McCains Pastor Problems

As politicians such as Tony Blair found out, mention God while in office and people start sniggering and thinking you have gone soft in the head but in America it is actively encouraged to name drop the big guy every chance you get but this seems to be causing a few sticky moments for two of the Presidential candidates.
First came Barack Obama's pastor, Jeremiah Wright, with his interesting take on Aids and his call for God to damn America. Now it emerges that a pastor with links to John McCain, John Hagee, who has some interesting views of his own.
Senator McCain sought the endorsement of Rev Hagee but it didn't take long to throw up remarks he had made claiming that Hitler was doing Gods work and described the Catholic Church as The Great Whore.
To his credit and aware of the damage suffered by a dithering Obama over the Rev Wright affair, Mr McCain quickly described the comments as "crazy and unacceptable".
To those of us outside of America, the rantings of a televangelist are used only to make the point about just how destructive religion can be in America, when an Arch-Bishop sticks his oar in over political matters in the UK he is patronisingly told to sit down, shut up and go back to counting his candles.
The relationship between religion and politics is fraught with danger, it can also place in the spotlight the beliefs of the candidates and as Obama and now McCain are finding out, you really can be judged by the company you keep and they would both do well to keep the God fearing community at arms length.

Another Eurovision Song Contest Failure

Millwall Football Club are so disliked by everyone else that they have a song celebrating that they are so disliked by everyone. After finishing last yet again in the Eurovision song contest last night it should be Britain singing 'Nobody likes us but we don't care' because either we are so utter bobbins when it comes to writing a tune or we are just about as popular as a condom in the Vatican with our fellow Europeans.
To be fair our song was rubbish which is ironic as the singer, Andy Abraham, was a binman before wasting his career on this dross but ours was Bohemian Rhapsody compared to some of the offerings from other countries. Spain put forward a guy playing a kids plastic guitar and they trounced us and if it wasn't for San Marino and Ireland, we wouldn't have got any points whatsoever.
The reason we have a fine record of finishing bottom or close to it every year is because, and it is hard to believe i know, but we have no close friends in Europe. All the Scandinavian countries gave each other top marks as did the Balkans and former Soviet nations and of our nearest neighbours in the West, only Ireland bothered to take pity on us floundering at the bottom of the pile and chuck us eight points and San Marino threw us six.
The UK commentator Terry Wogan decided that the lack of friendship being shown to us is down to the odd illegal war or two that we have undertaken recently which the Labour MP on BBC News agreed with, stating that "I think there's actually probably a deeper story here. People across Europe are fed up with Britain's over-close relationship with the United States and the Iraq War."
Good point until you realise that Israel - who know a thing or two about starting dodgy wars and being close to America - finished 9th and geographically, they are not even in Europe.
Although there may be a grain of truth in this hypothesis, and i am as keen to blame Tony Blair for our failings as the next person, we were still left with a bad song that was not as bad as some other songs, but nevertheless everyone liked the least. We are still left wondering why, when we can turn out some great pop songs, we can't compete with Bosnia Herzegovina or Azerbaijan when it comes to writing a decent European song.

And The Most Peaceful Country Is...

Although you may not believe it when you recall Bjork bouncing the head of a journalist off the tiled floor of an airport, but Iceland is the world's most peaceful country according to the findings of the Global Peace Index Survey.
The index studied 140 countries for such indicators as military expenditure, relations with neighbouring countries, human rights, prison population and murder rates to award an overall score and ranking.
Following Iceland in top spot is Denmark, Norway, New Zealand and then Japan. Canada are 11th, Sweden 13th and then it is a long drop to 49th place for the United Kingdom and even further down the page to 97th for the USA. The five worst places to book a package tour are Iraq, Somalia, Sudan, Afghanistan and Israel.

Interestingly, the five permanent members of the UN who have the final say in the most important decisions concerning global war and peace do not come out very well from the survey.
France are the highest at 36, then the UK (49), China (67), USA (97) and Russia are inside the bottom 10 in 131st place. Maybe we should consider letting the Scandinavians run world affairs for a while.

Gordon Brown Exit Stage Left

Government support is in freefall according to poll after poll including today's
ICM poll that shows that the Labour party is 14 points behind the Conservatives and only 5 in front of the Liberal Democrats.
With Gordon getting a kicking every way he turns the end is not so much nigh as inevitable.
So whenever the next election is, barring an unprecedented collapse of biblical proportions, we are soon to be hailing a David Cameron Conservative Government.
Cameron is the consummate right winger and a professional toff. From the exclusive Heatherdown Preparatory School (where the Queen sent her kids), on to Eton College and then Oxford where he met up with some of the people who are now in his shadow cabinet.
Straight from Oxford, Cameron joined the Conservative Party so apart from a 3 month stint as an admin assistant in Hong Kong between semesters while at Eton, the right honourable Dave has no actual work experience whatsoever.
Should it matter that the man who has only known the very best schools and has next to no experience of employment and comes from a highly privileged background, is now going to be making life changing decisions for the rest of us?
The only alternative to the depressing thought of someone who can honestly say he hasn't got a clue how 99% of us feel, is for Labour to remove Gordon, shift back towards the left and pray that they can elect somebody so far away from the Blair/Brown years that voters can see Labour are on another path. David Milliband would be my choice but if i was him i would keep my head down and wait until after the next election and the imminent removal of Gordon Brown before throwing my hat into that particular ring.
The only other option is to indulge in some of that postal vote rigging we keep hearing about. There must be a website that shows you how to go about it somewhere.

The Real Problem

The cost of food have risen by 6.6% over the past year, energy price have shot up over 15% and the guy who changes the numbers at the petrol station is in danger of a heart attack. The atmosphere is dirtier than the latest Jenna Jameson DVD and we are going through the worlds resources quicker than we can replace them.
The great and the good continue to scratch their heads and wonder what can we do about it but the answer is obvious but very uncomfortable. There are just too many of us. Now this is where it gets uncomfortable because just what exactly can we do about it?
We can't order people to stop reproducing and who exactly should not be creating offspring? People who wear Hawaiian shirts i hear you say but that is a given.
The present world's population is around the 6.6 billion mark and on its current trajectory, is expected to reach 9 billion by the year 2050. According to the CIA's World Factbook, the world human population is increasing by 211,090 every day.
Imagine the planets resources that another third of us again will consume and that is the real problem not to mention the growing conflicts over the dwindling resources.
Our present problems are the symptom but the cause is far too uncomfortable to debate but needs to be addressed somehow. No idea how though without causing outrage somewhere.

Just a Quickie

We haven't dropped by on Victoria Beckham for quite a while so lets see what the walking golf club has been up to lately.
It seems that, with a straight face no less, that she has announced her retirement from singing.
Following her lead, i hereby declare my intention to also retire from singing.
What do you mean i can't retire from something i never was to begin with? She started it.

More Poisonous Spewings From Bush

George Bush's speech in Israel to help celebrate its 60th Birthday was always going to be something to avoid for those of us who don't buy into the Israel good, Palestine bad argument.
Luckily it received next to no coverage here except from the brief mention that he was there and had slipped in a barely concealed barb at Obama.
Like a fool, i went looking for it and the obvious place to look was the Fox News website and sure enough there it was among the rest of the nonsense the President was spewing.
I had purposely avoided posting on the celebrations of Israels 60th birthday because how could anyone avoid mentioning what they have done to the Palestinians over the last 60 years. Not much to celebrate in that particular part of the Middle East when your new neighbour sets about bulldozing 385 of your 475 towns to build their own settlements on over the past half a century.
Of course Bush never mentioned the Palestinians plight whatsoever and to be honest, i never expected him to - that elephant in the room would stay firmly in the corner out of sight - but he did make the claim that anyone who claims that talking with terrorists will result in peace is experiencing a 'foolish delusion' and this idea had been 'repeatedly discredited by history' and even went as far to compare it with Nazi appeasement.
This fits in with the image Bush likes to portray of being the no-nonsense tough guy who shoots first and asks questions later but to the rest of us it just cements his position of being a warmongering moron.
Talking to your enemy is always preferable to the other option. Nobody has ever died by two leaders physically sitting around a table to sort out their differences. You can't count how many have been killed throughout history by following the crazy Bush doctrine.
We would still be burying our dead from the latest IRA bombs if John Major & then Tony Blair had not held talks with the Irish terrorist group. North Korea would be busy adding to their nuclear arsenal if there had been no talks, Libya were persuaded to surrender their nuclear ambitions when Blair 'reached out the hand of partnership' as he called it. If you can be bothered to look you can find countless other examples.
A glance at any decent history book will show that negotiating with your enemy has been far from repeatedly discredited by history. A glance at the shamefully long list of names on any war memorial will show that it should always, always, always be the preferred option. Hopefully one day the world will be void of people with the pathetic and poisonous mindset of Bush and filled with people who think more like Obama.

Standing Behind Hillary

Something that i found out only recently was that the supporters who stand behind the podium when Obama, Hillary or that old bloke give speeches are hand picked by organisers in order to reflect the candidate's demographic reach.
I always assumed they were just ordinary folk who had somehow happened to snag the best seats.
As the winner sets about their victory speech or the loser set about their speech that sounds like a victory speech, inevitably the viewers attention begins to wander and eyes are drawn to the supporters behind the candidate's head.
Black, white, young, old, the suited, the denim clad and everything in between seem to be packed in behind them and whooping and waving their banners enthusiastically. Some have cameras to snap the back of the object of their affections head but all are in a highly excitable state.
Sometimes that excitement can spill over into the sort of behaviour that could be considered inappropriate at a televised public meeting which could explain just why that guy to the right of Hillary in the picture above is wearing boxing gloves.
Maybe he is making a statement about Hillary battling back or boxing clever or something along those lines or maybe the man is wearing them for 'medical' reasons. He does seem to be squinting in this photo so possibly his eyesight is beginning to dim.
Whatever the reason, Hillary's campaign people never saw fit to banish him from the frame so they are obviously aiming for the much maligned and misunderstood men-who-have-to-wear-boxing-gloves-in-polite-company vote.
Good for her but if you find yourself behind one in the booth come November, you might want to give the pen a wipe before you use it.

Is It Time To Invade Burma?

Time for another one in the series of concurrent posts from Cody's It Is What It Is blog and Falling On A Bruise. With the Burmese disaster lurching from bad to worse, the question we are pondering is with a humanitarian crisis unfolding, should we invade Burma?

As many as 100,000 people may have died in the catastrophic cyclone in Burma last weekend and as many again are at risk of disease and starvation according to reports but still the military junta continue to restrict access to aid workers waiting to enter the country. There have been some calls for tougher, collective action including direct intervention and possibly unseating the ruling generals to prevent an already terrible humanitarian crisis becoming an even worse one. The Time website poses the question 'Is It Time To Invade Burma?' but there are two very good reasons why she should not even be thinking along those lines.

Firstly, we have three shining examples from the last decade where we have used, or tried to justify our actions, under the name of interventualism. Kosovo, Afghanistan and Iraq.
Despite it being one of Mr Blair's final justifications after a host of others had been dismissed, the Iraq War was not about saving the Iraqi people from Saddam Hussein. What we did in Iraq had precious little to do with saving Iraqi lives.
Each of our last three wars have been a substantial humanitarian disaster in its own right, from the civilians killed during hostilities, destruction of infrastructure and from the splintering of the invaded country into murderous gangs and militias.
The human costs of not invading would have to be substantially worse than those which would result from the invasion. Given the scandalously high human costs of our latest military adventures, we know that this wouldn't be the case. We would kill more by invading and occupying than if we left well alone.
A legacy of Iraq is that the US and the UK have dealt a hammer blow to the doctrine of humanitarian intervention or to be more precise, uninvited humanitarian intervention, which to many is just an euphemism for attempting to foist a friendly government in place of the old.

Secondly, the situation in Burma is horrific. Increasingly bad things are happening which we can't prevent. Earthquakes, hurricanes and floods are a result of an increasingly unpredictable mother nature and a disastrous lack of concern for our own environment in the case of last two, but that doesn't mean that we can just go stomping into any country we want because we don't think they are doing a good enough job.
George Bush and his administration were pilloried for their actions following Hurricane Katrina but is there really much difference between what the Burmese leadership is doing and the Bush administration refusing Cuba's offer to send 1,600 doctors and 26 tons of medicine to the New Orleans victims and turning down 1m barrels of oil and $5m in aid from Venezuela, along with mobile hospitals, clean water and fuel for the victims of Katrina?
Was that not wrong? Was he not putting his own people at risk because of politics? What would his reaction have been if we were having this conversation in 2005 about invading America because the American leadership were making a hash of New Orleans?
Unthinkable right? So why are we even giving a second thought about it for somewhere else?

Aid is getting through to the victims from the Asian countries and though the Junta are letting the aid in, it's the aid workers they are not wanting.
Whatever we think of their decision, on principle every nation has the right to decide who they ask in to their country and nobody has the right to force themselves onto somebody else regardless of who they are or for whatever reason.

Here for Cody's view on the situation.

Estate Agents & Schadenfreude

Once upon a time, about two years ago actually, estate agents everywhere were parading about in £75 shirts, driving shiny convertible penis extensions, then necking bottles of Moet and burning £50 notes in front of the homeless guy outside the 24-hour corner shop. (Possible exaggeration but you get the idea).
Now you can see them buying their shirts from Tesco, driving Fiat Uno's and searching out the Dr Pepper's closest to its sell by date so they can haggle a few pence off the price.
It is sad sight indeed and then you suddenly remember hang on, they are estate agents and you give a hurrah and begin to think that possibly there is a God after all. Then maybe you throw a tin of ravioli at their head just for good measure.
As the housing market remains frostier than a Siberian winter, estate agents all over the country are being made redundant and having their todger substitutes taken off them, but unless you are married to one or actually are one, nobody cares.
I would humble a guess that only traffic wardens, lawyers and tax collectors generate as much dislike as the estate agent and one of these four are heading towards extinction quicker than you can say delightful bijou residence.
Yes they are lying shysters, driven by greed and are chiefly responsible for pricing most people out of the housing market by driving up house prices in the first place, so its no surprise there's zilch sympathy for them.
They made a fortune out of doing bugger-all when prices were rising and took a percentage of the sale price so arm yourself with rotten tomatoes, put on your pointiest shoes and kick the poor sods while they are down.
Now let's see what we can do about taking down the Inland Revenue next.