Sold out

There I was, parked on the Northern Line with my tuna sandwich, square cut crisps and bottle of water taking a 'travelling' lunch' on the way down to Balham to pick up a cream coloured Hafele under-counter kitchen pull bin. Refurbished house, y'see. I felt good. Wrote two posts this morning. Some good work on my script. Felt like I'd cleaned out the old mental system for the day. So I glance down at the Guardian as I pop a light, salted potato snack into my mouth, and another, then three at once, glug of water.

And I saw this.

And I brought all back up again. But it was the Northern Line, so no one noticed much difference.

OK: Halliburton is going to own our nuclear energy industry. Which, with fossil fuel resources rapidly depleting means that they will own our lives. And all because Tony Blair told them, it would be OK by him. Which, even for the most cynical amongst us, is rather surprising...

It is the latest example of British willingness to sell off sensitive industries once considered vital to national strategic interests. Despite astonishment from other countries, which balk at foreign ownership of of their defence and energy complexes, the government seems relaxed about key national assets such as missile ranges and the operation of nuclear plants moving into private - and foreign - hands despite security issues in both sectors at a time of heightened concern about terrorism.

Beautiful. I'm so glad to ruled by a 'relaxed' government. Wouldn't want them all stressed about handing the keys to our future to a bunch of sociopathic robber baron Texan crony capitalist corporate criminal motherfuckers!!!!!!

Jesus Christ.

And that's not all.

Before they fuck us, Halliburton is going to fuck the futures of all its new (ex) workers -

Mike Graham, north-west secretary for the Prospect union, which represents thousands of workers at BNFL, says these sell-offs raise environmental, safety and staffing issues. Not least is the position of the huge pension fund which is currently in state hands.

Oh well, at least we have an opposition party who'll be all over this. Right?

No. There is no opposition.

I dunno. New Labour had a soul. It was little crusty and weird and fruity a bit like your vegan uncle who used to go on CND marches, but it was better than nothing. And anyway, then Robin Cook and Mo Mowlam died and the smirking twat we call our PM wouldn't even let them have a memorial at their beloved Party conference because people might show a little bit of emotion and he was too busy ordering security to bum rush OAPs inbetween taking orders from Rupert Murdoch on how to handle European policy over canapes and champagne.

Fuck.

Fuck fuck fuck.

Fucking Halliburton.

How can they? Oh, it's the free market now, global economy, get your head outta the past, be real, this is how the world works, yadda yadda yadda.

Well you know what, Tony Blair and all his little monkeys can shove Halliburton right up their arses. Let Halliburton take care of their colon. See how they like it when a bunch of $30,000 a month Texan contract workers hardwire their bowels to their lungs and they find they're breathing shit and they can't even get it fixed because now Halliburton owns all their internal organs and the only way to get treatment is to pay $100,000 on loan to a doctor who's part of a Halliburton subsidiary who prescribes them thousands of dollars worth of unregulated drugs that completely fuck up their minds and hammer them with physical side-effects all from another Halliburton subsidiary that was doing really badly ever since they got banned from selling chemical weapons to 3rd World dictators we used to support till they fell on the wrong side of geopolitical shell game and now the subsidiary has been given the contract of further fucking the bodies of all the people internally owned by Halliburton but wait! - that's not all - with all this cash you're throwing down so Halliburton can fuck you ever worse now you're so badly in hoc to your credit card company you have to declare yourself bankrupt so they'll own the entire rest of your life and that of your children and their children after them. See how they like that. See if they even crack a grimace on their branded, lobbied, focus-grouped, botoxed little gobs.

OK. Getting anxious. Time to relax. Play whalesong.

Must enter sleep pod.

"We're all completely fucked"

Well, despite all my elitist carping in the post below - now what was Tony Blair's phrase, "book reading intellectuals" or some such? - I must give credit to the Labour Party where credit's due. There's a post coming up for chair of the Joint Intelligence Committee, those chaps who did such a fine job "getting it all wrong" on Iraq, WMDs,the truth etc., and they certainly seem to be hiring someone with the right attitude for the job.

Say hello to Sir Richard Mottram, the man whose claim to fame, and entry into the dictionary of political quotations, is the following analysis of Jo Moore's 9/11 "now's a fine time to bury bad news" micro-scandal - "We're all fucked. I'm fucked. You're fucked. The whole department's fucked. It's been the biggest cock-up ever and we're all completely fucked."

Now, that's my kind of civil servant.

And you know what? With some of the things coming down the pike stemming from dear leader's advance on Stalingrad... er, I mean, Iraq, his cheeky little renunciation of international climate control and other, bigger, more general unavoidable crazy shit about to ensue, I suspect "we're all fucked" is a phrase Sir Richard will be using rather frequently.

If You Have to be a Wanker...

... then do it right.

I would suggest that once you send in the gorillas to 'handle' an 82 year old man, then you are defintely a wanker. See... it's kinda like crossing a Rubicon, for those of you with a classical historical bent. You know, if you want to be a not-wanker then - don't bully old people. Don't steal candy from babies. Don't flip your blind girlfriend the bird as you tell her you love her. And don't kill Bambi.

If, on the other hand, you choose to be a wanker... Know yourself, my friend. Be out. Be proud.

That's why the Labour Party's apology to Walter Wolfgang is just so much b.s. They set the goon squad on an 82 year old who fought Nazis, for Chrissakes. Whatever cuddly image there was - it's over. The mask has slipped. The clown has been caught exposing himself to the birthday boy. It's no more Mr Nice Guy. So don't apologise - tell him to go fuck himself. In fact, Tony Blair should send some guys to his hotel room at 3 in the morning to pin him down while they chuck his dentures in the loo. Then Blair should go on national TV and tell anyone else who wants to disagree with him that he'll cut their disability allowance or something. Little girl at a Primary School visit looks at the PM the wrong way? He needs to ask what business it is of hers, then head butt her and stare at the rest of the class in the pindrop silence that reigns demanding "who else wants to know".

In fact, amongst the caramel-tanned apprachicks sharing the podium with their rictus smiles the only one who seems to get it is John Reid. A true thug - but quite content with his thuggishness. Indeed, his welcome to Walter, re-accredited and back in the hall was a classic unveiled threat - "Hi Walter, shout out if you're here... Or perhaps you shouldn't" - was a simple, but effective example of the "watch your back, buddy" or the "see, there's some very bad guys you need protection from" variety.

And there you go, it's really not hard being a cunt.

And as for all the rest of you political cyborgs - go all the way, dickheads, because you ain't fooling any of us anymore.

Cue Who song, fade all the way to end.

Dawn of the Cephalopod

They finally found it.

And that's fantastic news. For anyone brought up on the movie version of 20,000 Leagues Under the Deep and giant monster picture books you'll know what I mean and join me in awe and rejoicing... That's right, the giant squid lives amongst us. And an awesome, liminal, alien sight it is too...

So, now that's under our belt: it's time to get busy.

Someone rent out the New Orleans Superdome - heaven knows, it must be going cheap these days and lots of bad vibes there, the place needs a little radical re-imagineering - line it till its watertight and fill it with salt water. Import a large, aggressive adult sperm whale from the South Pacific. Ship in the magnificently named Architeuthis squid and... Let's rumble.

Fight of the century, my friend. If you're a giant squidophile, you'll be breathless with anticipation.

Quote of the Week

On the Bush 'dynasty'. From my new favourite blog:

Christ. It's just one family. Everyone can't be Fredo.

Which just about sums it up, my droogies.

New Values

So, Pope Jerkoff I is racing down the pike with his freakozoid dark emperor Dr Evil smile and a new plan - or should I say encyclical - to cauterize the church of its ills:

The new Pope faces his first controversy over the direction of the Catholic church after it was revealed that the Vatican has drawn up a religious instruction preventing gay men from being priests.

{...}

The document expresses the church's belief that gay men should no longer be allowed to enter seminaries to study for the priesthood. Currently, as all priests take a vow of celibacy, their sexual orientation has not been considered a pressing concern.

{...}

The instruction was drawn up as part of the Vatican's response to the sexual abuse scandal that surfaced in the American church three years ago, which has seen hundreds of priests launch lawsuits against superiors whom they accuse of abusing them.

As the former head of the Congregation of the Doctrine of the Faith, the Vatican body charged with looking into the abuse claims, Benedict, then Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger, was made acutely aware of the scale of the problem. He is thought to have made clearing up the scandal one of the key goals of his papacy.

Next month the Vatican will send investigators to the US to gauge the scale of the scandal. More than 100 bishops and seminary staff will visit 220 campuses. They will review documents provided by the schools and seminaries and may interview teachers, students and alumni, then report directly to the Vatican, which could choose to issue the instruction barring homosexuals from entering the priesthood as part of its response.

Studies show that a significant proportion of men who enter seminaries to train for the priesthood are gay. Any move signalling that homosexuals will not be allowed to join the seminaries, even one couched in the arcane language of the Vatican, could reduce the number of recruits to the priesthood.

Now, you know that's all well and good. The Catholic church does have a huge pedophilia problem involving homosexual priests and it's correct that this needs to be tackled. But this new-found initiative is about thirty years and 8 billion dollars in legal damages too late. The issue of homosexual priests in a celibate church is now ingrained. A vast proportion of the Catholic church - as much as 50% - is made up of gay priests. Are all of them pedophiles? Of course not. But the problem has been dealt with in such a ham-fisted, dishonest, counterproductive way that the line is forever blurred and distorted in the public's mind. That's just the way things are and no amount of dogma or newly-dusted encyclicals is going to fix it. In fact, the explicit exclusion of gay clergy this late in the game is just another step by the Catholic church to writing itself closer to insignificance. They have declared war on a vast proportion of the remaining foot soldiers in an army that's already rapidly diminishing. What's the answer? Well, there is no answer, not now.

The damage has been done by decades of fundamentalist dogma, willful ignorance and ostrich like sand burrowing. The time to fix this was decades ago, when the families of abused victims were pleading with Cardinal Ratzinger to take this problem seriously, to deal with it head on and cauterize the cancer that lay in his beloved institution. Well, he refused. He decided, as always with those who savour the taste of power and self-importance, to cast the victims, their families to the wind and to protect his own. Child fiddlers, liars and destroyers of lives who hunkered in grim self-importance beneath the roof of God. He believed the problem would go away. That the institution would outlive it. And now, decades later he finds himself trying to plug the dyke, the crumbling levee if you will, with a piece of paper that writes his clergy into insignificance.

When will these people learn? When will we learn? We live in an age of triumphant, bloated fundamentalism teetering beneath the suppurating weight of its own indignant self-righteousness. Whether its the paleo/theo/neo/everyman -for-himself-cons in the United States who've finally gotten the wish-list they've been salivating over since the Goldwater 60s - imperial war in the Middle East! Unending cycles of tax cuts for the topmost slither of superwealth! Total demonisation of the poor and the black! - whether it's the psycho-Islamist death worshippers of Afghanistan and the Hindu Kush eating dates and cheese in caves built by European engineers while mindfucked college students are sent off to self-immolate school busses in the name of a false God that exists only in the darkest hell of men's hearts.

Whether it's the spiritual leader of a church founded on brotherly love and communitarian values who places power beyond weakness, scrap dogma and the twisted foibles of his own centurions over the everyday struggle of his desperate flock. Whether it's Sharon, corrupt and corpulent, Cheney, Putin, or whoever else should weevil out of the woodwork these days the bad guys are in charge. They don't represenet conservatism, true bedrock values. They represent a self-perpetuating feedback loop. A mindset engendered by granite belief. Word of God, self-deification, it doesn't matter what you call it, it's the same - we're being guided by petty, spoilt little psychopaths. Gilded men - and they all seem to be men - gorging on the cheaply perfumed aroma of righteousness because it brings a lift to their pathtic corrupt wizened little hearts.

And yes, they are all the fucking same:

"When the Muslim College, a London-based center of Islamic learning, held a seminar for Muslim, Christian and Jewish conservatives, the participants had a shock of self-recognition, says Zaki Badawi, an Egyptian religious scholar who heads the college. Suddenly, they realized they shared attitudes and world views. Whatever their stripe, fundamentalists are absolutists at heart, says Badawi. 'They don t like to hear other ideas at all. They want to hear their own voice, and are suspicious of anyone else's.'"

The only thing to add is - fundamentalists aren't all religious. Fundamentalism is a state of mind. Knee-jerk, tunnel vision. A reduction of all things, all complexities - some of them no doubt frustrating and irrelevant - down to a monolithic, immovable truth that justifies everything at every level. Everything is permitted - if you're doing it in the name of... Whoever. And as we're all human, last time I checked, that irreversably reduces to a justification of one's own's actions. Not God's, the proletariat's, the innocent seal cubs on Baffin island. But whatever breathes in a human mind.

Human friendly Dolphin

Whoa.

Someone needs to do a straw poll as to when exactly our universe bifurcated, we left reality behind and entered that parallel realm where the bizarre and the irreal are now the dominant forces. I don't know. I put it down to the moment when President Clinton got caught getting a blow job in the Oval Office. There was something so strange and National Lampoon's President's Day about it that it ceased to be a solid discernable event in my mind. something that could be judged with any weight. When the President of the free world acts like a hypersexed corndog Chevy Chase there is no rational, actionable response. No moral high or low ground. It is simply ludicrous and cannot be processed as a real event. Then, when the minutiae of his oral infidelity was printed in multitudinous volume and released on the internet (we forget the malice with which that was enacted. The desperate desire for final, ultimate personal desecration. A psycho-sadistic desire that is utterly psychotic) it became something even more bizarre, still unreal but now repulsive.

Anyway. much water under the bridge since then. We've had publicly stolen elections about which no one seemed to mind, Hollywood mini-apocalypses, terror masterminds hiding in cave complexes deep beneath the earth, anthrax in envelopes, suicide bombings, Paris-fucking-Hilton and a million metric tonnes more of the dross and sediment of a half-imagined plasticated irreality accumulating at an exponential rate till they threaten to overwhelm us completely.

A bit like the rising floodwaters pulsing against the weakened levees of New Orleans. They too broke, swamping the city like their cousin floodwaters that swamped the entire Gulf Coast. Destroying all in their path. Releasing toxic substances, primitive human urges... and packs of trained killer dolphins with high powered dart guns.

Oh yes.

Armed and dangerous - Flipper the firing dolphin let loose by Katrina

by Mark Townsend Houston
Sunday September 25, 2005

It may be the oddest tale to emerge from the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina. Armed dolphins, trained by the US military to shoot terrorists and pinpoint spies underwater, may be missing in the Gulf of Mexico.

Experts who have studied the US navy's cetacean training exercises claim the 36 mammals could be carrying 'toxic dart' guns. Divers and surfers risk attack, they claim, from a species considered to be among the planet's smartest. The US navy admits it has been training dolphins for military purposes, but has refused to confirm that any are missing.

Dolphins have been trained in attack-and-kill missions since the Cold War. The US Atlantic bottlenose dolphins have apparently been taught to shoot terrorists attacking military vessels. Their coastal compound was breached during the storm, sweeping them out to sea. But those who have studied the controversial use of dolphins in the US defence programme claim it is vital they are caught quickly.

Leo Sheridan, 72, a respected accident investigator who has worked for government and industry, said he had received intelligence from sources close to the US government's marine fisheries service confirming dolphins had escaped.

'My concern is that they have learnt to shoot at divers in wetsuits who have simulated terrorists in exercises. If divers or windsurfers are mistaken for a spy or suicide bomber and if equipped with special harnesses carrying toxic darts, they could fire,' he said. 'The darts are designed to put the target to sleep so they can be interrogated later, but what happens if the victim is not found for hours?'

Usually dolphins were controlled via signals transmitted through a neck harness. 'The question is, were these dolphins made secure before Katrina struck?' said Sheridan.

The mystery surfaced when a separate group of dolphins was washed from a commercial oceanarium on the Mississippi coast during Katrina. Eight were found with the navy's help, but the dolphins were not returned until US navy scientists had examined them.

Sheridan is convinced the scientists were keen to ensure the dolphins were not the navy's, understood to be kept in training ponds in a sound in Louisiana, close to Lake Pontchartrain, whose waters devastated New Orleans.

The navy launched the classified Cetacean Intelligence Mission in San Diego in 1989, where dolphins, fitted with harnesses and small electrodes planted under their skin, were taught to patrol and protect Trident submarines in harbour and stationary warships at sea.

Criticism from animal rights groups ensured the use of dolphins became more secretive. But the project gained impetus after the Yemen terror attack on the USS Cole in 2000. Dolphins have also been used to detect mines near an Iraqi port.

See, reality used to be a friend of mine. Then he started smoking some of that heavy shit and now he's gone all weird.

Thousands Dead. A City drowns. Government looks 'incompetent'. Hey - Not Such a Bad Deal After All

So Bush suffers some falling numbers, his guys look incompetent. So what?

One of the last remaining Democrat strongholds in the south gets wiped out, sizeable amount of voters never to return – a nice piece of redistricting. Corporate sponsors receive windfall reconstruction paychecks. Minimum wages recanted. Deficits increase, requiring stringent cuts to social programmes and entitlements. Attention sucked dry from hearings for a new Supreme court Justice. And now, the big one -

SOURCE: ASSOCIATED PRESS


Military May Play Bigger Relief Role
Sep 17 2:59 PM US/Eastern


By ROBERT BURNS
AP Military Writer

WASHINGTON

President Bush's push to give the military a bigger role in responding to major disasters like Hurricane Katrina could lead to a loosening of legal limits on the use of federal troops on U.S. soil.

Pentagon officials are reviewing that possibility, and some in Congress agree it needs to be considered.

Bush did not define the wider role he envisions for the military. But in his speech to the nation from New Orleans on Thursday, he alluded to the unmatched ability of federal troops to provide supplies, equipment, communications, transportation and other assets the military lumps under the label of "logistics."

The president called the military "the institution of our government most capable of massive logistical operations on a moment's notice."

At question, however, is how far to push the military role, which by law may not include actions that can be defined as law enforcement _ stopping traffic, searching people, seizing property or making arrests. That prohibition is spelled out in the Posse Comitatus Act of enacted after the Civil War mainly to prevent federal troops from supervising elections in former Confederate states.

Speaking on the Senate floor Thursday, Sen. John Warner, R-Va., chairman of the Armed Services Committee, said, "I believe the time has come that we reflect on the Posse Comitatus Act." He advocated giving the president and the secretary of defense "correct standby authorities" to manage disasters.

Presidents have long been reluctant to deploy U.S. troops domestically, leery of the image of federal troops patrolling in their own country or of embarrassing state and local officials.

The active-duty elements that Bush did send to Louisiana and Mississippi included some Army and Marine Corps helicopters and their crews, plus Navy ships. The main federal ground forces, led by troops of the 82nd Airborne Division from Fort Bragg, N.C., arrived late Saturday, five days after Katrina struck.

They helped with evacuations and performed search-and-rescue missions in flooded portions of New Orleans but did not join in law enforcement operations.

The federal troops were led by Lt. Gen. Russel Honore. The governors commanded their National Guard soldiers, sent from dozens of states.

Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld is reviewing a wide range of possible changes in the way the military could be used in domestic emergencies, spokesman Lawrence Di Rita said Friday. He said these included possible changes in the relationship between federal and state military authorities.

Under the existing relationship, a state's governor is chiefly responsible for disaster preparedness and response.

Governors can request assistance from the Federal Emergency Management Agency. If federal armed forces are brought in to help, they do so in support of FEMA, through the U.S. Northern Command, which was established in 2002 as part of a military reorganization after the 9/11 attacks.

Di Rita said Rumsfeld has not made recommendations to Bush, but among the issues he is examining is the viability of the Posse Comitatus Act. Di Rita called it one of the "very archaic laws" from a different era in U.S. history that limits the Pentagon's flexibility in responding to 21st century domestic crises.

Another such law, Di Rita said, is the Civil War-era Insurrection Act, which Bush could have invoked to waive the law enforcement restrictions of the Posse Comitatus Act. That would have enabled him to use either National Guard soldiers or active-duty troops _ or both _ to quell the looting and other lawlessness that broke out in New Orleans.

The Insurrection Act lets the president call troops into federal action inside the United States whenever "unlawful obstructions, combinations or assemblages _ or rebellion against the authority of the United States _ make it impracticable to enforce the laws" in any state.

The political problem in Katrina was that Bush would have had to impose federal command over the wishes of two governors _ Kathleen Blanco of Louisiana and Haley Barbour of Mississippi _ who made it clear they wanted to retain state control.

The last time the Insurrection Act was invoked was in 1992 when it was requested by California Gov. Pete Wilson after the outbreak of race riots in Los Angeles. President George H.W. Bush dispatched about 4,000 soldiers and Marines.

Di Rita cautioned against expecting quick answers to tough questions like whether Congress should define when to trigger the president's authority to send federal troops to take charge of an emergency, regardless of whether a governor agreed.

"Is there a way to define a threshold, or an anticipated threshold, above which a different set of relationships would kick in?" Di Rita asked. "That's a good question. It's only been two weeks, so don't expect us to have the answers. But those are the kinds of questions we need to be asking."

Ever get that feeling like you’re in the lion’s den and the sound of tortured steel and wind is the door snapping shut behind you...?

We are so fucked.