Is Blair Actually Mad?

The dominant theme among the left wing, Latte slurping Cafeista's during our usual Sunday morning Latte slurping session was Tony Blair and his appearance at the Chillcott Enquiry.
I decided long ago to avoid it on the day, i had no faith that Chillcott or any of the others would be able to nail down Blair, especially as he has had months of previous notice to work on his answers.
What i did do was read about it in the newspapers over the weekend and as expected, those who backed him in Iraq painted it a triumph for Blair while those who were against him called it a disaster for the former Prime Minister.
I can't possibly comment as i didn't see it but i read some very telling parts that were reported in all the newspapers.
He stated that the international community must now be prepared to 'take a very hard, tough line with Tehran' as he thought that 'Iran now poses as serious a threat as Saddam Hussein's Iraq'. He also stated that he had 'responsibility but no regrets' and would 'frankly, do it all again'.
First thought this raises is one about the disturbing insight this gives into his mentality. Does he really sees things so differently to others? How can he be so blasé about the hundreds of thousands of dead, the millions displaced and the damage reaped upon a whole country?
The non­existence of weapons of mass destruction doesn't seem to trouble him, though at the time it was the reason he told the British public that war was necessary, because as he said in an earlier interview, he would have found other ways to justify an invasion anyway.
The second thought is what would we be into now if he was still in power? Judging by the way he constantly kept moving the argument to the present day and the threat of Iran, it is easy to imagine him leading the charge for another bout of military action against Tehran. A terrifying thought.
Thirdly, the idea that after everything his actions in Iraq had bought, he would 'frankly do it all again'.
The clincher for me was when he claimed that "we didn't end up with a humanitarian disaster" in Iraq. That was when i came to the realisation that it may not have been Bush who was widely thought of as the madman of the duo, it was actually Blair.
He readily admits he did it, doesn't regret anything about it and if he had the chance, would do it all over again in Iran. I really do suspect that the man has been driven quite insane by it all. Not that it should stop the War Crimes tribunal though.

Starman, Waiting In The Sky

The Royal Society has been holding a UFO conference in London over the last few days with the fancy title of 'The detection of extra-terrestrial life and the consequences for science and society'.
Basically, the boffins were discussing what would happen if we did find other forms of life out there.
For this we don't need a SETI program or the Hubble Telescope as we have plenty of examples if we leaf through a history book.
Since man first sharpened a stick and found it hurts of you poke someone with it, the first thing we do when faced with another civilisation is slaughter it.
Hola Aztecs. Whack. G'day Aborigines. Splat. Howdy native American Indians. Smack.
That's always assuming that we are the advance ones. If they are and they turn out to be anything like us, we will be the one's herded onto reservations and building casinos.
The biggest question that never seems to get answered is what happens when the ET asks to be taken to our leader?
I think we should sort this question out pretty sharpish because it could happen at any time and how embarrassing in front of our intergalactic brothers and sisters if we stand there trying to work out who our leader is.
A strong contender would be Secretary General of the United Nations, Ban Ki-moon but i imagine the Pope would try and stick his oar in as would Obama and Hu Jintao.
Personally, i'd direct them to have a chat with Silvio Berlusconi. Hopefully they will think we are all as simple as him call off any invasion.

Whinging Pom Eggs

I do love the way us Brits can have a bit of laugh with our former colonies. Probably the former colony we laugh at, sorry with, the most is the Australians. The didgeridoo playing antipodeans seem to have this image of us Brits being a bit whiny. Not sure where this comes from and i'm also not sure why it is us who are the Poms. The first British settlers in Australia were convicts sentenced to transportation to the other side of the World wearing uniforms with 'POHM' which stood for 'Prisoner of His Majesty' on the back.
If anything we are law abiding non-Poms and they are the ones with the criminal element in their family.
Now the boomerang throwers have ignited a controversy with an Australian egg company launching the Whingeing Pom Egg, complete with a frowny face.
The carton says the eggs: 'Help you to wake up cranky and keep on whingeing all day long'.
In a press release, the company claims it studied 'behavioural traits of the Poms in their natural habitat' and quotes a Professor who states that: 'Our research found that the English preferred to wake up in a less optimistic, less good-humoured mood. Further still, we found that the gene responsible for whingeing is larger in Poms than any other race, particularly Aussies, confirming that whingeing is actually part of the Brits' generic make-up.'
Fair dinkum mates, those eggs will go perfectly with those chips on the Aussie's shoulders.
Now a nation that couldn't take a joke would comeback with Aussie eggs with little arrows on them all chained together or something but us Brits are above all that.
Got to give the Aussie credit though, they seem to have the courage of their convictions. Ahem.

Terrorist Winning Or Opportunist Politicians?

The UK Terror Threat has been raised to the second highest level of 'severe' meaning that an attack is 'highly likely' although rather confusingly the Home Secretary Alan Johnson said that there was no intelligence to suggest any attack was imminent.
A cynic may point to the security level being raised the day after Gordon Brown was strong armed into appearing at the Chillcott Enquiry as suspicious. Others seem to think that as the Labour Party have very little to crow about in the up-coming election, they are faking an imaginary terrorist incident so they can claim the credit for keeping us all safe.
This leaves us with two unsavoury thoughts. Three actually if you count that hardly anybody actually believed that a terrorist attack was highly likely in the first place. When you can't be sure that your leaders are telling the truth about it or not then they are a busted flush in terms of Governing.
First unsavoury thought is that the terrorists have won. They have us jumping through hoops and making more knee jerks than a chorus line doing the can-can. Two wars costing trillions, tens of millions spent on security, fighter jets on standby, political turmoil, travellers inconvenienced and a global Islamic demonisation and backlash.
If Al Queada never attacked again, just made a half hearted attempt every now and then, security would be still be cranked up and great expense in money and inconvenience and the paranoid and fear would continue.
Just by influencing so many changes in our lifestyles and the way we operate as a nation so dramatically, must mean that the Terrorists have won.
The other unsavoury thought is that we are all being played like a fiddle by opportunist politicians.
It's a win-win situation for them, we get attacked and there are the justifications for another war whether it's Iran, Iraq, Afghanistan, Yemen or the borders of Pakistan. We don't get attacked and they claim the praise for keeping us safe. All they have to do is create a climate of fear every so often, the sliding scale of the Terror Threat that can be moved up or down at a ministers whim and then send the tanks to Heathrow. The odd bust of a terrorist cell in a blaze of righteous glory and then hope that we don't notice when they are all embarrassingly released without charge weeks later as happened with Forest Gate, the Wood Green ricin plot and the students arrests in Manchester.
Identity cards, an explosion of CCTV, disruption of legal demonstrations and a massive surge in Government powers and obtrusiveness while we are persuaded that the loss of a few freedoms is the price we must pay for increased security.
One could be excused for thinking that the power hungry politicians can be thankful for Bin Laden and his cohorts for graciously providing the very excuses they were looking for.

What Else Can We Sale To America?

They bought our bridge, our best football teams (and Aston Villa) and now they have gone and bought our chocolate. As the Americans are over here spending their cash, let's see what else we can flog them from our island.
Americans, i couldn't help notice a lack of Royalty in the land of Uncle Sam. In a two for one offer, you not only get the Queen but the Duke of Edinburgh. Put her in front of a crowd and she waves. Put him in front of a non-white person and he blurts out racist comments. Sure to go down well in Louisiana.
Not interested? How about the Loch Ness monster because every country needs a scary monster and Sarah Palin isn't going to be around forever.
Maybe we can interest you in Greenwich, especially the Royal Observatory where time comes from or the Tower of London where in bygone days, people were taken to be tortured and imprisoned, many without good reason. Yes, i suppose you do already have Guantanamo Bay.
What else we got? How about the city of York, the county of Hampshire and we will even throw in the island of Jersey so you can get rid of the 'new' word in front of those places. Think of the time you would save writing out letters to the residents of these places.
Okay, i can see you are driving a hard bargain so I've been saving this one to last. Big Ben.
The Statue of Liberty may stand for freedom from slavery, oppression, and tyranny but basically she is a big French woman stood in your harbour. They didn't even have the decency to make you a new one, they just knocked out a bigger version of a couple of statues they already had in France anyway. Big Ben is unique and has the added bonus of telling you the time rather than just standing their being all French.
It's a deal. We will wrap it up and you can expect delivery within 7-10 working days.
You sure i can't interest you in the Royal Family? No need for that kind of language, a simple no would have sufficed.

Blaming God For Haiti

They were under the heel of the French, you know Napoleon the third and whatever. And they got together and swore a pact to the devil. They said 'We will serve you if you will get us free from the prince.' True story. And so the devil said, 'Ok it’s a deal.' And they kicked the French out. The Haitians revolted and got something themselves free. But ever since they have been cursed by one thing after another," Pat Robertson.

Considering Napoleon III was born seven years after the Haitian Revolution Mr Robertson alludes to, i struggle to put much faith in what the Evangelist has to say about this matter but i am interested in the reaction of the Religious to horrific events like the Haitian earthquake.
The Archbishop of York John Sentamu said he had "nothing to say to make sense of this horror" but the first reaction of Atheists, is to turn to the religious and say, 'well, explain that then'.
It is quite a contradictory position for us non-believers to take, to deny there is such a person until something like this happens and then when it does, to ask the believers to try and justify their 'loving Gods' actions to us.
My view is there is no God and this was simply a question of shifting plate tectonics, an event that has gone on since the planet was first formed. In that reply we have the answers to how and why based on indisputable geographical evidence so why look for other reasons, especially in an area we gladly dismiss?
God didn't summon it up to punish the Haitians as he didn't summon the Indonesian Tsunami in 2003 because to me, there is no God and as much as we might like to see the religious squirm with our demands to hear them justify his actions, it is hypocrisy to pick the times where we can say it has his fingerprints all over it to shift sides.
Besides, as one person of the Christian persuasion said to me today, he wiped out every living thing on earth with a flood so 100,000 Haitians is small fry.

Others Guilty With Chemical Ali

Saddam Hussein's cousin, the man nick-named 'Chemical Ali', has been handed another death penalty (the 3rd) after being convicted of ordering the infamous 1988 gas attack in the Kurdish village of Halabja that killed an estimated 5,000 people.
He is never going to get much compassion from anyone but the question hanging heavily in the air is the question of Americas guilt in supplying the weapons in the atrocity.
While Ronald Reagan and his administration must accept a major role in events, chief perpetrators are Saddam who ordered the attack and Ali Hassan al-Majeed who carried it out.
Other major players are those who supplied the chemicals, the know how and the means of delivery to Saddam and America are not the major contributor in this category.
The major chemical exporters to Saddam's Iraq were Singapore (4,515 tons), the Netherlands (4,261 tons), Egypt (2,400 tons), India (2,343 tons), West Germany (1,027 tons), Luxembourg (650 tons) and Brazil (100 tons).
The major exporters of the equipment to make the chemicals came from Germany (163), France (85), Austria (54) and Spain (14) while the shells and rockets to carry the chemicals were mostly Italian (75,000 shells/rockets) Spain (57,500 shells/rockets), China (45,000 shells/rockets) and Egypt (28,500 shells/rockets).
While the gassing of Kurds in Halabja featured heavily in the Bush and Blair Iraq pre-War build-up of vilifying Saddam, the U.S. State Department previously took the official position that Iran was responsible and not Iraq who they were backing.
The Defense Intelligence Ageny (DIA) study at the time reported that it was Iran that was responsible for the attack, an assessment (page 100) which was used subsequently by the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) for much of the early 1990s until Saddam's sent his troops into Kuwait.
The CIA claimed that: 'Blood agents were allegedly responsible for the most infamous use of chemicals in the war—the killing of Kurds at Halabjah. Since the Iraqis have no history of using these two agents-and the Iranians do-we conclude that the Iranians perpetrated this attack'.
While America was sending billions of dollars in loan guarantees and other credits to Iraq, the British Government saw it as an opportunity to replenish Saddam's arsenal. One of the revelations to come out of the Scott inquiry into the arms-to-Iraq affair was the British government's secret decision to supply Saddam with even more weapons-related equipment after he shelled Halabja.
It took seven weeks of haggling until the UN Security Council censured the Halabja attack. Even then, its choice of neutral language (condemning the 'continued use of chemical weapons in the conflict between Iran and Iraq,' and calling on "both sides to refrain from the future use of chemical weapons") was hardly the stinging rebuke expected.

As i said initially, the ultimate blame falls on Saddam and Ali Hassan al-Majeed but there are many other countries that deserve to hang their heads over the incident. Many supplied him, some lied about it, most turned a blind eye but almost all were seemingly relaxed about it at the time.

Is This The End?

I like think that the music industry was being too clever for its own good when they began selling records on Compact Disks. I'd like to think that some pony tailed ponce of a record executive sat there and thought that it was yet another way of getting us suckers for paying for the same song again having it on vinyl and tape already, we were sure to want it on CD.
Of course, what it did do was usher in new way for people to get free music as millions of people ripped the songs to their computer and shared them online.
What this has done is bought about the decline of Albums and i'm perfectly okay about that because if i'm being honest, i don't own one album that i listen to from start to finish without skipping through some of the tracks.
What sites like iTunes have done is almost make the Album obsolete as people don't download whole albums, they download the singles they like off them and then usually make up a compilation CD with the best songs off each album on it.
Albums sales were down again last year, 12% for 2009, although overall, music sales were up 2% and always having one eye on the profit, record companies are going to get wise to this and stop putting out albums and just release singles until they get enough to make Best of Albums and flog us them.
It may be a few years until it reaches this point but i see it as the obvious conclusion and i can't say that i am that upset about it. I have paid money out for too many albums that have had a few decent songs and the rest that wouldn't come within a mile of being released as a single but are deemed worthy of earning a place on the Album.
I wouldn't mourn the death of the album whatsoever.

Haiti Earthquake

Nobody can fail to be moved by the scenes unfolding in Haiti after the earthquake hit yesterday evening.
Haitian officials fears that more than 100,000 people have been killed as houses, schools, hospitals and prisons all collapsed prompting a desperate search for survivors.
It is admirable the way that many countries have sent aid and search teams as well as setting up much needed fund raising for the country but why does it take such a catastrophe to prompt help for a nation that is described as the poorest in the Western World?
It was the poorest country the day before the earthquake hit also but i didn't hear of nations organising any air-lifts of food parcels or tents for those homeless or living in dangerously constructed houses.
It is amazing what countries can achieve when we act together for a good cause but it is shameful that it takes such devastation and heart rendering pictures of widespread loss of life to get us to put aside our differences and do something altruistic for the poorest of the World.

Chrissie-bot

Fans of Buffy the Vampire Slayer will recall the The Buffybot, a robotic replica of Buffy built by Warren that acted as a sex toy for Spike.
Looking at the sex doll TrueCompanion has created, i can't help wondering if they had some sort of Chrissie Hynde infatuation.
Roxxxy is a life-sized, anatomically correct android with artificial intelligence, an articulated skeleton and flesh-like synthetic skin.
‘She can’t vacuum, she can’t cook but she can do almost anything else, if you know what I mean,’ said creator and judging by the guilty look on his face, best customer, Douglas Hines.
'Roxxxy also comes with five personalities – Wild Wendy who is outgoing and adventurous, while Frigid Farrah is reserved and shy. Owners can also customise her features including skin colour, hair colour and breast size, as well as modifying her personality and topics of conversation to match their interests.'
Now i may be wrong here but i don't think men who buy Roxxxy will be much for the conversation although it will probably be the first time they actually get a woman to sit and listen to how they think Star Wars is the greatest movie ever made without hearing the words 'I'm just nipping to the toilet, i won't be long'.
Roxxxy is priced at £5,600 so toy shops can expect a stampede of middle aged men desperate to sell their Luke Skywalker and Darth Vader action figures.

Strewth: Aussie Logic

If i was to go on a Safari and decided to get out and take a walk about and ended up being eaten by a lion, i doubt i would get much sympathy because we know that if we stepped into a lions natural environment, there is a chance we will not be coming back out again with all our limbs.
This is true for us encroaching on any other dangerous creatures territory but it doesn't stop us having a bitch and a moan when they try to take a bite at us. To them, we are a walking dinner bell and if i had the choice of either stalking a quick moving cream doughnut for most of the day or taking a bite out of the slow moving jam one that wobbled across my living room, i'd know what i'd prefer.
After suffering 6 deaths in 20 years, the Western Australia Department of Fisheries have decided that sharks that attack swimmers will be hunted down, shot in the head and sawed apart until their spines are severed.
'That is not an easy task, as sharks have very small brains' said the Fisheries Official in a sentence that also works if you replace the word shark with Fisheries Official.
Rather than catch, shoot and then mutilate a Shark for doing what nature intended, how about a radical step and just put up a few signs on the beach that say's 'Shark infested area'.
They could even go so far as to put a little picture of a shark on the notices for those Aussies to smashed on the national Fosters and Castlemaine XXXX breakfast to be able to read it properly. If anyone decided to still go in the water, then it's probably doing the gene pool a favour if a shark does treat them as lunch.
Obviously the chosen solution is for someone to get attacked and then kill the shark instead. And to think, we used to get beaten at cricket by these flaming galahs.

Usual Low Standards From Daily Express

As the cold snap continues there are advertisements on the television and radio reminding us to check on those who are unable to look after themselves so well. Making a few minutes in my lunch break to phone Downing Street and confirm that Gordon Brown was warm enough and had enough food in, i settled down to read the Daily Express with it's headline: SNOW CHAOS AND THEY STILL CLAIM IT'S GLOBAL WARMING.
Although it makes a nice change from headlines about paedophile asylum seeking terrorists taking our jobs, it was pretty much the standard Daily Express puff piece whose jist was that it's snowing and temperatures have plummeted so it disproves Global Warming.
To be fair, i have heard the opposite end of the argument also where environmentalists use a few days of scorching hot temperatures in the summer as proof of Global Warming and both sides of the arguments are just as cringworthy as each other.
The Met Office (the same people who told us it would be a mild winter) have explained that the wintry spell is due to the perfect storm of a weakened gulf stream, a developing El Niño and Arctic oscillation which all means that the tonnes of snow usually dropped in Siberia has shifted West and dropped on us instead. Whether that is due to climate change one side will say yes and the other side will say no but arguing over a few shiveringly cold or steaming hot days doesn't do anyone any favours.
What we have to look at is the trend over decades and see if there is a steady pattern so things that affect the temperatures or amount of Carbon Dioxide in the atmosphere like El Niño, oscillations and even volcanic eruptions, get taken into account.
From 1900 to 2002, the Earth warmed, on average, 0.17C every decade. In this 102 year period there were undoubtedly years that were exceptionally cooler and those that were exceptionally warmer than average but even accounting for these anomalies, the trend is that the Globe is currently warming.
Why it is warming and whether it is mans actions causing it is another argument but to dismiss Global Warming just because Western Europe is shivering for a few weeks is ignorant, irresponsible and plain lazy.

Snow Day

My husband does that thing where he will say it won't snow because 'it's too cold' which i've never really understood. How can it be too cold to snow when the Antarctic is ten times colder than Britain but you can't move for snow there?
Being sat on the South Coast, we don't usually get much snow here but yesterday evening it fell out the sky and carried on falling all night and most of today. Cue people moaning and groaning about how dreadful all this white stuff is as schools closed, businesses shut and only those with 4 wheel drive were brave enough to venture out on the roads.
Being British, we can moan about anything, even about how much we moan like i'm moaning about now, but i love this weather and unless you are trapped in your car on the A23 with just a box of Jaffa Cakes, i struggle to see how anyone can moan about it.
The kids get a day off school, most of us got the day off work or at least got to nick off early and everything looks clean and beautiful.
I say stop whinging, forget you are a responsible adult and put on the scarf and gloves then get outside and throw a few snowballs, build a snowman and enjoy it.
Soon it will be summer and you will be sunburned, sitting in a sweltering hot office with buzzing things forming an orderly queue to bite and sting your legs so make the most of it.
And stop moaning, at least you have Jaffa Cakes.

Yemen Next Then?

Today's Geography lesson comes to you courtesy of the US and UK Military machine.

Okay, so who can tell me where this great steaming hole used to be. Iraq, correct Jenny.
And this one? Not Iran Johnny, not yet anyway, it's Afghanistan.
And where is this pile of dead bodies? Nobody? Okay, it's Pakistan.
Now for an extra point, who can tell me where the next place Uncle Sam and John Bull will be blowing up? Yemen, well done Sally, have an apple.

The consensus seems to be that the next stop for the War on Terror will be the sunny shores of Yemen after the thwarted Christmas Day terrorist attack over Denver.
Al Queada, moving on from Afghanistan and Pakistan have now set up training camps in the mountainous region of Yemen and the Brits and Americans are now talking up the possibility of opening up yet another front.
Any Al Queada operative with an ounce of sense would have packed up their things and pegged it across the border by now because they know what's coming, they actually got a taste of it already as did Yemen.
What with Christmas and everything, the 120 Yemeni's killed courtesy of a US cruise missile attack on the 18th December against suspected Al Queada sites went largely unnoticed.
According to reports from Yemen, many of the dead were innocent civilians but i imagine that is how this one will play out.
It won't be a feet on the ground fight like Iraq or Afghanistan, the public seem to lose their appetite for war when it's there own boys coming back in coffins, it will be drone attacks at any suspicious activity like in Pakistan and will prove to be just as unproductive, will cause significant civilian casualties while not risking the lives of UK or American troops.
Yemini's will die in their droves and Al Queada will pitch up somewhere else in a years time and we can do it all again and the never ending War on Terror body count will go merrily up.
I don't know the answer but i do know that inadvertently killing innocent people with large bombs won't gain you many friends.

Trouble Brewing Across The Irish Sea

Back in the 1970s and 1980s, the Irish Republican Army were at their height and blowing up the English and Northern Irish with alarming regularity. Rather than take the Blair approach to terrorism which involved invasions and dropping a massive amount of explosives from a great height, the ruling Conservative Party held meetings with the IRA which resulted in the Good Friday Agreement and the laying down of weapons for a political solution. Although Tony Blair is quick to take the plaudits for it, it was actually John Major who did all the spadework and Blair just stepped in to cross the t's and dot the i's at the tail end after Major lost the 1997 election.
After a decade of relative calm it seems that the IRA, or rather splinter groups from the IRA, are keen on a return to the bad old days with news that a 1000lb van bomb was discovered under a flyover in South Armagh, three months after the find of a 600lb bomb in the border region.
The Real IRA, as they call themselves, recently staged a show of strength in Meigh where they patrolled the village with Kalashnikov rifles and rocket launchers.
There was a marked increase in republican terror attacks last year with attacks on police and army personal escalating and officials warning that the three splinter groups, the Continuity RA, the Real IRA and Oghlaigh na hEireann, have come together to intensify their campaigns. They have been blamed for a series of 'punishment attacks' on young men with 18 shot in Derry City during 2009.
The worry is that soon, one of these huge bombs will be discovered too late and the massive loss of life will spark the Unionists into retaliation and we will slide back into those dark years of the troubles when the Government did not need to play up the threat of terrorism on the street of Britain, it was very much here.
We could find ourselves in the same situation as Iraq and Afghanistan where to remove the forces will result in a bloodbath but to stay will only provide a justification for further violence.
I don't know the answer but the politicians had better start paying a bit more attention to events across the Irish Sea.

Guaranteeing You Keep Your Resolutions

I have given up making new year resolutions because they generally last as long as it takes to smoke a cigarette and drink a mug of coffee the following morning to break them.
It was while enjoying breaking what is usually my third resolution in the pub during the annual New Years Days drink that a friend mentioned an absolute guaranteed way that they managed to keep their resolution last year.
It is a simple but very effective way of keeping your resolution and all you need is your chequebook and a friend who cannot be talked out of doing the deed if it all goes belly up.
This is how it works. Think of the most abhorrent and worst possible cause you could donate to. Could be an Animal Research Lab, a fox hunting charity or the BNP.
Write out a cheque for £100 for your chosen cause and hand to a friend in an addressed and stamped envelope with the express wish that if you break your resolution they must post the cheque and under no circumstances hand it back until next New Year. Genius.
Not only do you have the incentive of not losing the £100, but you are withholding a donation to a cause that you revile.
As this would work just as well at any time of the year, i think we may have stumbled upon a cure for any number of addictions so i hereby declare that i will forward a personal cheque for £100 to the Conservative Party if within the next 12 months, i swear at anyone in Latin while dressed as the Pope. If this doesn't cure me of this habit then nothing will.
David Cameron, tum podem extulit horridulum.
Ok, starting from now.