Court Finds Bush & Blair Guilty

Since they both moved into political retirement, Bush has kept out of the limelight and stayed in Texas while Blair had a go at remaining in the spotlight before quickly realising amid a deluge of insults and shoes that he had better keep his head down also.
While there are relatively few places that the unpopular pair could go on holiday and not be abused, if they had any plans to soak up the rays in Malaysia they had better think again because a court in Kuala Lumpar has declared them war criminals.
Though the verdict of the court carries no legal weight, the court held a trial and the decision was that:
'The Tribunal came to the unanimous conclusion that a prima facie case exists that President George Bush and Prime Minister Tony Blair committed a crime against peace by their decision to invade and conquer Iraq and overthrow Saddam Hussein'.
The judge continued that 'Nothing in the United Nations Charter permits the actions undertaken by President Bush and Prime Minister Blair. The idea that the United States or United Kingdom was threatened by Iraq is preposterous.
The invasion of Iraq was an unlawful act of aggression and is an international crime. They acted with deceit therefore they are guilty as charged'.
The Court then recommended filing reports with the International Criminal Court against the two accused and that they both be included in the Kuala Lumpur War Crimes Commission’s register of war criminals.
Luckily for the unloved duo, the Court has no power to enforce their decision but it is proof that their crimes have not been forgotten or forgiven and the pressure on them is ongoing.
Next up for trial is Donald Rumsfeld, the US Secretary of Defence during the Iraq War and the most smug faced person on the planet.

Whatever Happend To...

While moving around some of the right wing sites on the internet, you do tend see quite a bit of amusing rhetoric regarding the protests in America. I was reading one recently that urged it's readers to arm themselves and fill their pantries in preparation of the oncoming Anarchist Socialist revolution. Wonderfully insane and i mentioned recently how Communism, Socialism and Marxism are all jumbled together in the minds of the enlightened right wingers who warn of the coming Soviet take over.
Stalin and Lenin are the usual historical bogey men the brickbats are thrown out but for some reason, the third of the revolting trio seems to escaped unscathed.
Apart from a mention by The Stranglers in their song 'No More Heroes', poor old Leon Trotsky hardly ever gets a mention, it's always those other two hogging the hate which is even more stranger when you consider Trotsky was the one who advocated permanent revolution which would have spread Communism worldwide. The other two lightweights were content to hold what they had.
If it wasn't for the occasional joke about ice picks, Trotsky would just never be mentioned and he was as much part of the Russian Revolution as Joseph and Vladimir.
He got one of the main roles in George Orwell's Animal Farm as Snowball who was later forced out of the farm by Napoleon after overthrowing Farmer Jones and yet he is spared the wrath of nutty right wingers who warn that people protesting against banks will lead to a re-run of the Great Purges from Maine to that place down the bottom full of oranges, old people and voting machines that don't work properly.
I say Trotsky should be treated with as much laughingly bad hyperbole as Stalin and Lenin by right wingers who want to scare their readers and i'm sure Barack Obama would agree, and he's a card carry Communist. Apparently.

Brutal Oppression In America

As in the Arab Spring back in March, the Egyptian protesters today were holding up gas canisters with 'Made in USA' stamped on them. The cameras cut away to Egyptian riot police launching another brutal baton charge to disperse the crowd, dismantling their tents and tearing down their banners.
If you had left the room and came back a minute later, you would still be seeing riot police brutally assaulting protesters and you would assume this was the same story, but it wasn't, these uniformed thugs were American police.
Among the victims of what was charitably described as 'heavy handed policing', a pregnant 19-year-old girl was pepper-sprayed as was Dorli Rainey, an 84-year-old woman. The reaction from the Police Department was a dismissive statement that Pepper Spray is 'no more dangerous to someone who is 10 or someone who is 80.'
The most disturbing scene was the policeman, Lt John Pike, calmly pepper spraying a line of unarmed students who were taking part in a peaceful campaign in California. Not only did he spray them at point blank range once, but then he walked back along the line to dish out another dose.
The police are there to protect and serve, but who exactly are they protecting and serving? Not the protesters obviously, but to use pepper spray, baton charges, tear gas, rubber bullets and sound canon against unarmed civilians posing no threat is just wrong in every way.
Over 1500 citizens so far have been arrested with journalists being threatened, beaten and arrested, 26 at the last count, for reporting on the police action. If this was anywhere else we would rightly be condoning it and branding the leadership a brutal regime, but there are people defending this action.
It cannot be simply written off as an over reaction of the police to something non-life threatening, non-deadly or a few bad apples which is a useful cover-all in the UK when police are caught out.
This is showing that in America, those that seek to protest against what they disagree with, will be put down with brutal force. If the protesters take up arms, as they did in Egypt, Iran, Libya and now in Syria, the Obama reaction would be exactly the same as Mubarak, Ahmadinejad, Gadaffi and Assad. Widespread slaughter because if they do this to unarmed civilians, and heaven knows how there has not been any fatalities yet, they will hit harder with lethal force if the protesters come armed next time.
In America of all places, it seems that if citizens peacefully seek to voice their grievances with the government, they will be threatened, ridiculed, bullied, attacked, assaulted and then arrested.
If this is how America deals with it's own version of citizens protesting, brutal oppression, then it has even less right to lecture any other country on how they should be behaving.

Osborne The Techno-Prat

We have heard the term 'technocrats' quite a bit recently with the news that the Italian Government has been cleared of all politicians and replaced by people with an economic background.
The theory is that people with experience of high finance are the best people to get the Italian economy back on its feet and it is a theory that i have some sympathy with even if i have misgivings with the Democracy side of things being swept to one side.
Whether this works or not we shall have to wait and see but it is obvious that in the UK, we do not have Technocrats so much as, well, idiots like George Osborne as the latest news from Northern Rock demonstrates.
The bank cost the Government £1.4 bn who then priced it at £1.12 bn but have now sold it to Virgin for £747m who had an original bid of £1.25 bn turned down a few years ago.
The Chancellor described the sale as 'The best deal for the British taxpayer' while his fellow Tory colleagues said it had been 'sold for a song'.
How the man in charge of our finances can call selling something for £400m less than the asking price a good deal is baffling, especially when you hear that what Virgin has paid for is only the profitable parts of the bank, we have helpfully broke off and keep hold of the parts of the bank that holds the £20 bn of toxic assets.
The idea of having people in charge who have an idea of what they are doing is sounding attractive so expect to hear how the Conservative Christmas Party at the local brewery has been cancelled this year. George Osborne is organising it. Smug faced moron.

Star Spangled Banner Rewrite

Oh, say! can you see by the dawn's early light
What so proudly we hailed as the riot police came steaming;
With drawn guns under the stars, fought the perilous fight,
O'er Zuccotti Park we watched protesters start screaming,
In the pepper sprays red glare, nightsticks fly through the air,
By daylight the proof that no protesters left there:
Oh, say! does that first amendment banner still wave
In the land of the free o'er the tents of the brave?

Katie Get Your Gun

A few years ago the Queen was on the end of much praise for putting a badly injured pheasant out of it's misery by wringing it's neck. What wasn't mentioned was that the injury was caused by Her Majesty blasting the bird out of the sky in the first place.
Our Royal family do like a bit of bloodsport, it if isn't taking pot-shots at harmless creatures for a bit of a lark, they are leading packs of dogs to rip apart foxes or rather they were until those bally commoners ruined their fun.
Now the Royal firing squad has another member to add to their team, Princess Kate, who has been having some private tuition in the art of bravely standing a hundred feet away and shooting at living things in preparation for the Boxing Day pheasant shoot at Sandringham.
Kate will spend her first Christmas with the Royal Family and is having the extra tuition because 'she is not the best shot'.
My first thought was to suggest a novel idea to her that she graciously decline the invitation to shoot at things but then on reflection, a loaded shotgun in the hands of somebody with lousy aim and a field full of Royals.
I say give her a gun, actually, give her two and get her some intensive training from that Cheney fellow.
I'm keeping my fingers crossed that it's Prince Andrew gingerly picking buckshot out of his backside Boxing Day Eve but i will be happy with any of them being unable to sit comfortably at the News Years celebrations.

Another Leader Bites The Dust

If i were being charitable, i would describe the now former Italian Prime Minister Silvio Burlosconi as a colourful character. In a less charitable mood, i would say he was an imbecile of massive proportions.
Although Italians should be celebrating the end of Burlosconi, the way he has gone leaves a bitter taste in the mouth because it wasn't the Italian people that booted him out, he was forced out by the markets and the leaders of France & Germany, the second leader they have removed in a fortnight.
Greece neared default and the elected Prime Minister was shunted aside and replaced with the unelected Lucas Papademos, a former Governor of the Bank of Greece and Vice President of the European Central Bank. Now Italy are heading towards a Greek style meltdown and Burlosconi is eased out and the unelected former European Commissioner, Mario Monti, foisted upon the Italian public.
The proper thing to do would have been for Greece and Italy to hold snap elections but it appears the EU doesn't do democracy, you know that thing we invade other countries for not having, but it certainly likes putting it's 'friends' in power.
I am amazed that the Italians & Greeks have just allowed someone else to decide who can and can't run their country, regardless of how bad a job they are doing. There have been protests calling for Burlosconi to go for the past few years but he managed to stay and then last week the banks and brokers got worried and he is gone in a week.
Without doubt Burlosconi has been an awful Prime Minister and racked up a wide range of scandals including being found guilty of lying in court, bribing tax inspectors, false accounting, consorting with minors and is currently under trial for paying a juvenile prostitute.
Certainly he was a liability and yes he was a moron who shouldn't have been within a mile of power but that should be up to the Italians to decide, not those sitting in bank managers chairs and the leaders of France and Germany.

FIFA Wrong In Poppy Backtrack

I feel a bit disappointed that FIFA has backed down in the great Poppy row that has blown up over the England football team wanting to wear a poppy on their kits in the match against Spain this weekend.
I'm not sure why the English FA decided this year in particular to make such a fuss over it, the FIFA rules regarding the non wearing of symbols on countries shirts has been respected since the World Governing bodies creation but this year the Prime Minster and Royal Princes have not just asked but arrogantly demanded that England are treated as an exception to the rule despite it being a long established rule that has failed to perturb the FA in decades of previous Novembers matches.
Fifa's reasoning for turning down the FA's request to have the poppies on the kit was that it would 'open the door to similar initiatives across the world, while jeopardising the neutrality of football'.
I wanted to hear FIFA say no and keep with it but now a precedent has been set for any of FIFA's 208 members to use their footballers for political or religious reason.
This does seem to be a part of the hysterical furore that has grown around the wearing, or non-wearing, of poppies over the last few years.
For some, not wearing the symbol is an act of betrayal, spitting in the eye of all those who have died in wars and conflicts through the ages and the whole thing seems to have been hijacked by vocal people insisting that it is a patriotic display of support for 'our heroes'.
The English FA, Prime Minister and Prince William were wrong to make any demands of FIFA to treat us differently to every other country in the world and FIFA were equally as wrong to give in to our childlike demands.
Will the same people screaming for the inclusion of a poppy be quite so vocal if the Indians wanted to wear a symbol to commemorate the millions killed in the reign of the British Raj or the Afghanistan team wanting do something for all those who have died under the recent Western occupation?

White House Say No ET

Barack Obama's administration has said it has no evidence that extraterrestrial creatures exist in response to a White House petition signed by over 5000 people demanding that the White House disclose the government's knowledge of extraterrestrial beings. More than 12,000 signed another petition seeking answers to the question of an extraterrestrial presence engaging with us humans.
In response, Phil Larson of the White House office of science and technology policy, said that the US government has no evidence that life exists outside Earth, or that an extraterrestrial presence has contacted any member of the human race.
As someone who strongly believes that out of the trillions and trillions of stars, it would be improbable that there isn't life evolving on one of the rocks circling them although many disagree. The main reason being why have we not seen them?
I answer simply because if they did take a look at us, they would keep their distance because to an outsider we must look like the last race in the Universe anyone would want to to make contact with.
Taken as a whole, we are not a peace fearing people by any stretch of the imagination. Our whole history is one of war and oppression and developing bigger and better weapons to kill each other with. We have wiped out entire species and been daft enough to seriously pollute our own environment.
If we came across another species and it was setting about doing the same thing as us, we would back off and avoid it and if the aliens have any sense at all, they have done the same thing and scarpered back to whence they came with the message of giving that blue planet a miss, they are crazy.

Socialism In A Nutshell

Rather predictable that the right wing is against the Occupy Wall Street protests that are currently sweeping not only America, but the Western World, but the Fox News team really outdid themselves this weekend.
Not only did they manage to accuse the protesters of being anti-Semitic because they are in support of the 99%, which leaves 1% which is roughly the percentage of Jews in the population, but wheeled out the usual insults of the protesters being anti-Americans, Marxists, Anarchists and Communists.
The Communists and Socialists insults crop up quite a bit in right wing rhetoric and Fox News had a helpful analogy to explain to it's viewers just what a Communist regime would mean for Americans.

Under Capitalism:
10 workers get paid £10 an hour and it takes them 10 hours to make a car. The car gets sold for £10,000. They all get paid £100 each and the remaining £9000 goes to the boss.

Under Communism:
10 workers get paid £10 an hour and it takes them 10 hours to make a car. The car gets sold for £10,000. They all get paid £100 each and the remaining £9000 go to the Authorities.

And now the part Fox failed to mention - Under Socialism:
10 workers get paid £10 an hour and it takes them 10 hours to make a car. The car gets sold for £10,000, They all get paid £100 each and the remaining £9000 is shared amongst them.

So Fox is correct that under Communism, all profits do go to the State as the State owns everything but they neglected to mention that under Socialism, the workers own everything so the profits are shared amongst them. The only difference between Socialism and Capitalism is who is the boss, a board of shareholders who take the profits or the workers who take the profits.

Despite the cries of the Right Wing, Socialism is not the Soviets under Stalin or North Korea, it is simply a system where the financial rewards are more evenly distributed and who wouldn't want that?
Think it wouldn't work in the real world? Department Store John Lewis’s is owned by it's staff, all 70,000 of them, and last year they shared just over £100 million profit between them, each receiving a bonus of nearly seven weeks’ pay. Last year each worker received the equivalent of 10 weeks pay.
Because John Lewis is owned by its staff from the boardroom to the shop floor, each receive the same percentage payout. This year it is equal to 13% of basic salary and that is Socialism in action and this proves that it works.
Now imagine if the banks did this with their tens of billions of pounds of profit, profit that at the moment go to the shareholders. What the Occupy protesters want are the profits of Capitalism to not go to the handful of companies shareholders but to be shared out amongst the people so Society as a whole benfits.
Don't let those who try to discredit the Occupy Protests with their talk of anarchists and Communists wanting to turn the West into North Korea, they are out to protect themselves and their bank balances and they will try to convert as many useful idiots to their cause as possible. Don't be a useful idiot for the right wing.