing act, one really does begin to despair.

The blatant attempts by the supposedly impartial EU to buy the election have been as despicable as the attempts by foreign Eurosceptics like Bonde or the UKIP to swing the decision to what suits them.

No one comes out of this with any credit. Not the liars who have attempted to link a yes vote with economic recovery. Not the liars who said a yes vote would lead to a shredding of the minimum wage.

The bottom line remains: you're voting on the treaty itself and nothing else. Not on the 'guarantees' which don't actually exist. Not on the minimum wage, or abortion, or a federal Europe, or economic recovery, or the current government, or NAMA, or anything else. Just the treaty.

My advice? Read the treaty. Not the summaries offered by vested interests, but the treaty itself.

I did. It's almost impenetrable. It took me about four days to finish it. At the end I was extremely concerned at how much of the treaty eroded our say over our own country and how many things were open to wide interpretation.

They say that if you don't understand a contract, you shouldn't sign it. Equally, if you don't know what to make of an issue, you should probably vote against it.

For those reasons, and not for any of the dishonest, disingenuous reasons offered by both the Yes and the No campaigns, I will be voting No on Friday.

I suggest that unless you've read, understood and approve of the treaty, you should do likewise.

Plan B

Biffo says there is no other option than NAMA. He says there is no Plan B.

Apart from the fact that Fine Gael have proposed a good bank/bad bank option and Labour have proposed temporary nationalisation of the banks, Biffo is still wrong.

While the Opposition proposals are improvements on the blatant bailout of Biffo's plan, there is a third option. It's called capitalism. Not crony capitalism like Fianna Fail understand. Proper capitalism.

Allow me to summarise: LET. THE. BANKRUPT. BASTARDS. GO. TO. THE. WALL.

But Biffo says we need to bail out these banks so that they can get lending to the rest of us and improve the economy so that we can stop borrowing a billion every fortnight and we won't have to call in the IMF.

Biffo couldn't be thicker if he was a bottle of pigshit.

Here's how to save the country's finances, Biffo. Here's Plan B:

• Let the zombie banks and the developers go to the wall. 77 billion saved right there. Then start prosecuting the bankers. Take them through the courts, using CAB if necessary. Probably a couple of billion minimum right there.

• After that, there's halving the salaries of TDs, closing the Seanad and making all representatives provide receipts for expenses, and capping the total at 10K per person per annum. Hundreds of millions saved.
  

• Make ministers drive their own cars and fly with their new bessie mate Mick O'Leary, and sell the Mercs and jets.
  

• Increase corporation tax by 2%. Not enough to drive FDI away, but enough to bring in an absolute ton of revenue.
  

• Cut the dole to no more than 25% higher than Britain's. That'll stop the vast amount of welfare tourism into Ireland, and will incentivise the unemployed to seek other options. Ideally, I'd timecap it to six months too, but in current circumstances it's unreasonable to expect people to find work in that period. But I'd timecap it as soon as we get unemployment back under 300,000. Billions saved there. Literally billions.
  

• Scrap the asylum system entirely, including the appeal system, and implement a pro-active approach involving identifying a capped number of those worthy of asylum and patriating them here ourselves. Deport everyone who has lost their case without appeal. Stop anymore coming in at the airport. Insist on Romanians and Bulgarians demonstrating an ability to support themselves here for three months or refuse them entry. Hundreds of millions annually saved on legal fees alone. Hundreds of millions more saved on processing bogus claims from the likes of Nigerians, over 95% of whom were found NOT to have a case on first application. And probably at least a billion saved in free legal aid, medical care, welfare benefits and so on.
  

• Introduce a third rate of tax on earnings over 100K per year of 60%. Introduce the American system of demanding tax returns from ex-pats on pain of loss of citizenship.
  

• Cap public sector wages at 150K per annum per person across the board from Brendan Drumm down. Introduce legislation to end their generous pension entitlements.

• Cancel all property-related tax incentives immediately, and the same for stud farms and all the other rich men's tax shelters.

• Legalise cannabis, licence it for sale and tax the hole out of it. Hundreds of millions in revenue right there.
  

• Introduce a property tax based on square footage of property owned, on an exponential scale, with exemptions for primary family homes under 100 sq m. Own half of Wicklow? Time to pay up, sell up, or open up your stately home to the nation.
  

• Prosecute Ahern. Not a lot of cash in this, but it is essential to demonstrate to the world that we're drawing a line under our corrupt and shady past.
  

I'm not saying this will reverse our currently catastrophic economic situation overnight. It won't.

But it is such a clear and vast improvement on the Government's plan A - to give tens of billions to corrupt bankers and their bankrupt specuvestor clientele - that you'd have to question who the Government actually represent.

Because it's definitely not the Irish taxpayer.

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:

You Can't Trust Them

Coir are an annoying shower of kerazzee godbotherers.

But they're right about the Lisbon Treaty being a shoddy deal for us and for the peoples of Europe.

But the best reason for voting against Lisbon again (apart from the fact that they arrogantly dismissed the sovereign voice of the Irish people last time) has got to be this: you can't trust the people who want you to sign up to it.

Boycott fashion

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

It's time to boycott fashion.

How to end clamping

A Frenchman told me tonight how to prevent clamping from taking hold in your neighbourhood.

Buy superglue, and keep it on your person.

The next time you see clampers immobilising some poor bugger's car, just wander past the clamper van and squirt a whack of the superglue in the lock. Do as many doors as you can.

According to the Frenchman, in his town (he didn't specify and I didn't ask, sorry), when they introduced clamping, everyone armed themselves with superglue.

Within a matter of weeks, the clamping was cancelled, due to the cost of replacing locks on their own vehicles.

Obviously, this is not legal. And I'm not suggesting that the spineless citizens of Dublin should follow suit in defending their liberties against clampers as the French have.

But wouldn't it be fantastic if they did?

The REAL danger of music piracy

I read Seanachie's piece on home taping with interest and a degree of nostalgia.

What person, anywhere on Earth, who's currently aged between 25 and 50, DIDN'T make a mix tape, or record a live concert off the radio, after all?

And he's absolutely right - home taping didn't kill music at all.

He makes an interesting point (borrowed from AquariumDrinker) about the development of CDs. Basically, we can now acknowledge that the compact disc format brought us nowhere as consumers, but was a great payday for the record companies.

CDs couldn't record, were fragile, looked rubbish and cost more. What mugs we were for buying into that one.

I recall in the early Nineties visiting a factory in the West of Dublin where they made CDs. They had just installed a facility for making a whole new thing called DVDs. I was intrigued, and a bit impressed.

Until they showed me a DVD and it looked exactly like a CD, only double-sided. Now, I wasn't impressed.

"This is the same technology, right? You've basically taken two CD surfaces and put them back to back, haven't you?", I asked.

Effectively, with a little additional information compression and creation of further storage space, that's what they had done. The factory manager looked a little guilty and sheepish.

"We nearly didn't open this facility," he told me in confidence. "But a lot of money has been spent on this format worldwide. The music and entertainment industry are going to get behind it anyway. I reckon we'll get five years out of it."

"What happens then?" I asked in all innocence.

"The future is no media at all," he laughed. "Things will be stored virtually and you'll just download them onto your stereo or TV when you want them."

That was the first time I encountered the concept of digital media storage in the home. The industry knew it was coming a decade before it properly did, but they just had to squeeze one last tired media format out there in the hope that we'd all be mugs and buy all our albums all over again for the third time (or perhaps replace all our VHS and Beta tapes with shiny DVDs.)

Of course, with its business model predicated on soon-to-be-defunct product, that factory no longer exists today.

But it reminded me that we owe these industries no loyalty. The entertainments industry and their pals at Sony and the other format creators have systematically and cynically been ripping off the public for decades, selling them one set of Emperor's new clothes after another.

CDs were shit, so were CD-Rs, so were DVDs, so were DVD-Rs, so were... you get my point. It was all a delaying tactic (a lucrative one, too) aimed at preventing the dawn of the digital virtual storage era.

Now we're in that era, they've returned to a previous position - the mantra that piracy kills music (or film, or whatever) coupled with preposterous law suits against individuals worldwide.

Memo to those industries: suing your customers is not a smart business model.

As a result, there's been a predictable backlash, and now we're seeing 'Pirate Parties' sprouting politically in different nations. This is of concern, but not to the big entertainment industries. This is of massive concern to writers, painters, musicians - artists themselves.

On the one hand we have Google seeking to digitise and publish online every book they can lay their hands on. First they started with out of copyright books. Now they don't seem to care what they digitise. They've offered a crappy deal to authors who can take it or leave it. Google doesn't give a shit for creator's rights. They want to own literature, and that's what they're intent on doing.

In this regard, buzzing flies like the Pirate Party (basically a load of 'no to everything' anarchists) become extremely useful idiots for entities like Google. As the pirates agitate against copyright and intellectual property ownership, they seem to resemble a grassroots campaign that backs all Google's arguments.

See here, says Google. Look at these misguided European hippies. But say, perhaps they're right? Perhaps no one should be able to own intellectual property that they created? Why isn't every book in the planet free to all?

The real danger of music piracy is not that people make copies of things for their own enjoyment.

The real danger of music piracy is that it has led to the situation where we now find ourselves with music firms suing their own customers, and the public backlash against that is being used by multinational corporations to erode the concept of copyright so that they can steal the world's literature.

The sound of sirens

Hello sirens, my old friend,
I'm on the Northside once again.
Because when I was in Clonskeagh,
a gentle quiet came over me.
Now the Northside skangers are yelling in the night,
about some shite,
amid the sound
of sirens.

In restless dreams I walk alone,
through hordes of drunken Gaa-head clones,
neath the halo of a street lamp,
I turned my collar to the cold and damp,
when my kidney was stabbed by the knife
of some junky skite.
Oh what a fright,
amid the sound
of sirens.

And in the naked light I saw
Eighty thousand boggers, maybe more.
People drinking without speaking,
People puking and then pissing,
People throwing their shite in my front garden,
They all dared,
despite the sound
of sirens.

You fool, they said, don't you know
the Northside's full of crazy Joes.
Hear my words that I might teach you,
Take my arms that I might reach you.
But their words like silent raindrops fell,
and were lost,
amid the sound
of sirens.

And the people drink and bray,
and piss and puke outside all day.
Perhaps I should have heard the warnings,
Resident protests seem habit-forming.
And the signs say that they'll clamp you
right outside your own door,
by tenement halls,
amid the sound
of sirens.

Trapped in Dublin

Are they trying to trap us here?

First the security chimps at Dublin airport go on an unofficial work to rule, preventing nearly 100 passengers from getting to their flights before they departed.

Then the main train line to the North mysteriously falls into the sea.

And there is a strike on at Dublin Port that could start affecting passenger ferries at any time.

Already it costs money to leave Dublin via motorway, and of course, with the Greens in government, that will keep rising.

Are they trying to stop us from leaving so that we'll be forced to pay their preposterous new taxes in the Autumn?

The grumpy parent's Q+A

BBC's online magazine asked readers to answer ten of the most common difficult questions that children ask. They didn't publish my suggested answers for some strange reason, so I reproduce them here instead:

1) Why don't all the fish die when lightning hits the sea?

Why don't you go swimming during the next thunderstorm and ask them?

2) How much does the sky weigh?

Who fucking cares? Do your homework! That is one of your homework questions? Meh. I'm getting you moved into Ordinary Maths next term.

3) Why can't people leave other people alone?

Are we talking about kids in your school or strange smelly old men in grubby white vans?

4) Why are birds not electrocuted when they land on electricity wires?

They wear tiny wellies, obviously. Tiny invisible wellies.

5) What is time?

The thing you're never on.

6) Why is the Moon sometimes out in the day and sometimes at night?

Because it's not subject to my curfew. Now get your sorry ass back inside the house!

7) Why did God let my kitten die?

He hates you, of course. Actually, God didn't let your kitten die. There is no God. Must've been you who killed it. And no, you can't get a puppy to replace it.

8) Why do I like pink?

Because you're gay. Your mother's heart is broken, by the way.

9) Why is water wet?

It's not as wet as you, with your pink and your kittens and what not.

10) Why does my best friend have two dads?

He doesn't. He has a dad and a mum like anyone else. But his mum left when she found out his dad was a batty boy.

Take your medicine

Anyone else see the egghead student whining in the Indo today about not getting into medicine?

Some privileged 17 year old from Tipp got a load of A1s in her leaving certificate but failed the aptitude test for medicine which they introduced this year.

Now she's in the national press moaning her hole off about how terribly unfair it all is, since last year her top grades would have secured her a place in any of Ireland's medical schools.

Talk about missing the point.

We've had years of only the very bookish students being permitted to study medicine and, do you know what? It didn't improve our health service in the slightest.

In fact, the doctors themselves have been complaining that the system was promoting eggheads into medicine rather than people who actually had a vocation to be doctors. The Irish Medical Organisation has been pleading for changes to the system for years.

So now we finally have a system that says you still need something massive like 520 points in the leaving cert, but also demands that you pass a test designed to see if you're suited to being a doctor. Good news for all.

Except for whining Marie Claire McGrath. She blew the aptitude test after aceing her leaving cert. In short, she's been found out in a standardised test not to be a suitable candidate for medicine. The test itself examines specifically "a candidate's logical reasoning, problem solving and social skills." We'll come back to that in a minute.

Marie Claire clearly feels entitled to study medicine. So entitled that she's moaning in the media. You can't blame her for feeling entitled. Unkie is a well-off doctor and she'd like to be too. She tactically dropped subjects and changed schools (to one in Cork!) in order to max her chances of passing these exams.

She's also the kind of person who gives up easily. Having blamed the HPAT test for her own failing of it, she now 'doesn't know what she wants to do', but is not considering repeating the aptitude test for medicine.

Now, I don't know about you, but I don't want doctors who give up and whine at the first moment of failure. I want doctors who stay the course and get people well - who are prepared to fight, in other words.

I also don't want doctors who are so nakedly ambitious and self-entitled. Marie Claire's idea of problem solving isn't to retake the test or rethink her suitability for medicine. It's to complain in the national media. The test, she feels, is at fault rather than her. That's a major breakdown in logic: the test failed her; she didn't fail the test.

I don't know what her social skills are like, but if they're like her logical reasoning and her problem solving, it's not a bit of wonder that she flunked the aptitude test for medicine.

The whole point of the new medical entry system was to weed out the unsocial, self-entitled, egghead medics and replace them with warm caring human beings with a drive to help people. That's what the aptitude test is for, and it looks like it worked perfectly on this occasion.

Perhaps Marie Claire, a 17 year old girl who apparently 'dreams of working as a GP' since she was a kid, should take her medicine and go and do something else with her life.

Radio Telefis England

RTE are a joke. Let us count the ways...

They hoover up the licence fee yet ram the airwaves full of ads too

They spunk the proceeds on preposterous wages for eejits like Gerry Ryan

They settled actions for millions with people like Beverly Cooper Flynn and Monica Leech when they could and should have insisted on getting every penny back for their coffers

They can't do comedy at all

They're riven with internal politics, with half the organisation seeming to be plotting against the other half at any given time

But for me the main reason RTE are a joke is because of their slavish forelock tugging to all things English all the time. The newsroom acts like independence never happened, banging on about the royals and British 'celebs' all the time.

But the greatest disgrace is their sports department. Not for nothing is RTE known among League of Ireland fans as Radio Telefis England.

In recent weeks, we've seen stunning performances from local clubs in the qualifying rounds of European football. Bohemians narrowly robbed of victory against Trappatoni's former club, Red Bull Salzburg.

Derry City's mighty giant-killing run. Or best of all, St Pats Athletic's stunning performances that has brought them to the very brink of the group stages of the Europa Cup, formerly known as the UEFA Cup.

Pats' performance in Russia was so remote that only 3 fans were able to travel to witness it. Thank God, then, for RTE, the national broadcaster, who picked up the live rights from the Russians and broadcast the game to the fans back home.

Did they fuck. They didn't even cover it on radio.

The national team played its first ever game in Limerick yesterday. The national football team in an international friendly against Australia. You'd think people who couldn't get down to Limerick might want to watch that on TV. Well, they did. And they had to watch it on Setanta, because once again RTE couldn't give a shite for broadcasting Irish football.

Wait another few days though. Wait till the showpony parade of the English Premiership begins again, with all the hype and all the money. Wait for RTE to start tugging its forelock and giving a foreign football league more coverage than it gets from the national broadcaster in that foreign country.

Throw in their Celtic fixation and blanket coverage of British clubs in European competition, and you'd think that you were watching a British broadcaster, such is their sports coverage.

They've even been covering English test cricket on their news bulletins recently! I've no problem with cricket being covered - Ireland is a new test nation after all. So why don't they cover OUR IRISH team instead of a foreign one?

RTE - Radio Telefis England. They're probably already orgasming at the thought of covering our 'home' Olympics in 2012. In London, of course.

SCAMA

Courtesy of Amhran Nua, I bring you the unofficial guide to NAMA (click for big):

Keep your daughter off the pole

Those were the wise words of Chris Rock to all fathers everywhere. The one duty of a father, he said, was to keep their daughter away from a career stripping.

It's probably redundant to add, keep her out of porn too. That's sort of implicit in what he said. Yet increasingly, the San Fernando Valley in California is inundated with girls who think that they might have found a back door to fame by whoring themselves on camera.

I was watching a documentary the other night about Ron Jeremy, the world's best known male porn star, and I found it tragicomic, poignant and ultimately depressing.

Here's a man who is engaging, warm, friendly and self-deprecating. A man from a good New York Jewish family, who works like a navvy even at 50 plus. A man who many other men believe has had the best life in the world.

Yet he's lonely, depressive, and ultimately frustrated in his lifetime ambition to make it in mainstream movies as an actor.

That got me thinking: if that's how life ended up for the industry's success story, how did others fare in porn? Then I found this blog, which tracks porn stars after their career. And the answer to my question was revealed. And it was frightening.

Sure, Stormy Daniels is running for Senate and Jenna Jameson is a millionairess. But what about all the others? Let's start with Chasey Lain, who was once so well known that she had a top 10 hit written about her.



Now a crackpipe ho. Pretty tragic. But she's still alive. Which is more than can be said for:

Billy London: murdered, his head and feet found in a dumpster
Marilyn Chambers: heart attack after taking prescription meds
Bryan Kocis: murdered by two other gay porn actors
Buck Adams: repeated heart attacks caused by drug and alcohol abuse led to his death at 52
David Wasserman: suicide
Missy: dead of a drug overdose at 41
Anastasia Blue: dead, apparently from drug use
Megan Lee: suicide by gunshot wound at 26
Melba Bruce: dead in her thirties in mysterious circumstances
Miyouki Asou: suicide at 22, believing porn had ruined her life
Paige Summers: drug overdose at 27
Star Stowe: murdered by a serial killer at 41
Elisa Bridges: drug overdose at 28
Dorothy Stratten: murdered
Lea de Mae: died of brain cancer at 27
Kathy Harcourt: found shot in the head, possibly self-inflicted
Vanessa Freeman: murdered at 30 by her boyfriend
Angela Devi: suicide by hanging at 30
Naughtia Childs: found dead at bottom of a stairwell, either suicide, murder or accidental death while tripping on LSD
Trinity Loren: overdosed at 34
Rene Bond: dead at 44 from liver cirrhosis
Rebecca Steele: died penniless in a motel room from a drug overdose at 42, while suffering from full-blown AIDS
Taylor Summers: murdered by photographer in possible snuff movie shoot
Terri Diver: dead at 29 from a drug overdose
Sheridan: wiped out in car crash at 20
Lolo Ferrari: died from 'mechanical suffocation' at 4o, husband spent time in prison for it.
Lisa de Leeuw: dead from AIDS at 34
Eva Lux: heroin overdose at 32
Britney Madison: died in car crash at 21
Chanel Price: overdosed at 35
Zoe Zane: murdered aged 18
Cal Jammer: shot himself aged 34
Haley Paige: dead of an overdose, boyfriend committed suicide before he could be questioned as to whether he had murdered her
Nancee Kellee: hanged herself
Alex Jordan: found hanging in her own closet, suicide or auto-erotic asphyxiation suspected
Savannah: shot herself aged 23
Julie Robbins: died in a car crash possibly caused by her being impaired at the wheel aged 26
Linda Wong: drug overdose at 36
Kristi Lynn: died in a car crash, suspected to be drunk at the time of driving
Shauna Grant: shot herself aged 20
Chloe Jones: died penniless of liver failure caused by alcohol and Vicodin abuse aged 29
Jon Dough: Suicide by deliberate overdose aged 43

And others are alive, but clearly damaged:

Kay Parker: believes she's been alive for 6,000 years.
Lori Michaels: faked her own death to avoid porn fan stalkers
Houston: former drug addict, cancer sufferer, now a Christian, sacked from her job because of her porn past
Alisandra: arrested for employing underage girls as strippers
Janine Lindemulder: jailed for tax evasion and lost custody of her kid
Tommy Saxx: jailed for credit card fraud
Fleur Brown: crack addict, jailed for trying to sell the virginity of a 13 year old
Hyapatia Lee: suffering from multiple personality disorder following the trauma of her porno experience
Jack Venice: jailed for raping a college girl
Max Hardcore: jailed for over three years for abusing women in his videos
Tony Eveready: jailed for possession of cocaine and guns
Danielle Rush: crippled in a car crash
Barbara Dare: broke and living with her parents in her late 40s
JR Carrington: a prostitute in a Nevada brothel
Marilyn Starr: convicted and jailed for insider trading
Melissa Walker: jailed for attempted murder

I probably didn't need to reproduce so many names. But I wanted to counter any charge that I was cherrypicking horror stories here.

Sure, some porno stars get out alive and relatively well. Though who knows what's going on inside their heads?

But this lengthy list of casualties has some common threads running through it: drug abuse, suicide, criminality, suspect car accidents, murder.

Given the small number of porn stars, and the incredibly young ages some of these people died at, it seems to me that one of the best ways to preserve your life to a respectable age would be to avoid porno as a career choice.

Let's go back to Chasey Lain before I finish. She was the subject of the Bloodhound Gang's 1990 hit 'Ballad of Chasey Lain' in 1990. But nearly two decades on, she's still apparently doing porn, when her crackpipe addiction permits her to perform.

She has a son. She's still not even 40. But like others on this list, she'll be dead or jailed soon enough, judging by the video above.

I'm no prude and I'm not judgemental. I'm not a big fan of porno generally. It's monotonous and sort of gross sometimes. But it's not a $10 billion industry for nothing. People like it and buy it and use it all the time.

Someone's making that $10 billion, but it's clearly not the performers. Not those who died through murder or suicide or overdose. Not those in jail, or ill, or mad. Not even relatively successful and affluent people like Ron Jeremy or Jenna Jameson.

And whoever's making the money clearly doesn't give a shit for the performers, who to them are as dispensible as the tissues they wipe down their sets with when their done filming.

I recently came across a campaign against cocaine which berated coke users for being 'selfish' because something like 3 square metres of rainforest is cleared to produce every gram or so of the drug.

What a species of people we are, who care more for trees than we do for people.

Porno can be bad for people who consume it, since it can become addictive and replace genuine affection and sexuality in people's lives.

But it is far more destructive to those who perform in it. When will we see an anti-porn campaign that is based, not on Christian disgust or feminist outrage, but on genuine concern for the people being damaged by the industry?

Do we really care more for Brazilian trees than we do for flesh and blood people?

Stop, please! No more irony!

I am suffering from an overdose of irony.

Evening Herald columnist and stay-at-home mom Suzanne Power has an especially pertinent title to her column this week.

It's been titled: "So look, stranger, don't bore me with your sad life and pathetic small talk."

I'm still not sure if this title refers to her article, which of course is the usual oul shite about men being crap, daytime TV and bodily functions - in other words, the same oul shite EVERY stay-at-home mommy columnist writes about.

In fact, I suspect it may be a comment from a wry editor or sub-editor forced to read this drivel as they put it on the page.

United Kingdom of Big Brother

CCTV cameras everywhere.

Corrupt police permitted to stop and search anyone they choose without need of suspicion, and arrest them and hold them for months on end without charge.

Endless databases of information about members of the public held by the authorities in insecure environments, including laptops left on trains or in taxis.

Criminal sanctions for not submitting your data to the databases.

Firearms and watercannons used routinely to suppress legitimate protests.

Authorities retaining DNA evidence supplied by suspects subsequently found to be innocent, including from children, despite being told by Europe to stop it.

A leader without a mandate who was not elected by the people, running a government that has no support, implementing laws that the people oppose and ignoring the will of the people on issues they care about.

And now the latest crackdown on civil liberties, the latest suppression of dissent in Big Brother Britain - Cops can break into your home and tear down protest posters.

Britain is now little better than an open prison.

Poison Pens Six: Feminist columnist wants to ban men

No knee jerks with such predictable, goose-stepping precision as that of a feminist when men deign to comment on female health issues.

The not-so-hidden subtext of such reactions is generally that men should STFU about women's health issues entirely, the patriarchal scumbags.

In this context, one can of course understand that British hack Melanie Reid (medical qualification: X -X chromosomes) is infinitely more qualified than a certain Dr Denis Walsh (medical qualifications: associate professor in midwifery at Nottingham University) to comment on childbirth (scroll to bottom, past the other shite she's written this week.)

Dr Walsh has opined that women are having too many epidurals these days. Not so controversial, you might have thought, to suggest that too many dangerous spinal injections for pregnant women during labour should perhaps be discouraged.

But that would be to disregard the righteous wrath of people like Melanie Reid, who, like Caroline Simons in a very different context, is apparently supremely qualified for everything by virtue of her possession of a functioning womb.

Let's start by reminding ourselves that Melanie is, first of all, a HUGE fan of medicalising pregnancy and birth as much as possible. Not for her the hippy nonsense of homebirths or that sort of delinquent behaviour. No, no. Mel wants hospitals, and caesareans, and drugs. And she wants everyone else to want that too.

Bear in mind, she's expressed some extremely strange opinions in the past. Probably the most bizarre before today was when she went on BBC Radio to talk about how caring for the elderly is bad for them and people should just let their elderly senile parents die alone of hypothermia like she did.

So let's ignore her prescriptive preaching, since it actually serves to strip pregnant women of choice. Let's ignore also her nonsense about what nasty people medics are for encouraging women to breastfeed. Let's instead focus on her latest bout of uterus-focused lunacy - men can't talk about pregnancy or childbirth because men don't have wombs.

Dr Denis Walsh is a midwife. Not just any old midwife, though. He teaches other midwives. He teaches them so well that he is now a professor of midwifery. He's been in the childbirth game for decades, and has seen the rates of epidurals rising rapidly, and he's concerned.

He's concerned because epidurals are risky, and because they lead to women needing hormones to boost their contractions, which has god knows what effect on the children. As the good doc says, we've no idea what the long-term effects of this will be.

He also reckons that there are a load of other pain relief options for women in labour. And he'd know, because he's a professor of midwifery and this is his subject of expertise.

But that's not good enough for Mel. She's got a womb, so clearly she is way more qualified to discuss such matters than Dr Walsh. In fact, she reckons that he should be sacked from his job for the sole crime of being a man - him and every other male midwife.

Let's imagine for a moment that I said: "Look here, this Melanie Reid is a pretty piss-poor journalist. Here she is criticising experts who know way more than she does. She's clearly not qualified to be doing her job. In fact, it's unnatural for her to be doing it at all. For centuries we relied on men to be journalists. All women should be banned from journalism because it's unnatural."

I take it the flaws in that argument would be evident to all. So now let's look at what Melanie has to say about Dr Walsh. (You might want to settle down and get the popcorn out for this - such spectacular nonsense rarely gets a public outing):

"There’s simply no point trying to be reasonable about this. Dr Walsh either wants women to suffer or he thinks being controversial is a good career move. Either way, this is the midwifery equivalent of bombing women back to the Stone Age. Personally speaking, I’d rather take my chances with the Taleban [sic] than inhabit a system run by Dr Walsh and his kind.

And incidentally, don’t you think men should be banned from becoming midwives? If we’re talking tradition, after all, a male midwife is even more unnatural than a pain-free childbirth."

She has no intention of being reasonable.
She'd rather receive pregnancy and labour care from the Taliban than a professor of midwifery in one of the safest countries in the Western World to give birth.
She considers his sage advice that less epidurals be used as akin to being bombed into the stone age.
She wants men to be banned from a job that many do well, saving little lives each day, purely on the basis of their gender.

Shrill? Yup. Unscientific? Yup. Kneejerk? Yup. Preposterous? Yup.

I have a little suggestion of my own, if we're in the business of proposing that people be banned from stuff. Melanie Reid should be banned from writing about childbirth, or medicine, or health, or men ever again, since she clearly has only frothing-mouthed feminist cant to contribute.

In fact, perhaps we should consider a breeding ban for Mel too. After all, she clearly doesn't like the way women are given options and advice and care when giving birth in Britain, and she clearly hates the fact that men are allowed to perform some of these tasks. And do we really want someone with such bizarre opinions in control of kids, even her own?

If she falls pregnant accidentally, we could of course refer her to the Afghani health service and those Taliban midwives - you know the ones, all dressed in black with zero education, living in squalor and under genuine male oppression - that she rates so highly.

Melanie Reid, take a bow for being the stupidest cow in British newspapers this week.

Poison Pens Five: HOLD THE FRONT PAGE!!!!

'Journalist asks question at press conference shocker!'

Seriously, I'm not making this up. About four national newspapers have all covered this non-story.

A journalist went to a press conference, plucked up the courage to ask a question, got an answer, then left.

I mean, OMG!!! All those scary old dudes there, asking about, like football and stuff. No wonder plucky Lisa has her hand totally to her chest in shock at what she's done (while posing for a photo, natch.) She, like, TOTALLY asked a question at a press conference?

I know! Like, who knew journalists did that? She should get a medal or something. Probably Fianna Fail are already tapping her up to run in the next general election.

Let's remind ourselves - this chick went to university. She trained as a journalist. Her daddy was a journalist before her. So she's seen her dad do this, she's educated and trained to do it. Why is it so shocking that she went as a journalist to a press conference and asked a question? It's her JOB to do that!

What so-fucking-what yawnathon will the Irish media treat us to next? 'Man rose early and drove electric cart to deliver milk'? 'Sun expected to rise in the East tomorrow morning'? 'Moon disappointingly not made of cream cheese'?

The media rightly get it in the neck sometimes for their sense of whats worthy of reporting and what isn't. People see endless tabloid headlines about Jade Goody, or Jordan, or David Beckham, and despair.

But this article is a spectacular classic of an even more debased genre - journalists puffing themselves and each other.

People do their jobs everyday without expectation of public acknowledgement, and many people do a damn sight more important work than asking Cristiano Ronaldo about his shorts.

Where are their articles?

People who perform surgery, fly airplanes, teach children or cure cancer, take note. Here's what a REALLY difficult job is like:

"It was mortifying from my point of view," said Lisa Cannon, "but at the end of the day that's what I was sent there to do."

Well done for spotting that, love. Yes, you went to a press conference and did your job. Congrats. Do we have to read about it in the paper everytime you do your job properly?

"It was a pretty difficult interview because I couldn't ask him any of the questions I really wanted to but I'm glad I did it," she continued.

Oh, hold on a minute. She didn't ask any of the questions she wanted to? Why not? Isn't asking some questions the sum total of her task? What stopped her? Did someone overpower her and clamp a chloroform cloth over her mouth before she could get the words out?

Perhaps she didn't do her job so well after all, if she couldn't ask questions at a press conference when your job is to do exactly that.

I don't mean to knock the girl - she's probably very nice and might well be generally excellent at her job, which I understand involves talking about clothes and make-up a lot on TV3. And it wasn't her decision to put this tripe into the national press.

My only questions remain for the national press themselves:

Why should the public give a fuck about this?

What is it doing in a newspaper?

How many 'Journalist did their job' stories do you reckon you could print before gangs of brain surgeons, airline pilots, firemen, nurses, teachers and other actually relevant people storm your newsroom and gag the lot of you with chloroform cloths?

The Dude at Masada

I met the Dude again recently. He's a friend of a friend I don't see much.

The Dude is a lovely fella of Israeli background and has spent quite some time there. He may even have done military service. He's also Jewish. We tend not to talk much about Israel because we tend not to agree on much about that topic.

But I was a little drunk, and I told him I have a picture of Masada up on my wall.

JC: I swear, it hangs above my desk next to the Buddha. I have it there to remind me that Israel fell before and will again.

Dude: That's hilarious. When Israelis visit, they climb to the summit and swear that they'll never let Masada fall again. Everyone in the army has to during their training. But others who aren't in the military will come of their own accord. Even Jews from other countries come and climb up to Masada to swear. It's like an allegiance to Israel.

JC: Really? Is that why they all climb up to the top when there's a perfectly good cable car running all the way to the summit?

Dude: That's for the tourists. I bet you took the cable car. Most young people will climb up the serpent's path. It's a good old hike, but it only takes an hour or so. Only lazy foreigners ever take the cable car.

JC: Or people who don't attribute any mystical significance to marching up a mountain in the desert at dawn when you can get a lift.

Dude: You did take the cable car!

JC: Might have.

Dude: And that's why Israel is here to stay, mate. We can talk about Israel and you'll be passionate and I'll be passionate. You have your opinion and I have mine.
But at the end of the day, it's Israelis who are prepared to march up the mountain in the desert for what they believe in. If you're not prepared to march up the mountain too, how can you expect to overcome those who are?

JC: Were you ever at Masada yourself?

Dude: I took the girlfriend there when I went to visit my parents last year. She loved it.

JC: Well, it is pretty spectacular. How long did it take you to walk the serpent's path?

Dude: She was wearing heels and we had to get back to Tel Aviv later that day.

JC: Cable car's comfy, isn't it?

Dude: So what if I took the path of least resistance that day? You can't climb mountains every morning.

JC: Sooner or later, everyone's got to take the cable car. There was an old fella from the US who took the car up with me when I was there. His daughter was some sort of professor, and he was on crutches, but she left him with me and went to climb.

Dude: But she climbed! She came from America and climbed Masada. The old men can take the cable car as long as there are still younger, stronger people to climb the path. That's why they built the cable car - so that old people could get up there and experience the place.

JC: In summary, people climb the mountain so that there can be a cable car?

Dude: It's the Middle East. People kill themselves and others so that they can live freely. Why are you still trying to make it make sense?

Lies, damned lies and TD expenses

Just a quick post to point out the further contempt in which Irish politicians hold their electorate.

In a brief moment of lucidity, Justice Minister Brian Lenihan decided to deal with the issue of dodgy TD expense claims by asking them to swipe a card in and out of the building.

This of course has the additional value of letting security know instantly who's in Leinster House and who isn't at any given time, which would be sort of important in a crisis, like a fire.

The response of one (sadly unnamed) TD in the Irish Independent?

"Can you imagine a member of parliament with a constitutional role having to swipe in as if he were a factory worker?"

To which, the answer from the majority of the people is undoubtedly, 'Yes, we can imagine it. But we don't want to imagine it. We want to see it done. Sign in and out so we can find out how much work you actually do, and let's see how many of you have been fiddling your expenses up until now.'

"What if a fella comes up on a Monday night and decides to go straight to his or her hotel," continued our anonymous TD. "Is he meant to swipe his card first in the Dail?"

Yes. That's the system, gobshite.

You get a card, you swipe it when you go to work and when you leave. You want to go to Dublin late on Monday night and crash out in your hotel room? Fire away. No one is stopping you. But don't expect us to pay you for going to a hotel and lying down!

It's the tone that is objectionable, the self-entitlement that oozes from every word. Scratch the surface further, and you hear of how FF members of the committee that made this recommendation to Minister Lenihan have been continually lobbied by their own party on this issue.

Bottom line is that the Leinster House mob don't want to lose their lucrative expenses and daily allowances that they can currently claim for whether they're entitled or not, because no one checks TD claims.

Earlier this year, the Sunday Mirror did. They found that Beverly Cooper-Flynn had claimed enough mileage in one year to drive the circumference of Planet Earth twice! This clearly did not actually happen, so one can only conclude that Deputy Flynn has got away with yet another lucky and undeserved payday at the taxpayer's expense.

Which is ironic, given her previous job was helping Bank of Ireland customers avoid paying tax. In different ways, Flynn has been screwing us all for years.

Or how about Bertie Ahern claiming mileage (he doesn't drive, has no licence, and as former Taoiseach already has a state Merc and driver on call 24-7) and overnight allowances (he lives in the North inner city, ffs)? Ahern's expenses claims are now about as plausible as his tax status, which continues to make no sense to anyone, least of all the Revenue Commission.

Jackie Healy-Rae also claimed thousands upon thousands of euro in mileage - yet the paper photographed him getting the train! And as a pensioner, he is entitled to travel for free anyway!

The fact is that the honour system can not be used any longer, because it is demonstrable that our TDs don't have any honour.

We need to save money - lots of money - from the state expenditure. Parliamentary remuneration has to stay top of the list. They shouldn't get to take a penny of us without hurting themselves first, because it was them and not the rest of us that scrapped banking legislation, fuelled property speculation and that blew our economy apart.

And we have to start with their expenses, the massive pay cheques they effectively sign for themselves each year without scrutiny.

Let the fuckers sign into work every day or not be paid. Let them produce receipts for everything or receive no expenses.

It's the very least they could do, and Lenihan is utterly right to demand this of them.

JC Skinner's letter on Lisbon

Dear Irish Turkeys,

Please do not vote in favour of Christmas.

The assurances of a happy festive season for all coming from our human partners in Europe have no binding legal basis.

This is the exact same Turkey-murdering Christmas that we rejected previously. No aspect of the celebration has been altered. It is also 95% identical to previous Christmases rejected by Turkeys in Holland and France.

Vote Yes or get stuffed is the message from Brussels. However the reality, my dear turkeys, is that if you vote Yes you WILL be stuffed, for good.

All the best,
JC

Ireland's debt clock

Ticking down to the midnight hour when the IMF turn us all back into peasants, I bring you...

Ireland's debt clock!

The Once In A Blue Moon

Recipe:

Take one bottle of traditionally illicit Antrim poitin, matured three months to six, and into it macerate some fresh seasonal blueberries for nine months.

Serve two fingers of the resulting fruit poitin in a Slim Jim with fresh mint leaves, muddled.

Add ice to the top, then dilute with quinine tonic water to the brim.

Citrus slice optional.

The best summer cocktail ever.

Pervert dies, America mourns

Michael Jackson, who wrote and performed some shit songs, is dead.

One feels sorry for his offspring (assuming they are actually his), only some of whom he has held off three storey balconies.

However, they live and their putative father is dead. And one should speak well of the dead, except of course for the small issue of child abuse.

Jackson shared his bed with little boys. That's neither normal nor right, but in keeping with the way of justice on this planet, being rich meant he never faced charges relating to his admissions of sharing beds with small boys.

In one sense, I have sympathy. He had no privacy, no normality, no childhood, no life. Not in a fit would I swap with his existence, no matter how large his fortune. That can't have led to a normal life.

But in another I do not. He put himself in a position whereby he settled a court case about child abuse and was faced with other cases. And there's no excuse for that.

One can have sympathy with Jackson over his childhood and his background without ever endorsing the situation in which he found himself among kids.

But in the long run, I suspect the main legacy will be the fact that he was black and turned his skin white.

What better condemnation of the modern world is there than the fact that "the most talented musician in the planet" (according to Sky News) sought to spend his lifetime changing his skin colour?

Some questions about Monica Leech

1. The court has found Monica Leech was not libelled by an Evening Herald article which said she travelled to New York with a ministerial delegation and did not attend the UN. So, what was she doing there and how much did it cost the taxpayer?

2. You get a quarter of a million for a lost limb from the personal injuries board. What lunatics rate a married woman's virtue as worth nearly ten lost limbs?

3. Monica Leech was hired in a process found to be flawed and wrong in which no one else was allowed to apply for the position, was paid well in excess of going rates, and has not been replaced in her role since departing her job with the minister. Since then, she has worked on the Higher Education Authority - a ministerial appointment - despite having little knowledge of that sector. Given that the articles did not make any reference to any affair, how is it possible for a victim of an alleged libel to completely make up such an allegation and attribute its meaning to a series of articles that clearly and overtly describe cronyism?

4. Monica Leech said during the trial that the articles 'only got her name right' and afterwards that the Evening Herald 'made up a story'. Since the court has found that their article was true, what story does Monica Leech believe they made up?

5. When are Ireland's creaking libel laws going to be overhauled, and when are caps going to be put on libel damages?

Solidarity among bloggers

I note with interest that celeb gossip blogger 'Perez Hilton' has been allegedly assaulted at some Canadian music video awards show.

'Hilton' is in reality an overweight gay Latino wannabe called Mario Lavandeira, and he has for a long time now been desperate to parlay his blogging nerdery into a place at the table with those he spins scandal about.

Hence the bizarre scenario whereby this overtly gay man ends up judging the Miss America contest, which predictably results in controversy when he decides to get outraged because one girl's a devout Christian and doesn't agree with gay marriage.

I don't know if this pointless cretin was really hit or not. Certainly, he appears to have got his video camera out and filmed himself crying like a little girl, though.

So, buried under layer upon layer of self-importance and self-regard, is the tiny possibility that someone really did the world a favour by slapping this bitch up.

And the inadvertent comedy of those 'tweets', in which 'Hilton' pleaded with the public to rush to his hotel to help him with the 'bleeding' will raise a smile for some time yet.

Should I be showing more solidarity for my fellow blogger? Should I not show sympathy for someone unfairly struck down? After all, according to the self-publicist, 'violence is never the answer.'

Except, of course, if the question is: "What word beginning with V describes the sort of act of aggression that is the correct response to dealing with whining, self-important, duplicitous gossip queens without talent when they accost you at a music awards ceremony in Canada?"

Let me be clearer still: 'Perez Hilton' is the bleeding edge of all that's wrong in the modern media. He inhabits the nexus where the internet, web 2.0 and social networking intersect with reportage and old media.

You'd hope for better from such an intersection - a democratisation of information, perhaps. A gripping real-time account of revolutions, such as we thought, for a second, we were going to get in Iran (until we all realised that the protests are a CIA funded activity.)

Instead we get this poison - 'Perez Hilton' breathlessly puffing other pointless inanities, but most of all himself. It upsets me that people care enough about such vacuous irrelevances to keep 'Perez' thinking that he's important.

So that's why I'm delighted today to see that he's cupping his eye and crying for teacher, just like the mouthy, bitchy little wanker in the playground who thinks he's fantastic being full of cheek to all the other kids until eventually someone stops him with a fist.

Because it seems to me that 'Perez' is still living in the playground. A dose of playground morality, therefore, doesn't seem amiss.

The Pogrom That Wasn't

A week on from screaming headlines all over the globe, what are we to make of the anti-immigrant pogroms in Belfast?

It made for perfect headlines for the world's media. To the outside eye, the North of Ireland has always resembled a boiling pot of irrational hatred and sectarianism.

Logic dictates that if these neanderthals are prepared to kill each other, despite sharing language, culture, skin colour and a God, what wouldn't they do to foreigners?

And that's what we got, all over the world, last week. Endless handwringing articles about a 'return to hatred', hectoring PC sermons from fingerwagging commentators in other countries, multiculturalism 'experts' warning ominously about the slide toward Nazism.

It always helps to return to the facts, and on this occasion, they didn't really get aired at all (although fair play to some of the local media and indeed Myles Dungan on RTE for eventually getting round to reporting the facts.)

So what happened? Same as everywhere else in Europe - a load of Roma gypsies moved into a nice area and made shite of it. Robbed, begged, intimidated local elderly people, and howled racism when asked to stop.

Wellington Park and Wellesley Avenue are NOT some Loyalist shithole full of 'For God and Ulster' meatheads. It's a mixed area next to the university and always has been. Go back two decades and it was probably one of the few areas of the city where a foreign face could be seen. Many Chinese and Indians live in the vicinity, as do many foreign students.

It's a nice, peaceful residential area, and it's not the sort of area that would easily accommodate a family of thieves, living in squalor 30 to a house, intimidating the locals.

Now let's deal with the lies. No one put copies of 'Mein Kampf' through any letterboxes. No glass bottles rained down on the 'anti-racist' march. No organised campaign by Loyalist terror groups or the BNP or Combat 18 or any other far right group took place. There is, in fact, no evidence of ANY FORM of far right or racist involvement whatsoever.

The only organised element in these whole proceedings where those of the sinister far left Socialist Workers Party. These demented Trots, none of whom come from or live in the area, saw a bandwagon to jump on and did so with gusto.

They organised an 'anti-racist' march through the area, pissing off all the locals and attracting abuse from drinkers at a local pub. Petrol on the flames as far as the Roma were concerned, I'd imagine, but far be it from the Socialist Workers to think of others. They had an issue to hijack after all.

So they lied to the media about being struck down in a hail of bottles that never happened. They lied to the media about copies of 'Mein Kampf' being put through letterboxes. They lied to the media about the involvement of a who's who of far right organisations. Not a word of any of it was true, but the media lapped up the headlines and repeated them unquestioningly.

There is a Polish shop on that street, but no Poles came out even for a minute to show solidarity with either the bussed-in Socialist Workers or the Roma. However, plenty of Romanians could be found protesting AGAINST the Roma.

How so? Well, who knows the Roma better than their compatriots? Who suffer more from being confused for Roma than other Romanians? Who are most upset at the good name of their country being dragged through the gutter by the behaviour of Roma gypsies than Romanians? And so Romanians were also involved in the protest against this particular clan of gypsies.

Where are we now? The world's base opinion of Northern Ireland is once again confirmed thanks to the clever media spinning and lies of a tiny coterie of crazy Trots. A bunch of thieves who should be facing charges are instead hiding in churches and claiming to be the victims of racism, while they await free flights home.

The losers are the good people of South Belfast, and a special neighbourhood that always accommodated everyone, even at the height of the Troubles. They have been maligned, and libelled, and lied about.

The winners as always are the Roma. More free food and clothes and accommodation and someone else to pay for their flight home from the squalor they've made in yet another foreign town.

And in two months time, they'll be back, in Belfast or Dublin or Galway or Leeds or London or Paris or Naples or Munich or Valencia, squatting in a house they don't own, fifteen or thirty of them, living like animals and creating a hygiene problem for the neighbours, who they will threaten with their big knives even as they beg from them and steal from the local shops.

Until once again, either the authorities will take their children into care and arrest them or deport them. And so the merry-go-round spins again.

The people of South Belfast are not the problem. Romanians are not the problem. Racism is not the problem. Far right organisations are not the problem. Policing is not the problem.

The Roma are the problem, and that problem was deliberately and disgracefully compounded by the pondlife of the Socialist Workers Party, a political movement of such extremity that they do not dare run candidates in elections.

Belfast has suffered many pogroms in the past. My own family were burnt out of an area in the Seventies during one of the most dangerous ones. The Thirties also saw some horrific pogroms too.

And of course, in the furore about the rights of thieving foreign gypsies to intimidate local communities, we have all seemingly forgotten how a Catholic man was kicked to death in Coleraine, his wife and a pregnant woman assaulted too, only a few weeks back.

That's a REAL pogrom, but 'Loyalist bootboys still murdering Catholics for kicks' isn't as sexy a headline as 'Race riots in Belfast' even if it has the benefit of being true.

But this week saw a new chapter being written in Belfast - the pogrom that wasn't. Despite the lies and the headlines, I think that's progress.

Related posts here and here.

Moonlighting for the Irish Left Review

At the request of the Irish Left Review, I've done some in-depth analysis of the Dublin Euro election and the Dublin Central by-election and the Dublin local authority elections.

The story of the transfers reveals both crisis and opportunity for the many-headed hydra that is the Dublin political left.

Read more here.

Elections 09 - Parsing the Prelude

As even the bookies are now offering only 1-2 odds on a general election this year, it seems we have entered dead government walking territory.

Hence, these local and European elections aren't just a referendum on the government's performance, they are a prelude to the main event of a general election.

As I write, the three Dublin seats have been filled, with sitting MEPs Eoin Ryan and Mary Lou McDonald making way for Socialist leader Joe Higgins. In a sense, that tells half the story of these entire elections: a slump in support for the government parties, Sinn Fein disappointment and the rise of protest Independents.

We saw the power of support for protest independents on Saturday at the Dublin Central by-election too, where Maureen O'Sullivan, the 'Gregory' candidate, managed to parlay her friendship with the late Tony Gregory into a Dail seat.

And the government slump has seen the Greens hardest hit, cut to the very bone for dancing with the Fianna Fail devil. Their organisation is now reduced to a handful of councillors, their MEP candidate lost her deposit and came in behind Independent Green Patricia McKenna, and now no Green Dail seat can be considered safe.

Fianna Fail themselves must look hard for positives. The backwoods of Westmeath and Roscommon offer a starting point. They actually improved their representation in those areas. And given the trend among some nervous FF-ers to go independent in order to ensure election to local authorities, Fianna Fail will find their numbers boosted as the likes of Tony Fox return to the fold. So this is not quite the tsunami that it initially looks.

There is further upside for Fianna Fail in the return of some dozen former PDs to local councils as independents. The PDs may be gone as a party, but as the cart which led the FF horse for over a decade, the working relations of PDs with Fianna Fail remain strong and ideologies remain compatible. FF are therefore boosted by their presence too.

Fine Gael's Christmases have all come at once. Historic is actually the word for it. George Lee elected first count in a by-election, 3 Dublin South TDs for the first time since the early 80s, the biggest party in the state for the first time ever.

No wonder Enda Kenny spent much of yesterday evening in the RDS grinning like a Cheshire Cat.

But the downside is that even if FG can maintain momentum into a general election, their simple lack of political nous means that they will not maximise their representation in Leinster House.

Tomorrow, Enda Kenny will overshadow the Dail debate on the Ryan report into clerical abuse by tabling a motion of no confidence. This is exactly the sort of politico-nerd behaviour the public despair of in the FG leader, and it is why Fine Gael should still consider thanking Enda for his great work so far and promoting Bruton to leadership in advance of a general election. But they won't.

The biggest winners of all appear, paradoxically, to be Labour. I say paradoxically, because one might have assumed it was a poor election for them, what with losing both Dublin by-elections and having a stiff race in the Ireland South European constituency.

But their representation across the country means that they, rather than the now-stalled Sinn Fein, are the main left challenge pretty much everywhere. If they had only fielded more candidates, they'd have maximised their representation even more. Labour for the first time in a generation have a national base to build on. And with a soft Fianna Fail vote there for the taking, Labour may well feel they can make it a three horse race in future.

What does this mean for any possible general election? Well, if the bookies are right and we see one in the next six months, it is fairly certain that Enda Kenny will be Taoiseach of a FG-Labour coalition.

The Greens can expect to be annihilated in their current form, while former Greens like McKenna and Maher could end up being the eco-representatives in Dail Eireann.

Sinn Fein appear to have reached their glass ceiling of 10%. Mary Lou will get a seat next time out, but they won't grow their vote until they outgrow the dodgy Northern leadership that too many Southerners find toxic.

The heart will be out of Fianna Fail campaigners for another election. They were anonymous on the ground this time and will be even more so in a general election. This is an opportunity for Fianna Fail to rid itself of much dead wood.

Perhaps they will be especially smart and de-select some of their sitting TD cohort in advance. Why bother running what the electorate wants shot of? Run the young candidate instead, give them a base from which to build. But FF are ultimately a party of gombeens shafting each other, as Mary Fitzpatrick could tell you, so don't expect this to happen. It's too sensible for them.

When will we see this election? Very soon. The Green leadership is panicked, trapped in power with their party and their voters deserting them. They're actively looking for the exit.

And Brian Lenihan is promising another hairshirt budget to punish the electorate for voting against Fianna Fail. That is likely to be the catalyst to bring people onto the streets to demand the removal of this government, which clearly now has no mandate left.

I'm voting against Fianna Fail today

In the locals, in the by-election and in the European elections.

I will carefully arrange my preferences to insure my vote doesn't come within an arse's roar of benefiting any Fianna Fail candidate.

Thankfully, given the abysmal candidates they have offered me, there is no confliction whatsoever for me in doing so.

Were Seamus Brennan Sr running, for example, there might be a slight twang of regret at putting his preference bottom, below non-entities like George TV and kerazees like that O'Gorman punter.

But thankfully they've made it oh-so-easy for me to punish them completely and properly for their corrupt mismanagement of this nation to their own selfish ends by running some of the most unqualified, shirking, gombeen eejits one could ever dread to meet.

These people are the wannabes (or in Eoin Ryan's case the hasbeen) in an institution that has lined its pockets and those of its wealthy benefactors at our expense.

They are the party that beggared the nation, who destroyed the economy for generations, and who are still doing so. A party so bereft of morality that, far from apologising for their many, many corrupt and shady deals in government with developers, rapist papists, and giving away our natural resources, they are still in utter denial of having done anything wrong.

These are the people who stole our gas, who let rapists away with it and paid for their sins with our money, who puffed property to the sky for their developer funders so that ordinary couples are now in debt for generations with only a shoebox in a dormitory burb to show for it, who took brown envelopes to rezone sites of national heritage for motorways.

Vote Fianna Fail LAST. Give them the very dog-end of your preferences.

Go right down the ballot, past the fringe parties, past the Shinners, past the single issue candidates, past the kooks, the loons, the anti-immigration nutjobs and the psycho Catholics, past even the Green lapdogs all the way to the end. And then vote Fianna Fail with your bottom preferences, or no preference at all.

It's time they were held accountable for their crimes. Let it start on Friday with a ringing rejection of all they've done to us. Let's get off our knees and kick the gombeen bastards in the bollocks.

Tiananmen: 20 years of silence and oppression

We have to remember Tiananmen Square.

It's two decades to the day since the Chinese people demanded their freedom from the despotic, mass-murdering junta that rules their nation.

It's twenty years since they stood in Tiananmen Square and sang songs and demanded that the Communist dictators quit power.



It's twenty years since the power-hungry psychotics turned tanks on their own people and murdered them for asking to be free, killed them, jailed them, sent them to re-education gulags where they were tortured horrendously.

It's twenty years in which more terror has been inflicted on the people of occupied Tibet, the Uighur nation, and the other minorities within the Maoist monolith.

Twenty years in which the hypocrites of the West facilitated China's leadership by hiring their slave labour, buying their bloodstained products at dirt cheap prices, handed back free Hong Kong and Macao into their anti-democratic hands and helped them block the internet from reaching their people, and let them hold a propagandist Olympics that will go down in history as stomach-churning as Hitler's Berlin Games in 1936.

Twenty years in which their template for terrorising their own people has been exported elsewhere, to other stubborn juntas who will not countenance democracy or liberty or freedom of choice, in places like Burma.



It is not anywhere near as long since I was in China. But the people there still yearn for freedom.

We cannot allow the Chinese government to exercise their blanket control over information. We cannot let them rewrite history. We cannot permit the spirit of Tiananmen to be ignored.

Because one day, the proud Chinese people will be free from the sixty year nightmare of Maoism, and they will legitimately say:

"Yes, for much of that time, we bowed to the terror and let ourselves be ruled. But one day we rose and sought our freedom, and we were brutally beaten down. And you in the West did nothing. Rather than insist on our freedom as you did for the people of South Africa, you instead rewarded the Communist cadres and made them millionaires."

Remember Tiananmen. Remember what they did.

Remember how democracy was stillborn in China twenty years ago, and how we still trade with the murderers.

Stop the taxpayer bailout of Anglo-Irish Bank

Are you annoyed that 4 billion euro has just been added to the national debt in order to bail out the big property speculators and Fianna Fail funders who owe around 7.5 billion in bad debt to Anglo-Irish bank?

Do you feel sickened that your grandchildren will still be paying taxes in order to save the asses of a small golden circle of ultra-rich elite?

Well, then it's time to ask the EU to block the deal. Brian Lenihan cannot go ahead with this robbing of the taxpayer to bail out his cronies if Europe blocks it.

So, let the EU know what the Irish people think of this shoddy backroom backscratcher of a deal.

Send an email to this address, SG-PLAINTES@ec.europa.eu , and highlight your feelings about the bailout NOW. Tell Europe you object to this deal and believe it is a betrayal of the Irish people.

Because it is.