Same Old Faces Threatening Yet Another War

Western intelligence officials are saying that it will take Iran two or three years to get the bomb but we have been told that Iran was two or three years away from building the bomb for the last three decades.
Not that we have ever let a small thing like evidence get in the way of a bout of anti-Iran propaganda, we are again being warned that Iran gaining nuclear weapons capability is imminent and such a possibility would spell disaster for America and Israel with only there 5500 nuclear warheads to defend themselves with.
Reports are being circulated that the UK is examining contingency plans which involve aerial attacks on Iran's nuclear enrichment plants, in dealing with Iran and it's nuclear ambitions. The same people that bought us the Iraq, Afghanistan and Libyan wars are openly talking about attacking yet another country.
These same countries are saying to Iran 'We may have thousands of nukes, have invaded more countries than you under false pretences but you can't have nuclear power stations because you might try and develop weapons at some undetermined point in the future like we've had for years'.
As anyone who has been paying attention for the past ten years will know, it is obvious why Iran might want a bomb of its own. If the fate of Saddam and Gadaffi showed us anything, it's that the Wests enemies should not give up their nuclear weapon programmes. If you've got oil, we are coming for it and we won't be diverted by heavy civilian casualties (although the death of our own military personnel might cause a few wobbles), nor the potential that the war would quickly escalate from Iran to bring in Syria, Hamas and Hezbollah to reap havoc.
The irony is that if Iran did comes out and say they had developed the bomb, it would probably save millions of them from being slaughtered by the West and Israel who seem to have carte blanche to commit any atrocity it likes with unreserved support from America.
Unlike the Labour Party under Tony Blair in 2003, we can only hope there are enough voices in Government to tell the Prime Minister, and in Washington to tell the President 'Stop listening to the dangerous rubbish from Netanyahu, who is legendarily untrustworthy, and don't get involved in yet another stupid war'.
If the Americans are dumb enough to continue the gunboat diplomacy on behalf of Israel, the very least Britain should do is take a leaf from Harold Wilson's book when LBJ was asking for Britain to join the fight in Vietnam and tell them to take a hike.
Of course we won't and the trio led by a compulsively lying warmonger, an out of touch rich kid and the Nobel Peace Prize winner will be merrily killing in another avoidable war.
Isn't it obvious yet that the biggest threats to peace are in Washington, Tel Aviv and London, not Tehran.

Beiber Baby Bruhaha

Teenage pop star Justin Bieber has said that claims he fathered a child with a woman he met at one of his shows are 'demonstrably false' and he will 'vigorously pursue all available legal remedies' in response to the claim.
The 20 year old woman, Mariah Yeater, claims she had sex with Bieber after a concert in October 2010 and said she is sure that he is the father because 'there were no other men she had had sex with at the time' and is demanding a paternity test.
Someone, is obviously lying and whoever it turns out to be, they are obviously being badly advised because after the paternity test the truth will come out.
Unless he has never had sex with this women, then he should not be making any claims that he is not the father as if it turns out that he is this will only come back to slap him in face twice as hard.
If this woman is making false claims then she will be forever branded a gold digging harlot and face a counter claim for trying to extort money.
Her lawyers claim 'There is credible evidence that Justin Bieber is the father of her baby' and pointed out that Bieber has not denied he had unprotected sex with Ms Yeater following the concert.
Bieber tweeted that he was going to ignore the rumours and asked he be judged on his music instead which is a strange thing to ask because to anyone who isn't a 12 year old girl, if he is the father his music is rubbish and if he isn't the father, his music is still rubbish.

UNESCO Vote

Heaven knows the Palestinians haven't had much to cheer about. Oppressed, downtrodden and bullied by their stronger, aggressive neighbour, it will take any victory and the UNESCO vote was a small victory.
The big UN vote for membership as a full member state is pencilled in for November 11th and the US has veto power at the Security council and has threatened to use it but it had no such power at UNESCO so instead lobbied hard to try and force the Palestinians to back down.
It threatened to cut all US funding for UNESCO, 22% of its annual budget, but UNESCO members have put politics before money, voting by 107 to 14 for the Palestinian bid.
This was not only a welcome failure of US power, but shows just how isolated America and Israel has become.
In the No column were Australia, Canada, Czech Republic, Germany, Israel, Lithuania, the Netherlands, Palau, Panama, Samoa, Solomon Islands, Sweden, United States of America and Vanuatu. When all the support you can muster is a handful of island nations and a few 'proper' countries, you must realise that you are backing a loser and Israel is hemorrhaging worldwide support.
It's response to the UNESCO vote was to suspend the transfer of tax money which it collects for the Palestinian Authority and to accelerate the construction of 2000 settlements on land where the Palestinians aim to found an independent state.
A small victory for Palestine maybe but a massive loss for the American and Israeli policy of keeping Palestine down with never ending talks which only achieve more Palestinian land illegally grabbed by Israel.
Now onto November 11th and the anticipated American veto in support of an increasingly isolated, and rightly maligned, Israel and the vitriol that will bring.

Prohibitive Thinking

It may be a truly horrendous clich矇 muttered by management types, but I have been attempting some 'blue sky thinking' and i have come up with a way to save us billions of pounds and thousands of lives. Surprisingly with those benefits, it might be a bit controversial.

This thing costs the overstretched NHS £2.7 billion annually and is implicated in 33,000 deaths a year in the UK. 3.2 % of all deaths worldwide

The British Crime Survey shows 53% of all violent acts are caused by this and 44% of acts of domestic violence

It is second only to tobacco as the major cause of premature death.

It kills 778 UK drivers annually (1 in 6 deaths on the road) and injures almost 20,000.

Crime related incidents directly from this costs police over £7bn a year.

It is attributable to 47% acts of criminal damage, 17% of muggings, 13% of sexual offences, 17% of burglaries and 12% of robbery's.

It costs the economy £1.8 billion annually in lost Working days.

It doesn't have any tangible benefits except raising approx £8 billion in revenue per year.

So with all this against it, why isn't alcohol banned? Apart from the drinks industry, who would lose out from a bout of prohibition? The £8 billion we lose from tax revenue would be dwarfed by the £2.7 billion savings to the NHS, £7 billion to the police and £1.8 billion to the economy lost through drink related absenteeism. That's a net saving of £3.5 billion not to mention the 33,000 lives saved.

The Government has long tried to restrict the ability of people to drink to excess by controlling the cost and availability of alcohol so why not just go the whole hog and slap a ban on it? If someone came up with the idea now it wouldn't make it past the planning stage so why persevere with something that costs so much socially and financially, something that if it was removed would not be missed and could only benefit society and the country's coffers?

Oetzi's Revenge

All Hallows Eve. The night when the veil that separates our world from the Other world is at its thinnest and the one time in the year when we glimpse for a moment the dimension beyond that which is known to man. It is a dimension where shadow and superstition lies, the dimension of imagination. Don't be afraid, take my hand and follow me through the veil into that other place.

It's 1991 and two German tourists, Helmut and Erika Simon, discover a 5300 year old mummified corpse and direct a team of archaeologists to the site in the Alps between Austria and Italy.
The body is encased in ice and the evidence shows that the man, nicknamed Oetzi after the area in which he was discovered, met with a violent death, having been shot with an arrow before having his skull smashed.
Then, the people associated with his discovery begin meeting with mysterious ends.
The first death occurred when the man who had who put the caveman's body into the body bag was killed in a car crash on the way to a presentation that he was due to give on the discovery of the dead man.
Then the mountain guide who lead the team to the frozen body died in an avalanche. On recoevery of the body, it was discovered that among his many fatal injuries, his skull was smashed.
Next was the cameraman who had filmed the recovery of Oetzi, collapsing and dying of an undetected brain tumor.
Helmut, the man who had actually found the Iceman, was then found dead, laying face down in a stream, where he had landed after falling off a 300 foot cliff. Was it a coincedence that when death came for him, he was face down in water with his skull smashed just like Oetzi?
In another macabre twist, the man that found Helmut in the river, then dropped dead himself, suffering a heart attack on the way home from Helmut's funeral.
The sixth person who had been there on that fateful day when the iceman was discovered died from complications with a medical condition and the final death (so far) was when the scientist who first examined the corpse, died of a blood disease.

Maybe there is a practical explanation for why all these people died, maybe it was all a bizarre coincidence or maybe it's a warning that there's a place between light and shadow where the dead can reach out and touch us. A night like tonight perhaps when the curtain between the living and the dead is tantalisingly pulled aside for the briefest of moments.

Was that noise outside your window really the wind? Somewhere, the dead eyes of a 5300 year old corpse are looking for it's next victim. Stay safe tonight.

WWJD?

On the side of one of the 250 tents pitched in the grounds of St Paul's Cathedral is scrawled 'What would Jesus do?'
What we know of Jesus is that he was a socialist and as such was no fan of the money men, even going so far as to chasing them out of a temple and judging by this picture, handing out a sound thrashing to one of them.
This makes it even more ironic that officials from St Paul's want to force protesters to remove their impromptu camp site as it is costing them around £20,000 a day in lost visitor revenues.
The Church of England website funding page tells us that the CoE raises just over £1000 million a year and has assets of £4.4 billion.
My guess would be that what Jesus would do would be to ask the Church what part of the rich man/camel/eye of the needle analogy it didn't understand and then probably punch the Archbishop of Canterbury in the face and tell him to stop being such a dick. Just a guess.

More Nonsense From The Tories

In these difficult times, the Government has been looking at ways to free up business and boost economic growth so commissioned businessman Adrian Beecroft to look into ways to achieve this.
His report to the Government has been leaked and his big idea is that if it were easier for businesses to fire employees, they would be more willing to hire so all rights to claim unfair dismissal should be removed, citing current employment protection laws and the inability for business to just be able to sack their staff hampering their ability to recover from the worst economic downturn since the 1930s.
His other conclusions suggest scrapping parental leave, scaling back flexitime working and reducing maternity pay to lift the burden on business.
Earlier this year Mr Beecroft recommended a delay in pensions reform, told No 10 that the NHS cuts should go even further and slash research support for medical charities.
So who was is Adrian Beecroft who wants to be able to sack anyone he doesn't like and wants the NHS slashed to the bone?
It should not be a surprise that he is a multi-millionaire businessman who has donated almost a million pounds to the Conservative Party over the last few years which immediately raises the question of cash for Government influence but if we dig a bit deeper we find something more interesting than a major donor being placed into a influential position by the Government.
Adrian Beecroft interests include wonga.com, an online company offering payday loans at huge rates of interest. A recent probe by the consumer watchdog Which? condemned the 4,394 per cent annual interest rate it charged.
Obviously, a business that lends money to those finding themselves short would only benefit from a constant round of employee hiring and firing but the real controversy is with his call to cut back further on the NHS.
Although he is no longer employed by them, Mr Beecroft retains interest in a firm named Apax where he worked as the senior investments officer. The company owns or manages healthcare companies such as General Healthcare which stand to benefit from the increased use of the private sector inside the NHS.
The Government can justify any move, no matter how absurd, as necessary for the economic recovery but to get their friends who are blatantly only in position because they donated large amounts of money to the Government and are using their influential position to further their own business interests is yet another reminder of why the Conservative Party should be removed before they do real damage.

Why Nobody Believes John Terry

Chelsea manager Andre Villas-Boas has launched a defence of his centre back John Terry over his 'alleged' racist slur against QPR defender Anton Ferdinand.
Terry, the England captain, has denied racially abusing Ferdinand, explaining that what he actually said was 'Oi, Anton, do you think I called you a black ****?’
Ferdinand has yet to come out in support of that chain of events and is actually pushing for is club to make a formal complaint but Chelsea boss, Villas-Boas, has already come out saying Terry has his full backing and pondering that he finds it strange that 'people don't trust the words of a representative from your country.'
Ah, the old he-plays-for-England-so-he-must-be-okay defence.
So where to start with why nobody trusts the word of the English representative.
For the benefit of the new Chelsea manager, allow me to present the case why the country collectively rolled it's eyes when Terry declared his innocence.
In 2001, on the 9th September, in the immediate aftermath of the 9/11 attacks on New York, John Terry was fined for mocking American tourists at Heathrow Airport and in 2002, he was arrested for attacking a doorman in a nightclub and again in 2007 for damaging the scooter of a photographer.
His last appearance in a policeman's notebook was when he was fined and gained an extra 3 points on his licence for speeding.
Being a drunken lout off the pitch is not evidence that John Terry, England's captain, is a lying, cheating piece of pond life but having an affair with your best friends wife goes a long way towards it. Throw in the quotes about 'I've never cheated on Toni and I never would' before the news broke fulfills the lying, cheating part.
As does his taking £10k a time backhanders from a renown ticket tout for unofficial tours of the Chelsea training ground but being a womanising, lying cheating scumbag off the field is one thing but his on-field behaviour is not much better.
In the Champions League Final in 2008, John Terry was filmed having a word in Carlos Tevez's ear before filling it with a mouthful of spit.
My evidence ends in 2006 with the allegation that Mr Terry told Ledley King to 'Shut up you lippy black monkey' before getting sent off.
So did Terry call Anton Ferdinand a ‘black ****,’ on Sunday? Don't know, the TV evidence sure looks like he did and that is why Mr Villas-Boas, nobody trusts the word of this representative of our country but feel free to continue backing him and picking him for Chelsea because apart from being a Grade A sleazeball, he is also over the hill and it's my teams turn to run him ragged this weekend.

Wall Street Occupiers Make Their Move

Anybody watching coverage of the demonstrations against the banks and financial institutions must have noticed the moustache and pointy bearded masks of the protesters, a stylised depiction of our very own Guy Fawkes.
The same masks were used by hacking groups a few years ago and have now been adopted by the occupy movement. The masks are from the 2006 film V for Vendetta where one is worn by the films hero, a revolutionary who uses Fawkes as a role model in his quest to end the rule of the British Government where he destroys the Houses of Parliament by blowing it up, something Fawkes had planned and failed to do in the 17th Century.
If you were looking for a revolutionary, Guy Fawkes would be one of the best you could pick and to be honest the mask is damn cool so i am glad that the younger generation have got their own identity and not gone for the obvious revolutionaries like Che Guevara.
Because of the link with Guy Fawkes, the Occupy Wall Streeters have designated 5 November as 'Bank Transfer Day', an idea that i mooted last week although they have opted to do it all in one go rather than what i would have thought would be a better approach of doing it bank by bank over time to bring about maximum panic within the banks.
The plan is for bank customers to transfer their money out of large banks, close their accounts and move to smaller banks and credit unions who are not-for-profit financial cooperatives.
The Occupy facebook page here declares: 'Together we can ensure that these banking institutions will always remember the 5th of November!! If the 99 percent removes our funds from the major banking institutions on or by this date, we will send a clear message and give the 1 percent a taste of the fear that we experience every day when we aren’t able to pay for our rent, food, medication, utilities, student loans, etc.'
The website here gives a step by step guide on how to go about things that day.
We know that this way of sticking it to the man works so hopefully, this particular group of Guy Fawkers will be more successful then the original one who ended up being quartered and his body parts sent to different parts of the kingdom. Ouch.

Gaddafi Killed & Western Appetite Restored

Since 2006, the West have wiped Saddam Hussein, Bin Laden and now Gaddafi from the face of the Earth. Some are regretting that the former Libyan leader was not taken alive and put on trial but the instigators of the conflict, Britain, France and America, are just relieved that the job has been done without turning into the debacle that is Iraq and Afghanistan.
All three leaders, Sarkozy, Obama and Cameron, were quickly on the television congratulating themselves on a job well done and the worry is that this success will lay to rest the ghost of Iraq and Afghanistan and fuel the perception that such Western intervention operations are the way forward.
The temptation will be for success in Libya to be cited as justification for military interventions elsewhere. In the orgy of back slapping that will surely ensue, the dubious interpretation of the UN resolution on the use of air strikes to protect civilians should not be forgotten and will hamstring any other attempt by anyone to make the same argument in support of a similar UN resolution in future.
For the past eight months since the conflict began, the Western trio of leaders have been at pains to stress the thousands killed by Gaddafi but there is no talk of the thousands, 15,000 at the last count, who have been killed by them during this latest military adventure.
The impression has been created that this was a 'clean' war with no French, British or American fatalities and that this was a revolution to overthrow a brutal dictator who had been oppressing his people for 42 years although for a lot of that time the very countries that would remove him, were arming and supporting him.
Leaving aside, or just not mentioning, the Libyan death toll, the idea has now been sparked that intervention in other people's revolutions or civil wars has a future, to help 'the people' overthrow dictatorial leaders wherever they be or rather in countries where the leadership is not sympathetic to Western interests.
With the fall of Gaddafi, the leadership in Tehran and Damascus will move strongly into the Western eye line and the niggling thought amidst all the celebration is that the West has got its appetite back for invading weaker, mineral rich countries under the guise of humanitarian intervention and introducing Democracy although the reasonable question to be asked is can there ever be Democracy in the Middle East and North Africa unless the West pick those countries leaders?