The Heavy Metal War

No, AC/DC aren't fighting Metallica to the death, cool and all though that would be.

I'm talking about the real world war being conducted today. The war that actually matters to us in Ireland, as opposed to the US colonisations of Iraq and Afghanistan.

The Heavy Metal War isn't being fought with bullets. That's not how the big wars take place anymore. It's being fought on the financial markets, by bankers and speculators and governments.

China, as we all know, has America by the scrota due to its ongoing huge trade surplus and its massive stockpile of greenbacks. Realising that the US, from municipalities, through states all the way up to the Fed, is actually bust, China is now trying to get out of the dollar before America takes them down too.

So they've been buying up Africa, and Australian commodities. Then they decided to stop exporting rare earths. These are obscure elements that are used in modern technology, from laptops to mobile phones. We need them for our toys. China's stopped sending them to us.

But even though China is in one mother of a property bubble, they still have infrastructure to build. They need things like concrete and copper. Oddly enough, one US banker (JP Morgan Chase) just cornered the copper market the other day. They now own half of all the copper on Earth, or 80%+ of the copper traded on the London metals exchange.

So we have a metals war between the US and China, playing out via the markets with banksters as the frontline generals.

It's not the only metal war, though. As the US prints its way out of economic trouble, the logical thing would be for the dollar to collapse into inflation. But that's not entirely happening right now. Why? Because as well as hedging their currency globally (by virtue of its position as the de facto world currency), America has also seen fit to suppress the value of real money, gold and silver.

Keeping the price of gold and silver down effectively keeps the price of the dollar and Dow Jones up.

JP Morgan admitted they were 'shorting' this market recently, after an investigation by regulators. This is the second front of the metals war. JPM have been fighting the price of precious metals down to prop up the dollar at the Fed's request.

Problem is, every time they smack the metals down, buyers pop up in China and India and snaffle up the real money for a bargain. And round and round the liabilities keep going, until sooner or later a stress fracture appears that cannot be papered over by permaprinting greenbacks.

This shit is likely boring the hole off you, so I'll stop there. Let's take a breath. What the fuck has any of this crap got to do with Ireland, you may be asking, if you're still awake?

Well, this is how things get done today. No more marching into the trenches to decide global disputes. Instead, you employ weapons of economic mass destruction and occupy nations via the markets.

That's what has happened in Ireland. Our sovereignty is one of the first casualties in the current world war. Bankers have run up debts, transferred them to our state and then foreclosed on us. Now we are mortgaged to international bankers to the tune of €170,000 each that we never borrowed. That's the size of a house loan. Each. One for every man, woman and child living here.

We can't pay it back. The idea isn't that we pay it back. The idea is that we service the loan for generations, as Germany did with the Versailles payments for WW1, which were only finally paid off the other month.

And while we're paying, our economy remains theirs to do with as they wish. And we remain indebentured debt slaves of the international bankers.

That's why you should care about the Heavy Metals War. Ireland was just a skirmish, a fundraising episode for bankers on the way to taking on China. But China just might be too big a target for them to take down.

For us in Ireland, until we're Back in Black, Nothing Else Matters. (Sorry!) But we don't have to accept our servitude without protest. Iceland conducted an effective guerilla economic war against their banker occupiers and succeeded. We could too.

By reneging on the bank guarantee, we would free ourselves of a hundred billion worth of debts that aren't rightfully ours. However, our politicians do not have the back bone or the sense of responsibility to their citizens that the Icelandic ones do.

But sometimes even the individual citizen can take guerrilla tactics to an occupying power. And this is something you can do too, in this economic war.

JP Morgan Chase are very short on silver. This means they've bet the price will remain low (thereby keeping it low) in order to keep the dollar high. So what can you do? Buy silver.

When you buy silver, you exchange paper money for real money. You make it that little bit harder for the banksters to keep the price low and the dollar high. You bring the banksters who took Ireland out that little bit closer to the precipice themselves. And you do yourself a favour too, by storing your hard-earned labour in real value, real money.

Crash JP Morgan, Buy Silver and let's save Ireland from the banksters.

All that glitters

It's US mid-term election night.

The exit polls are predicting a hammering for the Democrats. That should mean good news for the dollar and bad news for precious metals on the markets.

After all, the perception is that the Obama socialists (US perception, not mine) are flagrant tax-and-spenders, while Republicans are fiscal scrooges.

But of course, these aren't ordinary Republicans. These are people who have to issue ads telling the electorate that they aren't witches. These are ill-educated, small government looneys who have, with the support of frothing-mouthed cheerleaders at Fox News, successfully eaten up the GOP.

The markets like Republicans. But they don't like looneys. They probably like Obama better than they like looneys. (After all, he did bail out Wall Street.)

That fact, coupled with the inevitability of Ben Bernanke's great dollar printing machine going back into overdrive tomorrow, is driving the dollar back down and precious metals up.

Today, the Aussie dollar smashed through parity with the greenback. Expect the Swiss franc and the Canuck dollar to do likewise shortly.

What does this all mean for Ireland? Well, firstly, we're still screwed. The Germans are keeping the euro high in the ongoing currency war, meaning we're buggered on exports outside of the EU (ie to two of our nearest and biggest trading partners, Britain and America, who are both printing money like it was going out of fashion.)

Secondly, a bunch of Tea Party nutjobs won't look outside their narrow national interests. There will be more rabble-rousing about illegal immigrants, and more demands to repatriate jobs back to America. Either President Hopey Changey concedes to some of this rhetoric or he kisses a second term goodbye over two years of lame duck administrating.

The gelding of the Obama administration in conjunction with the destruction of the GOP by Tea Party malignants is not and cannot be good news for us.

Right now, Ireland is so far gone that we need a white knight to save us, and the Germans won't play ball, and the Americans are taking off their armour and hiding in a cave. And for all the Fianna Fail rhetoric and ass-kissing in Beijing, I wouldn't expect any help from the Chinese.

After all, they made their money playing a rigged currency game for the past few years, leading to the current beggar-thy-neighbour currency wars.

In 24 hours, America will look inward. It will look bankrupt. And it will look stupid.

And our Uncle Sam won't be playing sugar Daddy to Ireland possibly ever again.

New Year's Revolutions

Happy nearly New Year, y'all.

Hopefully, you realise tomorrow is just another day, and you don't need to make lifechanging decisions while drunk tonight that will transform into mid-January bouts of guilt as you fail.

You could stop smoking, lose weight or try to get a new job starting any particular day. Why do it alongside the rest of the herd? Is there camaraderie in failing en masse? I don't know.

What I do know is that I think New Year's Resolutions are about as pointless as those 'Caution: Hot!' warnings on takeaway coffees - they're really only needed for the truly remedial.

So I've decided to go with some New Year's Revolutions instead. Here are the revolutions I'd like to see in 2010:

1. A Chinese counter-revolution. Seriously, fuck the Chinese Communist Party. I'd love to see them overthrown and subjected to a quick round of real people power, the human-abusing thug junta. This same prescription also applies to the scum ruling Belarus, North Korea, Burma, Zimbabwe and a host of other thugocracies.

2. A drugs revolution. The war on drugs is lost. Why are our governments still fighting it? Increasingly, world leaders, health experts, religious minorities and influential commentators have come out in favour of a complete reversal of current failed policies.
I hope that either the lawmakers start listening, or else a proper grassroots movement comes along and makes ongoing prohibition unworkable for good. If the EU reverted to the Portuguese model, we might finally get a handle on drug crime and on harm reduction for addicts.

3. An economic revolution. The return of the gold standard? The end of fractional banking? Back to barter? Jail for banksters?
I'm no economist (and am suspicious of that pseudoscience in any case), so I will refrain from being prescriptive.
But since the current system just went pop for the umpteenth time, you'd like to think we might rebuild with some new method that doesn't unerringly result in a bubble and collapse every decade or two.

4. A democratic revolution in Ireland. Take a look at the Dail. Do those people really represent you? Do they look after your interests? Well, why keep voting for them?
I'd love to see an end to the cronyism, the parochial parish pump politics, the gombeens, the brown envelopes and the nepotism in Irish politics.
But that would require an electorate to grow up and take responsibility for those they elect.

What revolutions would you like to see next year? And are there any that you're prepared to man the barricades to bring about?

Tis the season to be clairvoyant

It's that time of the year again, when most people defer cynical normality until the New Year, eschew common sense and start spouting goodwill to fellow men.

But not Skinner, no sirree bob.

For me, it's the season for casting a gloomy, pessimistic, jaundiced eye over the year to come, read the runes, scatter the entrails, gaze into the crystal ball and attempt to predict what the year ahead has to offer.

We'll hold fire on last year's predictions until this year is officially up. (Though nothing's stopping you checking now.) Instead, it's full steam ahead with what's ahead in 2010.

1. I can haz double-dip recession? Sort of inevitable at this stage, really. Credit card debt should do it for Ireland, which is tragically appropriate for what has happened to us as a nation in the mass delusion of the 'Celtic Tiger'.
In America, it will be the ongoing slide in dollar value, while Britain will simply run out of cash. China is hamstrung by its dollar exposure, lack of Western demand for plastic tat made in sweatshops and the fact that the rest of the world will be slow to forget how China stitched up Copenhagen for its own ends.
In short, more red lines on the charts, more capital flight to precious metals, more lost jobs, more housing price decline, more negative equity, more foreclosures, more unemployment and more excuses from those responsible.

2. What does Africa need right now? You were thinking 'major soccer tournament', weren't you? Isn't that top of their list of needs?
Africans agree, of course, which is why they're having two in six months. Never mind the HIV epidemic, the grinding poverty, the neverending wars, famines and disease. I must haz mi football. Right?
South Africa 2010 will see predictions of violence against the occasional drunk affluent visitor sadly fulfilled. Stadia will be full of white people flown in for the occasion. A European team, likely Spain or Italy, will win, though an African team, likely Nigeria, will get to the semis.

3. General election in the Republic of Ireland.
Seriously, this government wouldn't even have lasted this long were it not for the dire standard of political opposition in the Dail, and the utter disorganisation of political opposition outside of it.
Enda Kenny is as effective and reliable as the Billings method, while the beards running the unions have already shot their bolt and allowed their campaign to be cleverly cut in two by a government sneakily talking up public sector V private rivalries.
But to hold together an administration this flimsy, talentless and aimless would require both the cunning of a natural alliancemaker like Bertie Ahern and endless pots of overflowing gold to pay everyone off and keep them all happy.
Cowen has neither Ahern's touch nor any money whatsoever, since Ahern spent it all already. So it's inevitable that sooner rather than later the faeces will fly into the fan.

4. Result of election? Fine Gael and Labour, that unhappily married couple, back in the saddle again, this time minus the self-exploded Greens.
Stasis for the Shinners, though a few new faces in their line-up, including Joe McHugh. A move against Churry as leader of the party finally coalesces around someone other than the unelectable Mary Lou. Toireasa Ferris, perhaps?
Fianna Fail to regroup around a new leader - with Martin facing off against Dermot Ahern for the job and Martin winning. Most of the current cabinet retire to count their ill-gotten gains.

5. A general election is already scheduled for next year in Britain and the North, so they're already in mid-campaign.
The toff Tories to edge it in a surprisingly close-run thing after an initial rally of the British economy in the Spring. But they will claim no seats in the North, leaving their alliance with the UUP in tatters.
Lady Sylvia to win as independent in North Down, taking their last seat, leaving them behind the TUV, for whom Allister will ascend Paisley's old throne in North Antrim.
Alisdair McDonnell to become the next SDLP leader, and subsequently hold South Belfast. A resurgence for this party might then finally be possible, especially if a Shinner generation shift starts to coalesce.

6. Post-Lisbon, the EU will grow ever more important. Initially in Ireland this will either not be noticed or welcomed when spotted, since it will come alongside support for our comatose economy or will be warmly contrasted with our indigenous mismanagement of our political affairs.
But elsewhere, the twin-track Europe does begin to finally emerge. Eager to push on with the long march to federalism, the elites of Brussels will seek to seduce an inner circle to move faster. Welcome to the beginning of a Europe of the centre and the fringes again, just like the Roman Empire.

7. Poor ole spook kid Barack just won't catch an even break in 2010. With the messiah sheen of his election campaign long lost in most memories, Americans will get on with the fact of confronting growing poverty and unemployment, a reduction in international relevance alongside a growth in international danger, not only in current war spots but also in some new ones too.
I'd expect more Islamoterror next year, likely of the old Nineties format of attacks on foreign -based US troops. And that will of course stabilise Pakistan hugely.
Not.

8. China realises its dollars are worthless and we don't want their tat anymore, and there's only so much African resources and commodities you can stockpile for future good times, so it belatedly decides to spree its dollar mountain on Western assets.
This overt accumulation of Western trophies, akin to the Japanese intervention into California in the Eighties, will be the first sign for many of the Chinese century everyone was suspecting might come about.

9. Chelsea for the league, Barcelona for the Champions League, Rafa for Real and Mourinho for Anfield after an Arab buyout of the bankrupt Yanks.

10. Russia will play silly buggers with the gas pipeline to the West again as it tries and largely succeeds in splitting both Georgia and the Ukraine in two.
Everyone talks tough, but the Kremlin ain't listening. Once again, decadent old Europe realises too late that the Eastern threat to its stability has never gone away but merely morphed into yet another totalitarian guise, following the Tsarism and Sovietism of the past.

Should be a good year.

Tiananmen: 20 years of silence and oppression

We have to remember Tiananmen Square.

It's two decades to the day since the Chinese people demanded their freedom from the despotic, mass-murdering junta that rules their nation.

It's twenty years since they stood in Tiananmen Square and sang songs and demanded that the Communist dictators quit power.



It's twenty years since the power-hungry psychotics turned tanks on their own people and murdered them for asking to be free, killed them, jailed them, sent them to re-education gulags where they were tortured horrendously.

It's twenty years in which more terror has been inflicted on the people of occupied Tibet, the Uighur nation, and the other minorities within the Maoist monolith.

Twenty years in which the hypocrites of the West facilitated China's leadership by hiring their slave labour, buying their bloodstained products at dirt cheap prices, handed back free Hong Kong and Macao into their anti-democratic hands and helped them block the internet from reaching their people, and let them hold a propagandist Olympics that will go down in history as stomach-churning as Hitler's Berlin Games in 1936.

Twenty years in which their template for terrorising their own people has been exported elsewhere, to other stubborn juntas who will not countenance democracy or liberty or freedom of choice, in places like Burma.



It is not anywhere near as long since I was in China. But the people there still yearn for freedom.

We cannot allow the Chinese government to exercise their blanket control over information. We cannot let them rewrite history. We cannot permit the spirit of Tiananmen to be ignored.

Because one day, the proud Chinese people will be free from the sixty year nightmare of Maoism, and they will legitimately say:

"Yes, for much of that time, we bowed to the terror and let ourselves be ruled. But one day we rose and sought our freedom, and we were brutally beaten down. And you in the West did nothing. Rather than insist on our freedom as you did for the people of South Africa, you instead rewarded the Communist cadres and made them millionaires."

Remember Tiananmen. Remember what they did.

Remember how democracy was stillborn in China twenty years ago, and how we still trade with the murderers.

A thousand unemployed call centre workers cheer...

It's happening in India too. Three cities in a row, I've found that waiting and kitchen staff in hotels in India were predominantly Chinese.

Fair enough, a lot of people like Chinese food, even in India. But I cannot fathom how it could be cost-effective for employers to take on migrant workers ahead of one of the lowest- paid workforces there is.

Perhaps the Chinese government is subsidising this as part of some sort of training programme? Does anyone out there know if there is method behind this madness?

Surely when Chinese staff are populating the rosters of hotels in a place like India, we've already exceeded even the flimsy economic purpose for mass migration?

And how can the Indian authorities justify these jobs going to non-Indians, given the poverty and deprivation in the country?

And have they foreseen the negative effects on their tourist industry?

After all, it wasn't that long ago that they were hiring hotel staff for Connemara in Newfoundland because so many complaints were coming in to Bord Failte from American tourists about non-English speaking staff in Irish establishments.

And with no Irish forthcoming for the jobs, they looked for staff in the one other place where people sounded and looked Irish. There is, it appears, a premium of authenticity that tourists attach to visiting places like Ireland or India that involves interacting with locals and not with imported Chinese labour.

So why are Indian hotels hiring from China? Does anyone know?

The real axis of evil

Anyone recall the Bush baby's hilarious 'axis of evil' speech?

It was basically his shit-list of countries that he didn't like. And wanted to threaten. It included various rum locations like North Korea and Iran. None of them places you'd like to wake up a peasant in, but equally none of them currently occupying other people's countries.

So I thought it might be useful to put together an alternative axis of evil list, based on the proportion of misery particular countries are responsible for in the world today.

1. United States of America. Well, who else? Two foreign occupations, the ongoing 'wars' on 'terror' and 'drugs', state-sponsored kidnap and torture, funding Israel. They're really in a class of their own.

2. China. Repeated famines of their own population, the ongoing occupation of sovereign Tibet, the suppression of internal minorities, the sabre-rattling at Taiwan, and some extremely dodgy dealings in Africa.

3. Israel. An illegal state formed on other people's land, currently engaged in a particularly vociferous and unjustifiable genocide of the indigenous inhabitants. 300 dead in Gaza in the past couple of days alone. Israel is the terrorist state destabilising the entire Middle East, with American assistance.

4. 'Great' Britain. America's lapdogs in Iraq and Afghanistan. So that makes at least three foreign countries their military are currently engaged in, including their occupation of the North of Ireland.

5. Zimbabwe. Mugabe's syphilitic insanity should not be permitted to stand in the way of the self-determination of these beleaguered people any more.

6. Russia. Putin has seen how America has been permitted by the international community to wander into other countries with impugnity and has decided to emulate them. Their 'near abroad' of former Soviet states remains under constant risk of invasion if they don't tow Putin's line, as Georgia discovered this year and the Ukraine may well the next.

7. Pakistan. Politically in ruins, riven by terrorists in the tribal areas, deeply repressive to women and non-Muslims, Pakistan is a nuclear power with a series of border disputes with equally nuclear neighbours India and China.

8. Somalia. Without any apparatus of government for many years now, Somalia is now a devastated zone of anarchy from which pirates flood in droves to prey on the world's transit traffic.

The list of honourable mentions, where the people are denied democracy and self-determination by unelected elites, runs into dozens, sadly. There is no room to list all the states, on every continent, which refuse to permit their people free rein over their own destinies.

99 well-read balloons

... floating in the North Korean sky.

This is a really beautiful news story.

It answers a question I had posed to myself in 2001, walking around the heavily policed Tiananmen Square, when it was announced that Beijing would host the Olympic games just past.

I remember thinking, as I scrutinised the secret police scrutinising me back, that the story of the Olympics in Beijing was going to be less about China opening up to the world and more about China closing down the usual global coverage of the games.

I couldn't see otherwise, unless there was a regime change in the interim. On the net, behind the great Firewall of China, you couldn't access any decent Western news source. I'd been on a train crossing Siberia and found out more about what was going on at home than I did in the capital of the most populous state on Earth. Even in Mongolia, there was greater access to information.

In the end, the Chinese did just enough to facilitate the foreign press, while attempting pretty successfully to keep a lid on free information flowing to their citizenry. But times had changed in those intervening seven years.

The press in Hong Kong, the movement of Chinese citizens across the planet and back, the growth of a new, post-Tiananmen dissidence abroad all contributed to the slow thaw of the Chinese Communist Party's 'mushroom' policy towards their people - ie keep them in the dark, and feed them shit.

But North Korea is like China used to be. It has all the crazy Stalinist-Maoist hallmarks, like isolationism, state-sponsored famines, loopy leaders seeking to deify themselves.

They're too poor for the internet and computers, by all accounts. Only the apparatchiks can access information from abroad, never mind travel there. Even Burma gets some tourists (not that I condone propping up the junta there, but tourists bring information to the locals.) The poor North Koreans really are mushrooms, stuck with only one bullshit source of information.

So fair play to the private citizens from the South who've taken it upon themselves to float news into the rogue state inside helium balloons. It's an inspired, inexpensive, low-tech, effective method for getting news and information into North Korea.

I can appreciate why the South Korean government is annoyed. Of course this will raise tensions at governmental level. Possibly for the North Koreans, it will raise problems domestically. But that can only be a good thing.

Right now, I'm simply delighted at the idea of mad Kim and his cadre frothing at the mouth as balloons explode in the sky, showering their nation with news that the information-starved people of the country are so hungry for.

Asian babes not good enough for marketing mongs

Apparently Asian babes aren't good enough for the marketing morons at chav outfitters, the incorrectly named Top Shop.

When they decided to foist their tacky, ill-fitting clothing on the people of China, the advertising wonks didn't think to hire some local models to try to make their clobber look wearable.

Nope, instead they spunked 24 million euro on ageing addict Cocaine Kate.

According to one fashion victim, the reason why people keep giving this human car crash so much money for effectively just standing about looking bored while wearing clothes is because of her 'look.'

Now, I'm no fashion expert. So I rely on those morons who are to inform me as to what this magical 'look' is (since to my untutored eye she looks exactly like what she is, which is a skinny, coked-up chav from Croydon.)

And here's what they say:

"Kate Moss was so different when she first arrived on the fashion scene," says Jen Stevens, editor of U Magazine. "At the time the catwalks were filled with six-foot goddesses and then suddenly along came this short, pretty ordinary girl from Croydon. It was this 'difference' that drew everybody's attention and upon which she managed to build a career."

So it isn't her look, because she looks short and ordinary. My eyes weren't actually lying after all. Even the fashionistas think she looks like a chav.

Okay, let's try again. Maybe it's her winning personality? Nope again. In fact, she almost never speaks in public and barely ever in ads. One assumes her paymasters in the fashion industry are aware that the sound of her grating estuary tones would shatter the glamorous image they've spent a fortune on creating.

Is it perhaps her life story that inspires people? That's definitely what one fashion victim believes:

"Maybe it's because she's fallen so low and fought her way back up again," says model agency boss Celia Holman Lee. "She's shown a vulnerable side that people can relate to."

Yes, you heard that correctly. Cocaine Kate's tabloid fall from grace, not to mention her house-trashing antics and association with hard drugs and hard druggies, is something that we can all relate to. What a load of shit.

Which brings me back to the news item I began with. What the fuck are Top Shop paying this cokehead chav tens of millions for?

And if they really must pay people preposterous amounts of money to stand around looking bored while wearing clothes, what's wrong with paying some stunning looking Chinese babe who doesn't do tons of hard drugs and isn't closer to forty than twenty?

When the earth moves

I was in Athens during the last Olympics. One mid-afternoon, I was sitting on a balcony with a Greek friend when, literally, the earth moved.

I have to admit to squealing like a girl. We were on the fourth floor of a somewhat shoddy apartment block, after all. And when the ground beneath your feet jerks and trembles like shook cloth, it is disconcerting to say the least.

Afterwards, my friend took me out into the street and pointed out the red X marks on some adjoining derelict buildings. Those, he explained, were signs of condemnation - buildings that were no longer safe after the last large quake. What we had just experienced, he said, was just a little shudder.

Well, what they've experienced in Szechuan today is no little shudder. At 7.8 on the Richter scale, it is only marginally less powerful than that which sparked the tsunami on 26th December 2004.

This is a breaking news story and we will hear more as time progresses. But I've been to Chengdu. It's a very large city of very recently built concrete structures of high density, poor quality housing.

And I've been to the smaller towns in Szechuan too. They're even worse.

We're hearing that six schools have collapsed trapping the pupils inside. We're hearing that tens of thousands of people have been killed. I don't doubt these stories. They tally with what I know of the infrastructure of the region.

Hopefully, unlike their puppets in Burma, The Chinese Communist Party will acknowledge the need for external help in the face of a horrific natural disaster.

Hopefully, the world will not turn their face away from the innocent victims of both these tragedies, purely because their governments are incompetent, totalitarian regimes.

Hopefully, these tragedies will shake our preconceptions of the peoples of South East Asia, and our response to their tragedies will shake their preconceptions of us.

Could this be the beginning of the end?

The Chinese themselves are now rising up against the police state apparatus of the ruling Communist Party junta.

In Gansu, some of those protesting may well be Tibetan or from some other ethnic minority.

But in Sichuan, they are Han Chinese, albeit not of the type to kow-tow to the whims of Beijing. In my experience, the Sichuanese are as fiery as the chilis they dose their famous cuisine with.

Hopefully, the solidarity they are showing with their Tibetan neighbours will be as potent and long-lasting.

The Beijing Junta can no longer lie that the protests are in anyway being co-ordinated by what they pathetically call the 'Dalai Lama clique'. Now it is Chinese who are protesting for their freedoms too, taking a lead from the Tibetans.

Hopefully this will now spread to the Eastern cities. Specifically, it would be fantastic to see people protesting the dictatorship in Shanghai and Beijing.

While some might have trepidations about a second Tiananmen Square massacre, I personally suspect that simultaneous, sustained protests in the West and the East would be sufficient to finally bring down the most murderous regime in human history.

What cannot happen is for there to be any wavering outside of China. Gordon Brown must ignore the Chinese and meet with the Dalai Lama. We in the privilege of European democracies must keep the pressure on the Chinese.

Write to the Department of Foreign Affairs demanding a statement of condemnation from Dermot Ahern. And boycott the Beijing genocide Olympics.

Lhasa is burning

Lhasa is burning today. The town on the roof of the world, the inspiration for Shangri-La, the spiritual home of Tibetans is aflame.

Tibetans are demanding their freedom, which was taken from them by a military invasion nearly fifty years ago by the Chinese communists.

Tibet is NOT part of China. It NEVER WAS part of China historically. The Tibetans speak their own language, have their own venerable history, their own religion and their own rich culture. They aren't Chinese and never will be.

So instead, China seeks to eradicate them. This is the world's quietest genocide, a murder of an entire culture by the slow process of murder, arrests, tortures but also mass immigration into their land from Han China, the Sinization of their towns like Lhasa.

In an astonishing display of compromise, the Dalai Lama, the Tibetan spiritual and political leader, has long sought to negotiate a deal with China that would prevent the Sinization of Tibet by allowing Tibet autonomy within China.

In other words, they are prepared to sacrifice their independence forever in order to obtain a limited freedom in which their culture and people might manage to survive. China's response has been to close more monasteries, kill more Tibetans, and move millions more Han Chinese into Tibet.

In this Olympic year, even the profoundly pacifist Tibetans are not going to accept the ongoing murder of their culture. That is why Lhasa is burning today.

The fires over Lhasa are a much more genuine symbol of human endurance and the quest for freedom of expression and achievement than any sullied Olympic torch spluttering in the Beijing smog ever could be.

Boycott the Beijing Olympics. Show your support for the people of Tibet.

See also my account of visiting Lhasa last year.

UPDATE: It didn't take long for the Chinese to start murdering Tibetans, sadly.

Juntas don't vote for voting rights for all

Trocaire director Justin Kilcullen has called on the Irish Olympic Committee to consider a boycott of the Beijing games in protest at the Chinese authority's tacit refusal to put pressure on their fellow-travelling Military Junta in Burma.

At the Burma Action protest in Dublin on Saturday, Mr Kilcullen stated that the Olympics had gone to China in the hope that holding such an open and global event would encourage the Chinese Communist Party to move faster on providing basic human rights to the citizens of China.

"However China hasn’t kept up its side of the contract," he said, and who can disagree?

I've written before about how China has denied its people even access to information about themselves and the regime they suffer under, by firewalling the internet.

Their pals in Burma have gone one step further and switched net access off throughout the country in the hope of preventing images of their brutality leaking to media outlets outside of Burma.

I've spoken in the past about how China has abused its military might by occupying a sovereign nation's territory and seeking to wipe them out culturally and politically.

Of course, The Karen people of Northern Burma might well see a parallel there in their own fate. They have fought an intermittent insurgency against the illegal military junta for years. They have reaped genocide as their reward.

I've even highlighted how China has behaved in exactly the same way to its own internal demands for democracy as the Burmese Junta are doing now - with military force and the shooting of unarmed, peaceful protesters.

It is therefore foolish to expect such a regime to exert pressure on an identical one to encourage a democratic process. Turkeys don't vote for Christmas, and military juntas don't vote for voting rights for all.

Nevertheless, as I wrote last week, the Chinese are in a major quandary on this one. They cannot be seen overtly supporting the suppression of a people's demand for freedom, especially by such an internationally unpopular regime.

The world has spoken in relation to Burma, but it must keep speaking out if the UN mission to Burma is to achieve anything. It must also keep speaking out in order to force change in Burma, not only for the benefit of the people of Burma, the Burmese, the Karen, the other ethnic minorities.

It must keep speaking out because only when Burma is free of this horror, can we hold out a slender sliver of hope for the people of Tibet, for the people of China itself, all of whom yearn for their own sovereignty and for democracy, for human rights and freedom.

So for all of those reasons, we should support Trocaire's call for a boycott of the Beijing Olympics.

Burmese Days

If you were a military junta that had dominated your populace by terror for decades, you'd be pretty unhappy to see your neighbouring puppet junta facing democracy protests from hundreds of thousands of civilians and religious monks.

And if you had a major world event to put on within twelve months, which you hope to use to whitewash and normalise your regime in the eyes of the world, then you'd be panicking over what to do.

Pity the poor Chinese government. Do they assist the Burmese military in viciously suppressing the demands for democracy, risking a worldwide reaction, or do they leave well alone, and risk seeing another protest in Tiananmen Square next week?

Actually, don't pity them. Instead, offer your support to the Burmese demands for democracy. Petition your local representatives. Email Bertie Ahern (he might get a chance to read them after he's finished spoofing to the Mahon Tribunal).

Congratulations are due to Foreign Minister Dermot Ahern for speaking out in favour of Burmese democracy. Ireland needs to support this burgeoning revolution. We need to call for the release of Nobel Prize winner Aung San Suu Kyi now.

Otherwise, it might look like we're a bunch of racists who only support democracy when it's nice white Europeans asking for it. Nice white Europeans who we can get to come and serve us coffee for minimum wage in Dublin afterwards.

Chinese bad habits

The Chinese government are telling their people to quit their bad habits in advance of next year's Olympics in Beijing.

Reuters reports that citizens are being warned not to swear, spit or litter, and to learn how to queue in a line properly.

Such a terrible pity that it's not the other way round. I've little doubt that the Chinese people would only love to tell the Government to quit their bad habits, which are a lot more serious that clearing your throat in public or failing to line up neatly.

Invading sovereign nations like Tibet and subjugating them, for example. That's a very nasty habit of the Chinese Communist Party.

Or stifling all dissent by murdering or incarcerating anyone who dares protest against any aspect of the regime. That's a very nasty habit dating back to the time of that crazy old psychopath, Chairman Mao.

Starving the people in needless famines, that's probably the most nasty of the habits of the Chinese one-party government. They've done it repeatedly too, causing tens of millions of deaths.

And rewriting history to suit their own ends, so that everything they don't like, such as the KMT's leading role in defeating the Japanese during the war, or the Tiananmen Square democracy massacre of 1989, gets airbrushed out of their history. That's a tremendously nasty habit right there.

There are plenty of bad habits that ought to be corrected before China is permitted to hold a global event like the Olympics. But spitting and swearing are the least of them, I'd suggest.

Boycott the Beijing Olympics.

Remembering Tiananmen

I've been looking for an excuse to blog again about China, and it looks like the ageing Junta in charge of the world's fastest growing economy have given me one.

The editor of the Chengdu Evening News - a paper I've seen, but being unable to read Mandarin, I can't vouch for its quality one way or the other - has been sacked for publishing a one-line classified ad.

What heinous statement could this advert have made, for it to have cost the job and career of a regional newspaper editor? What horrific sentiment could it have contained, for the state to have sent dozens of people out on the street to retrieve copies of the paper, or for a crack investigative team to have flown from Beijing to get to the bottom of the issue?

Here's what the microscopic ad on page 14 of yesterday's paper said: "Saluting the strong mothers of victims of 64."

If you're still confused, let me add that 64 refers to the fourth of June. If that's still unclear, and it probably would be for most of us in the West, then it's probably important to recall that on the fourth of June 1989, the Chinese Junta sent tanks into Tiananmen Square to mow down protestors who were demanding more democratic rights.

Tiananmen Square was the nerve centre of the liberation movement that was smothered at birth. As freedom spread across the former communist world of Eastern Europe that same year, it was strangled with tanks in Beijing.

For 18 years, any mention of how the state mowed down their own people in the name of dictatorship has been brutally silenced in China. And now that they run Hong Kong too, they're also seeking to silence dissent in the most democratic part of their realm.

The South China Morning Post and the Standard, Hong Kong's main English language papers, reported extensively on a major row last month when Beijing puppet Ma Lik sought to play down and joke about the Tiananmen massacre.

At least in Hong Kong, the massacre is still remembered each year, and thankfully there was a predictably irate response from pro-democracy campaigners to Ma Lik's comments that people couldn't have been minced by tanks in the square and that the death toll was greatly exaggerated.

For us in the West, it would be all too easy to forget that China is the world's biggest police state, intent on smothering the democratic rights of its citizens with violence. It is all too easy to visit Beijing, tour the forbidden palace and other sights, forgetting how the students were mowed down by their own government.

It would be easy to ignore the occupation of Tibet and the denial of full democracy to Hong Kong.

Beijing desperately wants us to forget all of these things, and is spending billions on hosting the Olympics next year in an attempt to convince us that it is a respectable world power now.

It isn't. If you need proof of that, ask the editor of the Chengdu Evening News, if you can find what re-education camp he's been sent to. Ask the mothers of those murdered by the state in Tiananmen Square on June 4th 1989.

Frankly, I'm not normally a fan of boycotts. But these Olympics should be boycotted by all decent thinking people, in order to show solidarity with the Chinese people and not with their corrupt ruling class.

Unlike the joyous atmosphere of Athens in 2004, which I attended, the Beijing Olympics will be built on fear, denial of human rights and the threat of murder. Hardly the spirit of the Olympics, is it?

And while the people of China face the threat of incarceration for merely mentioning Tiananmen Square, it is incumbent on the free world to remember it for them. To remember it, and ultimately to hold the Communist Party ruling elite responsible for it.

Why Irish builders should move to Tibet

We all know there's a 'downturn' under way in the Irish construction market. This has something to do with the fact that Irish houseprices are currently marginally more unbelievable than the toothfairy and the Yeti in a clinch.

But it also has something to do with the revelation that a quarter of a million houses in the country are lying empty according to the last census.

We have all the houses we already need. Why pay the silly prices being asked? Once that penny dropped for people, so did the asking prices.

As we watch Irish house prices flutter downwards towards something vaguely and distantly resembling normality, let us consider the plight of the poor, downtrodden property developer.

Yes, he will have smirked wryly to himself over a nice Scotch at the golf club this weekend as news permeated his idyll that his old pals in Fianna Fail have been returned for another five years of playing 'protect the builder.'

But the bottom line is that all the pips have already been squeezed out of that orange.

It's always worth chancing your arm trying to flog crap holiday homes in places no one's heard of, like Cape Verde, especially if people trust you, like they do Eddie Hobbs.

But for most builders, interested only in their declared mission in life of knocking out substandard homes for over the odds prices as quickly as possible, the prospect of slogging it out in the Cape Verde villa market does not appeal.

So what to do? Time to move to Lhasa, I'd suggest.

The ancient capital of Tibet consisted of the Potala Palace, home of the Dalai Lama, and the Jokhang Temple, around which Tibet's main tourist drag of Barkhor Street now runs (see pic of Barkhor above).

A photo I have of Lhasa in 1916 indicates these two buildings as the only things on the entire plain between the Himalayan ranges. Nowadays, the entire stretch of the city, from the Norbulingka Palace to beyond the Barkhor Area, is a predominantly Tibetan 'old' town.

This in itself is odd, given how Tibetans are traditionally semi-nomadic, following their yaks in semi-permanent tents for much of the year, often going on pilgrimages solo, spending time at sacred lakes or sites in contemplation and so on.

But there you go, Lhasa the city exists. But there is another Lhasa - the Chinese immigrant city best viewed from the back of the Potala. This is twice the size of the Tibetan city, and is, apart from its relative cleanliness, indistinguishable from any other Chinese city.

This end of town has the little kids in their sports tracksuit school uniforms, the Bank of China ATMs, the garish neon signs for cheap hotels or good Sichuan food, the travel agents, the shopping centres, the gated communities, the car showrooms.

This is the product, not only of sixty years of Chinese occupation, but also of the dozen flights and numerous trains daily arriving in Lhasa from China in recent years. Lhasa is a Chinese boomtown right now, and Chinese from all over the Middle Kingdom are arriving looking for work or to make a fortune out of foreign tourists.

It's the wild west, from China's perspective, especially since the SARs of Hong Kong and Macau are off-limits for most Chinese.

Now, currently China is gobbling up a quarter of the world's cement, a similar amount of the world's steel and all sorts of other construction materials as it tries to build its way out of murky economic waters, create the Beijing Olympics, renovate Shanghai as a financial centre, and cater for an indigenous property speculation and stock speculation drive.

Mostly, this building is going on in the East, in places like Shenzhen and Shanghai, as well as in Beijing for the Olympics. But the exception is Tibet, where building of housing and massive infrastructure is proceeding at breakneck pace, presumably in an attempt to increase the rate of cultural colonisation and Sinization in Tibet.

Now, it would seem to me that a canny Irish builder looking for a bit of work to tide him over between Irish property boom cycles could do worse than pop over to Tibet right now.

There's no end of work for immoral, shady developers used to corruption and backhanders, who are practised in the dark arts of throwing up developments as quickly and shoddily as possible.

Form an orderly queue, lads.

Great firewall of China

Hi.

Or, in the current circumstances, ni hao.

Sorry for the lack of updates.

Please blame the great firewall of China for stifling my normal loquaciousness.

Normal service will be resumed shortly.

In the meantime, here's a nice pic of a pagoda in the Sichuan city of Chengdu for you all to enjoy.

Ta ta for now.

Idiots rule

Like the song goes, idiots rule. But for them to rule, then a large proportion of the rest of us have to follow. Which makes us the even bigger idiots. How does this work? Let's examine a few current examples:

1. China expects to be short by about 30 million marriageable women by 2020. This one's not rocket science. They couldn't have seen it coming?

Okay, so first the Government tells you to stop breeding under pain of death and prescribes stringent laws punishing people for having more than one child. What to do? Overthrow your mad-as-a-brush government is what.

Don't listen to the idiots - if you do, you end up killing your girl children and your sole son will have no one to marry when he grows up, which he will have to do entirely surrounded by other lads, which will probably make him gay.

2. A thousand Poles have applied to join the PSNI. Again, when you throw the doors open for half of Eastern Europe to come in, sooner or later those people are going to want the nice public sector sinecure jobs instead of the nasty meat-packing ones. This one could have been predicted.

But again, idiots rule. Why? Well, primarily because such is the endemic xenophobia in Northern Ireland that Polish officers could expect plenty of trouble everywhere they go.

Also because there does not appear to be sufficient vetting of the candidates, and because even Poles with police experience back East are unlikely to be suitable due to the fact that up until not very long ago their police were psychos suppressing the people.

Not unlike the PSNI, you say? Fair enough. As you were, gentlemen.

Don't listen to the idiots who reckon you deserve a yellow-pack police service, people. My suggestion? When PC Pawel comes knocking on the door, conduct your conversation in Irish or Ulster-Scots. If he arrests you, appeal to Nuala O'Loan. You'll get off, you'll get millions in compensation and Pawel will be deported.

3. Also, little Albania has shown up the rest of us so-called civilised countries by taking in as refugees those people who, after five years (Happy Birthday, Gitmo!) of incarceration by the US in Guantanamo Bay, have been proved innocent but are unable to return to their homelands for fear of death.

America is sending these people to Albania because, of course, it fears for their safety and is concerned about human rights in their countries of origin, which include Uzbekistan, Algeria, Tunisia, Egypt and Libya.

According to the US State Department's deputy director for War Crimes (yes, they really have such a role in Government, and no, she isn't pursuing George W!), one Sandy Hodgkinson, "The US position is clear."

Tell us what that position is please, Sandy?

"We will not send individuals to places where we believe it is more than likely they will be tortured," she says. So that's nice and clear. Except for one thing: The US sent them to be tortured BEFORE they got to Gitmo, and the entire time they were held against all international law and human rights IN Gitmo.

Among the places, Gitmo incarcerents were sent to be tortured by the CIA are Uzbekistan and Egypt, ironically enough. So why the sudden crisis of conscience when letting them out?

Yes, idiots rule alright. Don't listen to the idiots who tell you they're concerned about torture and human rights while they're simultaneously practising torture and ignoring human rights. Their double-think permits them to rule you despite their being idiots.

Getting a rise out of Chinese 'medicine'

It came as no surprise to me to hear that some unscrupulous Chinese medicine practitioners in Northern Ireland have been dosing their Oriental snake oils for impotence with Viagra.

This doesn't surprise me for two reasons. Firstly, I have first hand experience that Chinese medicine doesn't work, and secondly, Chinese people rarely pass up a genuine business opportunity.

If the GP's research is correct, and I appreciate the vested interests involved in his motivation for researching this, then it seems like some naughty Chinese medicine practitioners saw fit to take a substance that ought only be sold subject to a doctor's prescription and add it to some amusingly exotic looking and sounding herbal treatments to make them actually work, while simultaneously quadrupling the price for gullible Westerners.

Nice mark-up if you can get it. Since there are no formal qualification requirements to open up a Chinese medical practice, anybody of an Asian extraction can open up premises with some inscrutable Asian qualifications mounted on the wall, and sell quack cures to the gullible with relative impugnity.

And it's only when they get supergreedy and start adding generic Viagra to their impotence snake oil, and a vigilant doctor catches them out, does anyone stop to think of the potential dangers of these charlatans.

Does Chinese 'medicine' work? No doubt some of their herbal remedies have certain physiological effects. In fact, some of them are actually downright dangerous. And when they include prescription drugs, you can see how dangerous it can be to permit people with no medical training to be handing these substances out.

Once, on a trip to Beijing, I decided to visit the Great Wall of China and the Ming era tombs of the Emperors. Like so many tourists before me, I was kidnapped into a traditional Chinese medicine centre near the tombs, so that the operation could try to sell us shit we didn't need.

Or as they put it, 'to permit us the pleasure and excitement of diagnosis of our ails by the most estimable doctors of China.'

The brief backstory is that I was actually viciously hungover and also suffering the after-effects of a kidney infection I'd caught in Russia. My travelling companion, however, was in rude good health.

The experts of the clinic, dressed in white lab coats gave us a talk and then mingled to 'diagnose' us, by drumming lightly on our pulse points with three fingers. These people made a great deal out of having treated Chairman Mao no less back in the Seventies. It seemed churlish to point out he died shortly afterwards.

I was declared hail and hearty by my attendant consultant, albeit in need of something anti-inflammatory for my entirely unpained ankle. Its yin and yang were allegedly out of kilter, requiring a $20 purchase of some random ointment that was swiftly produced from a box and waved in my face.

My colleague, however, was warned severely about heart, kidney and liver troubles, and it was sternly advised that she part with nigh on $100 for seemingly randomly chosen boxes of pills and tinctures.

I refused and so did she, at first politely then with increasing annoyance and frustration. It became evident that our tour group was captured until someone parted with money for some quack cure.

Eventually, an American gave in and on we went. I noticed that he smartly dumped the 'cure' in a bin at the tomb site, later.

As with all placebo cures, there will be some who will claim miraculous results from the kindly attentions of their local well- (or ill-) meaning Chinese quack doctor with his amazing exotic array of Oriental herbs and preparations, so evocative of a medieval apothecary.

But the bottom line for me is that Chinese medicine is not evidence based medicine.

And medicine that is not evidence based,
medicine that seeks to diagnose by drumming on the pulse points only,
medicine that proffers expensive and potentially dangerous cures without first investigating whether patients are already taking medications,
medicine that thinks it is okay to adulterate snake oil cures with knocked-off prescription drugs,

- such medicine is bad medicine indeed.