2009 Person Of The Year

Time magazine have handed the 2009 crown for Person of the year to Ben Bernanke for the job he did preventing an economic catastrophe. I guess they mean the economic catastrophe that we did get as opposed to the economic catastrophe we could have had.
It isn't that easy to pick out anyone who really deserves it from 2009 although there has been some men and women who have made us sit up a bit this year and not all for good reasons.
2009 was probably kindest to Susan Boyle who began the year as a strange looking Scottish woman and ended it as a strange looking Scottish woman with a number one album.
The sudden exposure put her under as much strain as her waistline put on her ankles but after a trip to the Priory, hairdressers and beauticians, Simon Cowell knocked out a SuBo karaoke album of ballads and show tunes and tried to make her into the new Elaine Page.
Not that i begrudge Boyle her 6 months of fame, good for her and i hope she makes enough money to keep her cat in tuna for the rest of its life but enough already.
As much as Cowell and Piers Morgan may tell us, our own ears prove that she is nothing more than an average singer who would be embarrassed up against the likes of Katherine Jenkins or Leona Lewis who are this country's best warblers.
Well done SuBo, now retire gracefully please.

Come Back Soon Tzipi

When the Goldstone report recommended that signatories to the Geneva Convention arrest and prosecute individuals who set foot in their country and were responsible for human rights and war crimes violations during the Gaza conflict last January, i was hopeful that someone, somewhere, would feel the collar of those involved.
What i didn't expect was Britain to be the one to make an attempt to nab them but the British courts it was who issued an arrest warrant for Israel's former foreign minister and member of the war cabinet during the Gaza offensive earlier this year, Tzipi Livni, over war crimes when she was expected to turn up on our shores at the weekend.
As it was she got wind of it and cancelled but i am immensely proud that it was my country that made a grab for her.
We do have recent history here of attempting to bag the Israeli's accused of war crimes with an attempt to arrest Israel's defence minister, Ehud Barak, only foiled because he is a serving minister and was afforded diplomatic immunity while he was here.
In 2005, a retired Israeli general, Doron Almog, returned to Israel after landing in London and refusing to leave his aeroplane because he was tipped off that police were on the tarmac waiting to arrest him.
Other Israeli leaders, including former military chief Moshe Yaalon and ex-Shin Bet security chief Avi Dichter, have cancelled trips to Britain in recent years for the same reason.
Israel hit back over the Livni arrest warrant warning that until the matter was resolved senior officials would not be visiting the UK.
Israelis prime minister, Binyamin Netanyahu, called the warrant absurd and there has been calls for the the recall of Israel's ambassador to Britain.
The Goldstone report concluded that it found Israels actions during the the war to be 'a deliberately disproportionate attack designed to punish, humiliate and terrorise a civilian population and could lead a competent court to find that crimes against humanity, had been committed'.
Let us hope that Israel has received an uncomfortable reminder of international anger over the excessive Gaza war and i am proud that Britain has sent out a strong message that it will stand up for international law and justice. Well done us.

Evil Chavez At It Again

Since mostly all liberals are weed smoking hippies who pine for Communist Russia and want to see Israel wiped off the face of the Earth, it is no surprise that the lefties love Hugo Chavez.
Now they are getting all excited again because the chubby dictator is screwing the West once again with his Socialist toy fair.
In a deliberate snub to every decent American, he has taken food from the mouths of millions of Venezuelans to spend government money importing 124,000 toys from China and is selling them at 20% of their price to hard up parents for their children's Christmas presents. The evil bastard.
Toys include dolls, puzzles, prams and remote control cars with Barbies being the most sought after present.
The industry minister, Simon Daoud El Saden, said the merchandise was being sold at cost, stripped of speculative retail mark-ups. 'It is a way to control and lower prices.'
Chavez called the event 'a victory over rip-off capitalist toys' and even Chavez's political opposition lauded the bargain toys.
"It's positive, many people will benefit," said Antonio Ledezma, the mayor of Caracas.
The man is a threat to everything us right wing maniacs stand for and must be stopped. Today it's handing out dolls and tomorrow it's copies of Das Kapital and attempting to instill a fairer, more just system on the World.

Bliar

'I have got no doubt Saddam is very bad for Iraq, but on the other hand I have got no doubt either that the purpose of our challenge from the United Nations is disarmament of weapons of mass destruction, it is not regime change.' Tony Blair 2002

It was with much amusement that during the Iraq War build-up, anti-war protesters had the good fortune to have someone to rage against whose name changed from Blair to Bliar with such little effort.
The main charge against Blair was that he lied to take us to war. Some of his justifications came unravelled almost immediately such as the yellow cake and links with Al-Queada and others were being rubbished as time went on such as Saddam's WMD's and the 45 minute claim.
Speaking on BBC One's Fern Britton Meets programme, Tony Blair was asked whether he would still have gone on with plans to join the US-led invasion had he known at the time that there were no WMD.
He said: 'I would still have thought it right to remove him. I mean obviously you would have had to use and deploy different arguments, about the nature of the threat.'
At least we now know from his own mouth that even if he had been aware there were no weapons of mass destruction he would still have felt justified in launching the Iraq war and used other reasons to justify it.
Firstly it makes a mockery of when Blair stood up and told Saddam that he could stay in power if he handed over those elusive WMD's, that was never going to happen because he and George Dubya had already planned in advance Saddam was being removed however they had to justify it.
Secondly, regime change is illegal under International law and this proves that it was what the whole debacle was about. Bush and Blair arrogantly declared themselves World Policemen, flouting world opinion and the United Nations to become Saddam's judge, jury and executioner.
The self righteous, sanctimonious arrogance is sickening but listening to the ongoing Chilcott enquiry, i have very faith that Blair will be sufficiently grilled by the committee that seems increasingly unwilling to ask the pointed questions.
Blair has admitted that he blatantly lied as a cover for regime change in Iraq. How much more evidence do the people in the Hague who draw up the list of leaders to be charged with War Crimes need?
It must only be a matter of time before Blair gets the tap on the shoulder and a policeman tells him 'Mr Blair, You do not have to say anything, however it may harm your defence if you do not mention when questioned something you may later rely on in court...'.

Rage Against The Cowell

I often wonder just exactly what Simon Cowell asks for when he goes for a haircut. His hair is sort of square with an attempt at a centre parting that fails miserably.
A bad haircut isn't all Mr Cowell has to worry about because his usual march to the Christmas number one is under threat by an Internet campaign to get Rage Against the Machine to the Chrimbo top spot instead of the atrocious Hannah Montana song Simon has chosen for the X Factor winner to sing this year.
I'm all for it, i hate the way the whole show is geared towards claiming the Christmas top slot when it should be songs about snowmen and reindeer.
Not that 'Killing in the name of' is particularly festive, I've just read the lyrics and i have no idea what the songs about but it has a killer riff and the singer gets all shouty and that's always a winning combination at any time of the year.
Cowell is hitching his trousers even higher and hitting back. With an apparently straight face he branded the campaign stupid, cynical and dismissive of the shows viewers.
'It's incredibly dismissive of the people who watch and enjoy the show" he said, 'to treat our audiences as if they're stupid and I don't like that.' Indeed, he likes to treat the audience as if they are stupid. We all remember the Jedward incident when he went from hating them to loving over the length of an ad-break.
The Facebook group currently has 548,000 members and the page says to start buying the song as a download from this Sunday, the day the X Factor winner is announced.
Mind you, there is a certain irony to buying a song all about not being told what to do because someone told you to.
I think i'll just buy Merry Xmas Everybody by Slade instead.

Meanwhile In Iraq...

As the Chilcot inquiry rolls on we should not forget to look in on how things are panning out for the people of Iraq.

2 March 2004: Suicide bombers strike Shia shrines in Karbala and in Baghdad, killing at least 181 people.
14 September 2005: Co-ordinated bombings in Baghdad kill 178 people.
23 November 2006: Car bombs kill 215 people in Baghdad's Sadr City.
3 February 2007: Truck bomber at Baghdad market kills 137.
18 April 2007: 183 killed in attack on Shia locations of Baghdad.
7 July 2007: Suicide truck bomb kills 160 in south of Kirkuk.
14 August 2007: Truck bombs kill over 500 Yazidis, a Kurdish-speaking religious minority.
19 August 2009: Suicide bombers hit the finance and foreign ministries, killing more than 100 people.
25 October 2009: Car bombs kill at least 155 people in attacks on government offices.
8 December 2009: Baghdad bombs kill at least 112 and wounded more than 190

Tony Blair and George W Bush must be very proud of the Iraq that they created.

The Lost Copenhagen Post

Day 1 of the Copenhagen climate Change Summit and i had prepared a sparkling witty, thought provoking and altogether smashing post. Then didn't save it and lost it when my computer froze whilst trying to download AVG updates.
It's too much to try and remember what i said but i know i began by stating that people who said the World wasn't flat and that the Earth went around the sun were probably disbelieved at first and even after they were proved right, there were some who still refused to believe them.
The term 'useful idiot' was thrown in here because it just seemed to sum up exactly what i think of people who blindly follow the likes of Richard Lindzen who get well remunerated by those with an interest in denying climate change. He gets a back pocket full of dead presidents, you get wet feet and asthma for all your misguided simpering.
I then linked these strange folks to climate change deniers who, despite all the evidence, continue to shake their heads and think it's all some convoluted Government scam.
Next up was the science bit as L'Oreal say with 800,000 year old ice cores that show that at no point in the past 800,000 years did levels approach today's carbon dioxide concentrations of around 387 parts per million (ppm) and that the fastest increase seen was 30 ppm over a period of approximately 1,000 years which we have seen in just under two decades.
Then i went through the proof of what we are seeing now with desertification, changing weather patterns, the rise in sea temperature, polar ice melts, warmer summers, spread of disease, crop failure, raising sea levels and the loss of eco systems.
It was starting to get a bit long by now so i ended with a short and snappy sentence that went along the lines of if you can look at all this evidence and still say that the climate is not changing, then you are either Richard Lindzen, an employee of Exxon Mobil or just painfully ignorant.
Shame i lost it all, it was quite a good post so i suppose i will have to write about something else instead.

Amanda Knox Guilty

Much said about the conviction of Amanda Knox for her part in the murder of British student Meredith Kercher in Italy. I watched the announcement of her guilty verdict and the 26 year sentence and the analysis afterwards on the BBC where the summing up seemed to go along the lines of going by the evidence, she was as guilty as hell and got what she deserved, echoing my own feelings of the case.
Around 1am, as usual, the channel flicks over to the American news channel CBS for an hour or so.
Interestingly, the Knox conviction was being discussed on there also but they had a very different view of events and the question was posed, was Knox a victim of anti-Americanism?
Searching around the Internet, i found American sites that posed this question and it reminded me of the 1997 conviction of the British nanny Louise Woodward who was found guilty of involuntary manslaughter when an eight month old baby died whilst in her care.
The British media was incredulous that a British girl had been convicted of murdering a baby by an American Court. Woodward's sentence was reduced to time served (279 days) and she was freed to return back to Britain where she now works as a dance teacher.
Now it seems that Italian justice is being questioned by some people in America although in this case, the imprisonment of Amanda Knox and her ex-boyfriend seem a safe conviction.
The change of alibi halfway through the case was the most damning evidence. From being in the other room to 'remembering' that actually she stayed at her boyfriends house that night was probably what sealed it along with the DNA evidence on the knife and Meredith's bra, the confession later withdrawn and the bloody footprint.
Knox always came across as an arrogant woman, a view supported by the Police testimony that she was performing cartwheels, doing the splits and giggling with her ex-boyfriend when she was first brought in for interview.
Being arrogant doesn't make her a cold hearted killer, and being American doesn't make her any more or less guilty but refusing to accept the verdict of a court just because of the murderers nationality is wrong on every level whether they are a British nanny or a pretty American student.

Tiger Woods Is Fair Game

It's an old debate but it's one that crops up all the time in the world of journalism and here it is again with the news that Tiger Woods has been up to no good.
The debate splits down the lines of whether the media should be reporting the twists and turns of Tigers marital affairs or the counter argument that his private life should be kept out of the newspapers.
To me there is a very simplistic answer. If a person chooses to put themselves in the spotlight, then they are fair game. You can't only play the publicity game when it suits so that means the whole package of good, bad and ugly.
Tiger makes millions out his 'nice guy' persona through advertising. For years he has been handsomely paid to get his picture taken wearing a certain make of clothes or appearing on television selling razors so he has actively gone out of his way to make himself visible.
Now that he has been caught out playing around on another ladies fairway, he wants to pull down the shutters and asks for privacy.
For me, Tiger Woods is a completely legitimate target and journalists have every right to report the who, when, how and why of the reasons behind his late night fire hydrant crash.
Woods is the villain of this particular piece, not the people reporting it.

Where's The Change Obama?

It has been a tough week for us pacifists and environmentalist. Hopes for an International agreement to save the planet in Copenhagen next week seem to be dwindling before it even starts and Obama, in his wisdom, seems intent on ramping up things in Afghanistan and Pakistan.
I once had high hopes for Barack Obama. He isn't my President but after the devastating International effect of George W Bush's policies, i thought and hoped Obama would come in and right a few wrongs.
Almost a year on we still have prisoners locked up in Guantanamo Bay, troops continue to occupy Iraq, the Environment is put on the back burner, Israel continues to ride roughshod over the Palestinians, the threats to level Iran continue and he has just expanded Bush's war in Afghanistan.
Obama came to power promising change but i can't help looking at his record so far and thinking we are in exactly the same position as we were under Bush.
For all i know he may be doing wonders in America for his own people, although judging by his figures it seems his popularity is waning dangerously, but looking at him from the outside, he is proving to be yet another in a long list of big disappointments.
I should put it down to him being just another politician who talked the talk to get into office but altered his sights once he got there but that seems a bit harsh when he still has 75% of this presidency term still to go.
Hopefully he will up his game in his second year and show us that he isn't just rehashing the policies of George W Bush and wrapping them up in fancy speeches. I do have a growing sense that the gulf we thought existed between Bush and Obama, is not as wide or as deep as we first thought and the only change i can see is that Obama is more eloquent at explaining his disastrous policies.