No more

Closing this sucka down.

Getting to paid blog elsewhere now.

That rulez.

How blogs work

A very interesting week for the bloggy world.

The biggest story of the week in Britain was uncovered by the blogger Guido Fawkes.

Hat tip to Guido.

And in the States, the good guys at The Exiled are continuing their excellent campaign to unmask Republican manipulation.

In Australia, the big story was a sensationalised and misrepresented load of twaddle from a newspaper that is on its last legs.

There's an excellent analysis of what blogging 'means' here from Kezia Dugdale, a prominent Scottish blogger.

Viva blogs! Death to the tree murderers!

Aaaaaargh mateys ...

Great piece from Johann Hari about the pirates. Continues at link etc.

Who imagined that in 2009, the world's governments would be declaring a new War on Pirates? As you read this, the British Royal Navy - backed by the ships of more than two dozen nations, from the US to China - is sailing into Somalian waters to take on men we still picture as parrot-on-the-shoulder pantomime villains. They will soon be fighting Somalian ships and even chasing the pirates onto land, into one of the most broken countries on earth. But behind the arrr-me-hearties oddness of this tale, there is an untold scandal. The people our governments are labeling as "one of the great menace of our times" have an extraordinary story to tell -- and some justice on their side.

Pirates have never been quite who we think they are. In the "golden age of piracy" - from 1650 to 1730 - the idea of the pirate as the senseless, savage thief that lingers today was created by the British government in a great propaganda-heave. Many ordinary people believed it was false: pirates were often rescued from the gallows by supportive crowds. Why? What did they see that we can't? In his book Villains of All nations, the historian Marcus Rediker pores through the evidence to find out. If you became a merchant or navy sailor then - plucked from the docks of London's East End, young and hungry - you ended up in a floating wooden Hell. You worked all hours on a cramped, half-starved ship, and if you slacked off for a second, the all-powerful captain would whip you with the Cat O' Nine Tails. If you slacked consistently, you could be thrown overboard. And at the end of months or years of this, you were often cheated of your wages.

Pirates were the first people to rebel against this world. They mutinied against their tyrannical captains - and created a different way of working on the seas. Once they had a ship, the pirates elected their captains, and made all their decisions collectively. They shared their bounty out in what Rediker calls "one of the most egalitarian plans for the disposition of resources to be found anywhere in the eighteenth century." They even took in escaped African slaves and lived with them as equals. The pirates showed "quite clearly - and subversively - that ships did not have to be run in the brutal and oppressive ways of the merchant service and the Royal navy." This is why they were popular, despite being unproductive thieves.

(Don't) Fuck (With) The Police

So The Met beat Ian Tomlinson to death and then lied about it.

And we're surprised? These would be the same police who pumped caps into Jean Charles De Menezes head, then lied about every single stage of what happened on the day.

All cops are dogs. FACT.

Anyway, here's Barney The Dinosaur's take on the po'po.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fmH3Gwf9UiY

WAGs (insert sad face) ...

Now the G20 and NATO summits are over, with radical decisions taken to chuck more money at the banks and send more soldiers to fight the unwinnable war in Afghanistan, at least we are going to be spared the sorry specatcle of the political WAG brigade.

As many of you know, I'm a solid feminist and a big supporter of chick's rights. And so when it comes to real footballer's WAGs, I'm fairly forgiving. Let's face it, there are always going to be a certain percentage of girls who are attracted to fame and power and if it means being roasted in a Manchester hotel to get near it, that's a price they are willing to pay.

But what is sickening now is the rise of the political WAG, as embodied by the hateful Carla Bruni.

I despise Carla Bruni. She is a little rich girl who played at dressing ups and then an awful musical 'career', breaking up more than one marriage along the way.

But now this clothes horse is held up as what a 'first lady' should be.

Excuse me? Michelle Obama is a Harvard educated woman who has forged a successful career in health care management. Kevin Rudd's wife, Therese Rein, has built a very lucrative international business. Sarah Brown was a prominent PR type who'd worked to create a thriving practice.

Yet these women are largely reduced to photo ops with Bruni, with the inevitable comparisons.

How come nobody sticks the boot into Bruni for failing to have achieved anything her life except take her clothes off and shag famous men?

The nasty politics ...

Labour MSP Lord George Foulkes claims Alex Salmond was playing politics by asking for FMQs to be cancelled as a mark of respect for the 16 men killed in the North Sea helicopter crash.

I don't think FMQs should have been effectively cancelled either, but I do think Foulkes is wide of the mark with this attack.

Especially given that from where I was sitting, he appeared to sleep though large sections of it anyway.

In fact, he tends to nod off fairly regularly in FMQs, when he is not heckling to the point of being told to shut up by the Presiding Officer.

Why torture doesn't work

I remember when Abu Zubaydah was captured and we were told it was the next best thing to getting Bin Laden himself and that by torturing him, the Yanks were gunna save zillions of lives.

Guess what?

Turns out, surprise surprise, that the Yanks were bullshitting.

Zubaydah was a mentally ill equivalent of an Al-Qaeda dogsbody who knew nothing about anything

And that torturing him only produced false leads that lead the Yanks to watse millions of hours and dollars chasing shadows.

Hot asterisk action

I like these threatening emails that have been sent to AIG executives. Nothing like a good old-fashioned threatening missive. The beautifully coy way in which the American papers apply asterisks somehow adds to the charm. The last one is by far the best.

Needless to say, I sympathise with the sentiments.

-- All you motherf***ers should be shot. Thanks for f***ing up our economy then taking our money.

-- Dear Sir: Ya'll should have the balls and come clean and give back the bonuses. I know you would never do this so the gov't ought to take you out back and shoot everyone of you crooked sonofb****es...I would be very careful when I went out side. This is just a warning. If I were ya'll I would be real afraid. Thanks, Bill.

-- I don't hope that bad things happen to the recipients of those bonuses. I really hope that bad things happen to the children and grandchildren of them! Whatever hurts them the most!!

-- You f***ing suck. Paying bonuses to the d*****s that made bad bets losing your company billions of dollars. I want to f***ing puke. Publish the list of those yankee scumbags so some good old southern boys can take care of them.

-- You mother-f***ing, c***s***ing, d***l****ers need to be taken out one by one and shot in the head. There's a special place in hell for you pond scum. Watch your backs because someone will come to get you, you can be sure.

Off with their heads!

Today the G20 protests begin in olde Lahndahn towne. Its the usual suspects coalition of unions, beardy left wing vicars and the concerned middle class marching through Hyde Park.

Good on them. We need everyone working to change the world in their own way.

But things will get interesting later in the week when the real protests kick off.

There is talk of storming the Stock Exchange, of occupying banks, of hanging effigies of bankers from lamposts.

This is just the start of what is required though. We need to hang some real bankers from lamposts in the Square Mile. Now.

If you are getting a bit squeamish at the thought, you would do well to read this fantastic piece from The Guardian's outgoing Africa correspondent Chris McGreal.

The crux of McGreal's recollections of his years covering Africa is when he describes watching the execution of a Hutu militia leader that had had not only personally murdered people, but even worse, had been a key figure in whipping up the bloodlust that saw one million Tutsi and liberal Hutu killed in 100 days.

Having witnessed first hand the horror of the genocide - the churches with bloody handprints on the wall, the hurriedly dug mass graves with limbs still sticking out of the dirt - McGreal notes with surprise that for all his lifelong Guardianista left liberal stance against the death penalty, watching the men responsible for the slaughter being executed themselves does not arouse any passion in him. Instead, he decides that they really do deserve to die.

We must be the same with the bankers. The Hutu Interhamwe may have killed with machetes, but the bankers did it with CDOs and plain greed.

And hundreds of thousands, if not millions, will die in the collapse they have caused. They will kill themselves - and increasingly their families and workmates, as Mark Ames at The Exile has noted - when they lose their jobs and homes. They will eat cheap shit food and die younger. Males become far more prone to acts of murderous violence. We will drink more and smoke more and do more drugs.

And that's without even contemplating the now rapidly looming reality that the only way the capitalist system can maintain control in this meltdown is with a good old large scale war.

So fuck the bankers and fuck their accomplices. Hang them from lamposts and take their shit.

Huzzah for the bobcat!

Yes! After my call of only a few days ago for more obscure animals to attack people, a bobcat has invaded an Arizona bar and laid into three folk.

Top work bobcat.

Sadly, the States being the States, local cops - the amusingly named Cottonwood Police - went and busted a few caps in its furry butt under the spurious excuse that said bobcat was infected with rabies or something.

Bonjour Madame La Guillotine

So mega thief and ruiner of tens of thousands of lives Sir Fred 'The Shred' Goodwin is having a big old sook because some people broke his windows and keyed his car.

Listen fucko, I retort, consider yourself very lucky it is only your windows that have been broken.

I have been calling for the selective public execution of various global criminals for a while now. Fred the Shred and that Cassano or whatever he's called from AIG would make an ideal opening pair.

But, you will mumble, having been brainwashed into a pathetic servility by decades of this neo-liberal gangster culture of ours, that won't ACHIEVE anything. Look at China, they execute corrupt executives and it doesn't stop corruption.

Oh yes it will achieve results. Firstly, natural justice will be served. These people are heartless criminals and need to be punished accordingly. I'm not calling for a cruel and unusual punishment. Just a burst to the back of the head from an AK. In public. After they have listed their crimes and expressed genuine remorse.

Secondly, there's a big difference between us and the Chinese. The Chinese have an inbuilt fatalism. The execs there who get caught know deep down that one day they will be and that their final destination will always be state exceution.

But the likes of Goodwin are different. They are bullies, psychopaths even and they honestly think they can get away with it. They are laughing at us as we speak. So what they say? You broke my windows? I screwed you out of billions and got away with it!

But once we dispense some traditional old style Kalashnikov justice to a few of them, their true cowardly nature will come out. We will encourage them to turn on each other and they will. We will offer some amnesty if they reveal the full misdeeds of the others and like the vile serpents they are, they will fall over themselves to condemn their old mates in order to save themselves.

And once we have executed those they informed on, we will kill the informers too.

And it will be glorious.

It's in them thar hills ...

Coming as I do from a part of the world that was literally born out of a gold rush -the storage vaults at the bottom of the Treasury building on Spring Street are something to behold - I must say I found this story about the second Californian gold rush quite heart warming.

In Victoria, they estimate that there are still tonnes of gold to be had, albeit much of it requiring deep mining, rather than the close to surface alluvial gold you can just pan out like these Californians are doing.

In fact, according to some estimates, there's so much gold left under Bendigo, that it would actually be economically viable to raze the twon and move its inhabitants, then dig the bugger up to get all the gold underneath.

Eureka!

Sickening stuff ...

As I've mentioned before, one thing I don't want to do here is get into the mindlessly boring Israeli - Palestinian conflict.

There's more than enough places on the Net where you can get yourself involved in that vicious little circular argument if you want.

But I couldn't not post this picture of this vile T-shirt available in Israel now that celebrates IDF snipers killing pregnant Palestinian women.

Every time you hear about how the Palestinians indoctrinate their kids to become murderers etc etc, think about this paragraph from the long Ha'aretz article at the link:

Dead babies, mothers weeping on their children's graves, a gun aimed at a child and bombed-out mosques - these are a few examples of the images Israel Defense Forces soldiers design these days to print on shirts they order to mark the end of training, or of field duty. The slogans accompanying the drawings are not exactly anemic either: A T-shirt for infantry snipers bears the inscription "Better use Durex," next to a picture of a dead Palestinian baby, with his weeping mother and a teddy bear beside him. A sharpshooter's T-shirt from the Givati Brigade's Shaked battalion shows a pregnant Palestinian woman with a bull's-eye superimposed on her belly, with the slogan, in English, "1 shot, 2 kills." A "graduation" shirt for those who have completed another snipers course depicts a Palestinian baby, who grows into a combative boy and then an armed adult, with the inscription, "No matter how it begins, we'll put an end to it."

Nasty

Regular readers of this blog will know that in between posting links to apocalyptic stories about the economic shitstorm and sticking the boots in Gordon Brown's Britain, I like to lighten things up by featuring heart-warming tales about people being eaten by various wild creatures.

Thus, I was intrigued to read this story today about a poor bugger in Indonesia who got mauled by two Komodo dragons after he fell out of a tree.

From the piece:

The reptiles, which can grow up to 10ft feet long and weigh as much as 150lbs (70kg ), have shark-like serrated teeth and a bite that can be deadly. Its saliva contains roughly 50 different known bacteria strains, so infection is a risk.

I reckon being attacked and partially devoured by Komodo dragons would probably be the worst thing that could happen in the realm of When Animals Attack, although as a mate pointed out, its probably not too much fun being mauled to death by any kind of wild animal.

My favourite - though obviously not for the unfortunate victim or her family - was when this poor scientist woman got mauled to death by a leopard seal while diving in Antarctica.

That's a pretty cool way to check out.

More politics later or tomorrow.

(And hopefully more obscure animals eating people)

Time to tape the clips together ...

We need to publicly execute some of those responsible for the financial crisis.

I'm normally against the death penalty but in a case like this where guilt is so obvious and the magnitude of the crime so enormous, occasionally you have to take action.

We could start with some of the senior staff at RBS and AIG. Despite us having to bail them out, these scum then pay themselves bonuses and fat pensions. If we don't take a stand, the parasitical gangsters that got us into this mess will realise that even as we stare into the precipice, we still haven't got the strength to really fight back.

If we don't act now, they will crush us forever. These people are psychopaths in the purest medical sense of the word. They only understand terror.

Anyone who doubts the need to use my old Russian friend the Kalashnikov to dispense some much needed justice - and more importantly, to draw a line in the sand - should read this and get back to me.

I'm not advocating full revolution. Just the murder of say 250 selected criminals to remind the rest that we mean fucking business and they best be falling into line.

The descent into national socialism

I have been saying for a while now that Britain is heading inexorably into a national socialist state.

The key ingredients are already in place. A well established security state. The state now owns the means of production - the financial services industry. And there is and always will be a strong latent racist/xenophobic strand to British culture, one this current government has no problem in stoking. See today's announcement about making Johnny Foreigner pay £50 more for a visa.

All we need now is the charismatic catalyst, the man or woman, who puts the ingredients into the pot and cooks up the vile soup. It will happen. He/she is out there.

But what of the United States? Will The Age Of Obama mark the beginning of the end for anything resembling democracy in the US?

Is, as this long but very insightful article argues, the Obama presidency the new Weimar Republic?

Because we all know what happened to that.

Expose the charlatans and their lies

It is a sad day when the failure of modern mainstream journalism has become so complete that a professional comedian does a better job than those who claim to practise the great craft of exposing and disseminating the truth.

But Jon Stewart's 'take down' - to use the American vernacular - of the charlatans of the financial markets, most notably their cheerleaders on CNBC like Jim Cramer, is by far and away the best effort by any media figure so far to challenge the people who bear a great deal of responsibility for the awful economic mess we are in.

I'm a bit of a dewy eyed optimist when it comes to journalism. I still retain this quaint belief that if journalists or opinion formers masquerading as journalists - the pundits - get something completely wrong, then something should happen.

They should face some punishment, or comeback. Ideally, the 'market of ideas' would mean that people would say 'Oh, they got that wrong, I'm not reading/watching them anymore'.

But what do we do when the nature of our mediascape means it is owned by a very small number of people with deeply vested interests, who keep these people in their jobs not because they are journalists, but because they are paid mouthpieces.

The examples come from across the spectrum.

As the good boys at The Exile point out, many of the pro-Iraq war writers and talking heads who lied us into that charnel house still have their jobs and many even have the temerity to think they can use the same trick as regards Iran.

Even in the provincial world of Australian Rules Football, Caroline Wilson, chief football writer at The Age who confidently told us the smart money was on North Melbourne being relocated to the Gold Coast in 2007 when no such thing ever happened swans on with seemingly no blowback.

How wrong do these people have to be before they lose their jobs?

Luckily for us - and not so luckily for them - the scale of this financial crisis means that people are no longer willing to put up with more bullshit. People are working out they've been systematically lied to and aren't willing to put up with it any more.

We aren't even 10 per cent into the giant steaming pile of crap that confronts us.

What comes out the other side will be a very different beast from what we have today.

How it works ...

And it has begun. Britain has officially started printing money in an attempt to get itself out of economic malaise.

The snooty name for this is 'quantitative easing'. Of course it is not just printing money, say the Bank Of England and Treasury spinners. Only a fool would say that. Instead, they tell us, QE is about the Bank of England creating 'new funding' with which to buy up the debt of various companies - and more worringly government - thus allowing those entities to spend money they'd earmarked for debt on other things, thus stimulating the economy.

You with me? Thought not.

You're wondering how it REALLY works. This is how it works.

I bank with an institution that has recently come under majority government control. Just the other day, they sent me a letter telling me they'd upped the limit on my cedit card three-fold.

Now, you'd think a financial institution that is fundamentally bankrupt and needs to be bailed out by government might be tightening the purse strings, not throwing cash around unbidden.

Welcome to the wonderful world of QE. Essentially, the government is lending me the taxes I'll pay them in the future now in the hope I'll spend it. Then obviously pay back that money from what I'll earn in the future, while the actual future taxes will balance out what they've lent now.

In theory it works. But what if I spend the money and then lose my job, something quite likely in a recession.

Or - what if I weren't a UK citizen and simply took this money and bailed home? Then they'd lose the money twice - once now and then in the future when I'm not around to pay the tax they are banking (literally) on.

Yet Gordon Brown has the temerity to say Britain is best placed to weather the recession.

In fact, if he says it one more time, I will take their money and piss off back to Oz, a country that has yet to have even one quarter of 'negative growth'.

The reality of survivalism

One of my favourite sub-strata of the Internet is the very well established right-wing Yank fascination with with what would happen if ... when ... society collapses and a man is forced to defend his God-fearing family from the 'two legged wolves', usually folk of shall we say, another colour.

The fantasy is deeply entwined with the hilariously crap white nationalist movement and almost always contains strong racist and anti-Jewish ... the rule of ZOG etc ... tropes.

Although this notion reached its apogee in the late 90s with the Clinton era crackdown on the militia, it has survived and in these troubled economic times (copyright everyone), it is making quite the comeback. Could the much ballyhooed apocalypse finally be upon us?

It is the favourite fantasy of middle aged white American men who substitute guns for their shrivelled, inadequate genitalia and political emasculation by the late capitalist system.

It is of course, utter bullshit. Red Dawn was not a documentary.

Anyway, here, one of the best writers on the Net - The War Nerd - gives a scathing deconstruction of this quasi-fascist fantasy survivalist crap.

Courage under fire

The definitive line taken by the British media - the tabs anyway - following the Real IRA attack on the Antrim army barracks and the murder of the PSNI officer in Craigavon is that the men who carried this out are cowards.

They are not.

Let me repeat here that I do not support what they did. No-one wants to see that part of the world return to a savage cycle of violence.

But the guerillas who launched those attacks must be seen for what they are: a small isolated unit of guerillas fighting a battle that has minimal public support. But it does have some public support, otherwise they wouldn't exist.

To misquote Mao, the water these dissidents swim in cannot be very deep, but it is there.

And to launch a full frontal attack on a British Army base, or even on another trained and armed officer like the PSNI man, takes courage. It also takes planning and dedication. Similar to 9/11. Again, a reprehensible thing, but to call someone willing to hijack a plane with glorified stationery and then fly said craft into the World Trade Centre a coward is simply moronic. Its an unbelievably courageous act carried out to further a vile goal and with horrendous results.

Talk to British military types who went up against the IRA and they'll tell you that they were - and still are as this latest event showd - tough, gutsy, smart and ruthless.

Exactly the qualities we like to associate with OUR soldiers.

And when a bunch of goddam beardy Muslims turned up yesterday to point out that from THEIR point of view, the actions of the 'Coalition', like say bombing a village from a fighter jet at 20,000 feet on the 'suspicion' that the 'enemy' may be there, were cowardly, all hell broke loss.

Ah well. Luckily most of us know that war is a racket fought by poor people to further enrich already rich people and only scoundrels are lured by the patriotic lies issued by every side, be they the lies of The Cause, or Our Boys, or Jihad.

Or do we?

The boys are back in town

Two soldiers dead on the weekend and now a policeman killed near Craigavon as well. The Real IRA has taken responsibility for the attack on the barracks - and that attack, whatever your views on Northern Ireland, must be seen as the work of a well-drilled guerilla unit, a worrying sign for those of us who want peace- and the Continuity IRA is now claiming the Craigavon shooting.

Nobody should be surprised about these latest outbreaks. It hasn't been in anyone's interest to report it but there have been a series of bomb, gun and rocket attacks against Army and PSNI forces in Northern Ireland in the last few months.

The reality is that there's provinces of Afghanistan and Iraq that are safer for British forces than Northern Ireland right now.

There is also another element coming into play. The drastic cooling, some would say freezing, of the Irish economy combined with similar happening in the British economy means the supply of money going to Northern Ireland to fund expansion of services in rundown areas and employment schemes for ex prisoners and so on, is drying up.

A clear, if unspoken, element of the peace process was the notion that the "revolution will be drowned in baby milk" and while the funds were flowing, that went well.

But now, things are different. If, as I suspect, the Republic pulls out of the recession quicker than Britain, then there will be a clear economic argument for Irish unity as well.

Also, on all the news reports, we hear that the dissidents have "no community support". They might not enjoy widespread acclaim but they obviously have enough people in the community willing to aid them that they can store relatively large amounts of sophisticated weaponry and plan attacks like the raid on the Army barracks knowing they have a network of safehouses and the like in which to retreat.

If I was a betting man, I'd lay money on the two guys who pulled the trigger at the barracks attack having got a Ryanair flight out of somewhere like Shannon or Knock early yesterday or Sunday morning with the full intention of settling down in somewhere like Croatia where the dissidents have close contacts for the summer.

Brits have sook about Obama 'snub'

Some Brits are having a sook because Obama didn't give Brown the full red carpet treatment.

Why in hell would he? Brown is a discredited joke who presided over much of the disastrous economic policy Obama is now trying to unpick.

Obama knows that the US economy was as much broken on the deregulated London financial markets Brown used to boast about as it was in any Michigan sub-prime mortgage default.

And now Brown swans over excpecting the lecture the bloke on how to fix it?

If only Brown read this fabulous and prescient blog, he would have known not to expect too warm a welcome in Washington.

British soldiers torturing Obama's Grandad probably didn't help matters much either.

Fred The Shred

The pack now turns on Sir Fred Goodwin. It is not hard to see why: he was the CEO of the Royal Bank of Scotland during the time it made the business moves that have now unravelled, leading to tens of billions in losses and effective nationalisation.

Now it turns out that Goodwin will not be returning his £693,000 a year pension, despite the revelations regarding the appalling shape he left the bank in.

And I don't blame him.

I don't like him. I despise the casino capitalism he embodied. I even had the misfortune to glimpse the man one day when I was out at the sinister post-fascist headquarters RBS has out at Gogarburn. He was striding along some Roman consul while lesser beings were expected to - literally - move to the side of the path to allow the great man through.

But the fact is that a Government Minister signed off on Goodwin's deal. They knew. So why should he give it back?

When Goodwin was winning at the mortgage-backed securities roulette wheel, Brown, Salmond, the Tories, all of them were queueing up, desperate to be associated with him. Worse than that, they were like those footy slappers who hang around in clubs hoping for some big name star to ream them every which way in a casually abusive fashion then discard them, all so they can tell their mates they were with Big Fred from the RBS Rangers last night.

This whole campaign to pin the blame for EVERYTHING on Goodwin and demand he give back his pension is nothing more than an attempt to disguise the fact that the entire British political establishment is utterly complicit in this financial disaster.

In the greater scheme of things, while I could certainly deal with £693,000 a year for doing sweet fanny adams, I'm a bit more concerned with about the hundreds of billions that seem to be produced every few weeks to chuck at yet another failing bank.

The bottom line is this all happened on Gordon Brown's watch, first as Chancellor, now as Prime Minister.

No matter how much Labour spin, no matter how much they shriek and point the finger at everyone else, that is the simple fact and the voting public knows it.

Sharks - lift your game

After this blog snared the world exclusive about the stingray jihad against Australia, I thought it was time that I addressed the frankly disgusting and unAustralian behaviour of our sharks.

The sharks have been attacking us with some regularity of late.

And it's just not on.

Why can't the sharks be more like the crocodiles, which have the pleasing tendency to only attack tourists? I fully support this behaviour from the great green dinosaurs.

If Pommy backpackers think they can come over here and take our lowly-paid call centre jobs and steal our sunburn, then they've got to accept that any moment a 15 foot long scaly escapee from the Jurassic era might seize them in its bone-crushing jaws, before taking them on a terrifying death roll and then leaving their broken corpse underneath a submerged log in order to putrefy for a few weeks before consuming them in huge barbaric gulps.

That's why I reckon that salt water crocodiles should be introduced to places like Bondi Beach and St Kilda where tourists congregate.

That's one Peter Garrett should be getting onto pronto.

Anyway, we have laws protecting the biggest and meanest of the sharks like the Great Whites. And whenever one of them attacks somebody, we always say things like "Yeah, nah, look, Darren wouldn't want the shark killed, he knew he was in it's environment."

So lift your bloody game and stop attacking us sharks. I appreciate you have to eat. It's pretty much all you do, apart from occasionally menacing underwater cameras and stuff.

But we bring enough tourists to our beaches.

If the crocodiles can content themselves with foreign fare, then you can too, finny denizens of the deep.

Ya basta! And yes I know its not Greek

I have suitably recovered from my birthday which was celebrated in fine style.

At some hungover point I read this fantastic article in The Observer about the recent Greek riots.

It's the kind of stuff that makes you want to put on a balaclava and head out onto the streets to punch on with the coppers.

Comments ...

I have now enabled people to make anonymous comments if they wish.

Go on.

Coming together ...

One thing that shat me about the bushfires at home was the shrill insistence that Australians were fantastic because we 'came together at this time'. FFS - what do you expect us to do?

The difference of course is that this was an unexpected semi-natural disaster.

Things are very different in the economic disaster we are all suffering at various levels.

I defy you to read this piece and not be sickened by the voraciousness of both the American corporate world and many consumers. And don't go kidding yourself that consumers in Australia or Britain would be any different.

Silence, nagging voice ...

So it turns out Jade Goody is really genuinely dying from fancer.

What's fancer you ask? Fanny cancer.

Don't worry, if it was a similar sort of bloke, I'd say nadcer, or cancer-balls, or something.

I must say I'm a bit confused by own reaction to all this. From the very first time I saw her on Big Brother, I found Goody to be the personification of the gobby tabloid ignorance that crystallises the very worst in English culture.

But now as she's literally being eaten away inside at a young age, I'm reconsidering.

To her credit, Goody has never pretended to be anything other than she is: a very 21st Century working class white girl. And she's made more cash than any other Big Brother contestant despite not even winning the show.

She's also as much as a product of us than anything else - she put herself up on the shelf and the British public bought her schtick, however unconscious much of it may be, by the bucketload.

Getting a bit Pseuds Corner, she reminds me of the prole women in 1984. In her completely unself-aware insularity, she manages to reveal the machinations of Inner Party types like Mandelson and their bumbling Outer Party minions like Derek Draper for the hideously contrived bullshit it is.

I can't say I'll actively miss Goody when she shuffles off into the great Diary Room in the sky in a few months time but then - hey! - thousands of people die an hour and I don't grieve for them either.

But I certainly don't dislike her anymore and I have to admit to a grudging respect. You got dealt a shit hand in life Jade - with the crackhead Mum and all - and you played it pretty well.

May your journey be swift and the WKD Blue flowing wherever you end up.

Shoichi Nakagawa ...

Can't say I blame Japan's Finance minister for wanting to get on the sauce.

His country is spiralling into depression only a few short years after emerging from the Lost decade of deflation and general misery.

In fact, having now had the misfortune to be close to a few politicians, I'm firmly of the belief that it is the shiny eyed mega-keener types, usually those who have never had a real job outside student then party politics, who very rarely drink, that are the one's we should be afraid of.

Hitler was teetotal after all.

With the world turning to shit, what we need is one of those big piss ons where you all sit around putting the world to rights and often come up with some decent ideas.

Just remember to get someone to take notes or tape it so we can gingerly begin implementing it in the morning.

Schadenfraude is good ...

As you have hopefully worked out, this blog is about The Age of Obama. It's developing slowly this age and it tends to have problems with not having paid its taxes back in the day.

However, I did have a good old cynical chuckle this morning reading about the travails of the filthy little gangster port that is Dubai.

If ever a place came to symbolise everything that was bad about The Age of George Bush, it was Dubai: a vile temple to casino capitalism built both literally and figuratively on the unstable sands of debt and Middle East power politics.

I hope the entire place goes bankrupt and gets sold off to the Kiwis or something.

Heaven knows those poor little buggers need a helping hand now everyone's forgotten about Lord Of The Rings.

I wish ...

I wish I could be a climate change sceptic. It sounds like the thing I'd be right into and pretty bloody good at too. It ticks all the boxes for the kind of stuff I normally despise: quasi religious fervour of adherents, involvement of drippy gullible types, figurehead like The Amazingly Lifelike Al Gore.

God, I wish I could bring myself to think that climate change is a big scam. But it isn't.

There are of course lots of scammers out there making big bucks off it. In this regard, its much like The Millenium Bug, or Y2K, albeit that climate change is 'realerer' than that. Some of the hyperbole around climate change is patently designed to seperate fools from their money.

Global Adaptation Solutions salesman: Did you know when sea levels rise by 1000 feet next year because of CLIMATE CHANGE, your whole business will be wiped out and your 16 year old daughter forced to become a hooker in order to feed the family?

Gullible businessman: Oh noes!1!!. Whatever can I do to avoid this awful outcome? Tell me, O seer, O Great Sage.

GAS salesman: The only way to escape this is to sign up all your staff to our bespoke Surviving The Coming Climate Catastrophe: How Your Business Can Prosper In The Apocalypse training sessions. Only £795.95 per staff member per session. Each module contains 17 sessions. It is recommended that all staff complete at least 5 modules. Or otherwise middle management types on business trips will be bending your lovely daughter over a Holiday Inn breakfast table at £70 a turn.

Laugh as you may, but effectively this is what many in the climate change industry are doing.

The problem is climate change is real. It is happening. But not in the ways that are easily digestible into soundbites or sales pitches. Global temperatures are rising, but not uniformly. Some parts of the world, in North America and Europe, may actually be getting colder, while the south eastern corner of Australia is apparentley now locked in perpetual drought.

If temperatures in Melbourne rise by 4 degrees above average and those in Chicago drop by 1, then that is still a rise of three degrees from the average. (I think, maths never being my strong suit, but you get the idea.)

People in some parts of the world will not be too adversely affected by climate change probably for many decades to come. Some are feeling it already. As always, the poor will feel it most and first. Even in rich Melbourne, the suburbs that burned were those on the fringe of the city where people on low incomes have been forced because of indecent property price surges.

It is an old truism but we are very much like the frogs in the pot of water, with the temperature rising and us not feeling it untril it is too late.

Thanks America

The US and Australia have a very close relationship when bushfires strike. Every northern summer when California burns, we send firefighters and equipment over there and they do the same when we are hit hard. It's a good thing and must be supported.

But one influence we can do without is the fundamentalist brand of evangelical Protestant Christianity developed in the US and now exported here.

One of the most extreme examples in the US of this tendency is Pastor Fred Phelps of the Westboro Baptist Church. Phelps has a quite unhealthy obsession with what gay types get up in their day-to-day lives and has become convinced that because the US 'tolerates and encourages' the 'sin' of homosexuality, all bad things that happen there are divine retribution.

He even pickets the funerals of soldiers killed in Iraq and Afghanistan with charming signs like those above.

Now the Australian wing of this movement - mega churches, babbling in tongues, DONATE NOW! - is getting in on the act.

One of the biggest churches, the badly-named Catch The Fire Ministry, issued a statement claming that access to abortion in Victoria is the reason for the fires.

“In my dream I saw fire everywhere with flames burning very high and uncontrollably. With this I woke up from my dream with the interpretation as the following words came to me in a flash from the Spirit of God.

That His conditional protection has been removed from the nation of Australia, in particular Victoria, for approving the slaughter of innocent children in the womb.”

“We at CTFM have spent the last few days in prayer and weeping, watching the news and learning that more than 170 people have perished and more than 750 houses have gone up in flames with much property and personal belongings of people all wiped out within hours,” he said.

Firebugs

Thinking about the fires at home, especially the fact that so many were deliberately lit - and some apparentley re-lit after being put out - is immensely distressing and frustrating.

So I have taken some solace in this picture of a firefighter giving some water to a koala.

The future is now ...

It is qute a bizarre experience siting in a chilly living room in Edinburgh watching places you know and have been burning amid an unprecedented heatwave.

Last week four consective days above 43 degrees left the area surrounding my home city of Melbourne scorched tinder dry, giant fields of kindling and basted grass just waiting for a spark. Today it was 46 degrees, with gusting winds: like living in a fan forced oven.

When the fires started, and sadly it is likely that some were deliberately lit, the result was an instantaneous cauldron of flam moving at speeds of 60kmh.

While the loss of life - police are estimating at the moment that 40 people are dead - is awful, we do have to face the fact that such fires are part and parcel of Australian life. And we are making the situation worse.

Just like if you swim in t waters off the coast of Victoria, you need to be aware that there are 6m Great Whites in those same seas, thus, if you are going to live in the bush in south eastern Australia, you need to be prepared for fires.

And if the Victorian Government is content to let 1500 people a week move to Melbourne and for the city's suburbs to expand ever further outward, then it has to accept the fact that more people and houses will be placed in the fire danger zone.

Melbourne is expanding too fast and the lack of infrastructure, from transport to the ability to provide enough water, is becoming more and more apparent.

Still a great city though.

The race to the bottom

Protectionism is the new black.

British jobs for British workers says Brown. America first said Obama, before having to withdraw the statement under pressure - laughably hypocritical pressure - from the EU.

British Labour, led by Gordon Brown, is deeply complicit in all this. The anti-foreigner strikes here make plain their cause: you said British jobs for British workers Mr Brown the placards read, let's see them.

But thankfully, some rump elements of British - more accurately English - Labour, refuse still to sign upto the neo-liberal divide and rule agenda.

Dagenham MP Jon Cruddas realises the danger of Brown's imbecilic soundbites - his constituency already has a strong BNP presence. But as a real Labour MP, he knows these strikes are not about racism per se, but are actually a reaction to the economic ultra-liberalism that has allowed unfettered movements of workers and crucially, capital.

It's worth a read

The real danger on the far right comes not from the security services penetrated and controlled BNP, but from a movement and vitally - charismatic - leader we don't know about yet. This depression will be long and hard. There is plenty of time for such a creature to evolve yet. The question is how ugly and savage it will be.

Doesn't scare me

On the Beeb last night the story about the Iranians launching their first communications satellite led with the line that the move led to "grave concern in the West".

I am as Western as they come and I'm not concerned. Not one little bit. I'm not even concerned about the Iranians getting a nuke. The best way to stop the Iranian nuclear program would be to demand that the Israelis open up their own nuclear stockpile to international inspection. But that'll never happen for obvious reasons - hello Obama chief of staff and IDF volunteer Rahm Emanuel among others.

So instead we have to put up with this drivel about Iran being a nuclear threat when Israel's fundamental defence strategy relies on The Samson Option - put simply, if they think they are in deep trouble, they'll blow up with the world with them, thus, we better save them.

Even if the Iranians do get a nuclear bomb and the means to deliver it, I'm still not concerned. The doctrine of MAD means that they'll never use it. They might be Muslim but they aren't crazy.

I am concerned about the treatment of women in Iran, it's capital punishment policy and many other issues.

But then, I'm concerned about what goes inside plenty of nuclear armed Western democracies too.

Most of all though, I'm just sick and tired of this relentless, baseless scaremongering about Iran. We're not idiots.

They wouldn't - would they?

Well, well, well. From the file marked Tres Convenient we learn today that the official election register from last year's Glenrothes by-election has been 'lost'.

We only know this because the Scottish Nationalists, who were as surprised as everyone at the 7000 vote margin of the by-election, demanded access to said register after their activists on the ground the night of the vote expressed concern at the amount of late registrations for postal votes in the election.

Some analysts suggest that Labour received 400 per cent more postal votes - which are notoriously easy to fake - in the by-election than they did for the same seat in the General Election held only two years earlier. That's a lot of people on holiday at once.

And, as the Nats know, Labour has form on vote rigging using postals. It's been demonstrated in a court of law.

It is difficult to overstate the importance of Glenrothes to Labour. They'd just lost another safe Labour seat - Glasgow East - to the Nats, had lost Crewe and Nantwich to the Tories in England and Brown was on the ropes. The word in the corridors suggested that if Glenrothes went, the bloke who held the neighbouring seat, one G.Brown, was going with it.

Am I saying Labour rigged the by-election? No. Am I saying it that it is a distinct possibility? Yes. Yes, I am. An inquiry, now launched, must be thorough and swift.

There's two main reasons why I'm suspcious. Brown broke with convention and campaigned in the seat numerous times and even sent the missus out to knock on doors. He simply couldn't afford to lose.

More tellingly, the Nationalist apparatchiks on the day were briefing that the election would be nail bitingly close: a margin of about 500 votes either way was their call. And they'd been on the money with such predictions in Glasgow East and the Scottish Parliament elections before that. It's hard to believe they'd be so spectacularly wrong in this case.

But still, politics is funny game.

I mean, who would have thought Her Majesty's Government would rip a PHD students thesis off the Internet and misrepresent it in order to dupe MPs into voting for the illegal invasion of Iraq?

Still, what does that prove? Everything and nothing in equal measure.

Behold the monobrow!

Was watching the Liverpool v Chelsea game on Sunday and couldn't but notice Chelsea's right back Jose Bosingwa and his mighty monobrow.

Look at it. It is quite amazing, like he has shaved a riverboat gambler's moustache and stuck it just above the ridge of his brow.

If you look closely at his designer stubble, you can see the sideburns reach right up his face. If he wanted to, he could affect a look where his monobrow and sideburns become one. That would be pretty cool. Like a reverse Craig David.

This is how it starts ...

Eric Blair would have liked the headlines in the papers at the moment:

The Observer talks about the creation of a People's Bank.

The ever cheerful Daily Mail demands British jobs for British workers.

There is a simple political term for what is happening in this cold rainswept island off the northwest coast of Europe. It is called National Socialism.

The state is expanding to the point where it has become the economy. Financial services, which used to be 'the engine of our prosperity' - yeah, I can't write that with a straight face either - are now centrally planned in the most Soviet sense of the word.

Civil liberties are being eroded daily. Soldiers die in a far off war every week for reasons no-one can really articulate other than we need to be fighting 'them'. Support our boys on the Malabar front. And now the Government is goading us to blame them foreigners with their garlicky breath and weirdo Polish names made up entirely of consonants for all our difficulties.

And this is only February. What's it going to be like in six months time, when people realise the economy is in genuine depression and not going to recover any time soon?

Raccoon rape update

Here is the first pic of the plucky raccoon that saw off the lecherous advances of a drunken Russian looking for some furry action.

Top work raccoon. Make this brave creature a Hero Of the Soviet Union right now Mr Putin.

It is this fighting spirit and refusal to just lay down and take it that won the Battle Of Stalingrad.

(That and 1.5m men running at machine guns)

RIP John Martyn

A great track from a great artist.

Harsh times in a harsh country

As someone loved every single episode of The Best Show Ever Made ... aka The Wire ... I found this story about a body frozen into a block of ice in Detroit both horrifying and strangely familiar. Guys like David Simon and Denis Lehane, who wrote much of The Wire, and gave us the 'hitters' Snoop and Chris who disposed of their victims in abandoned rowhouses must be wondering with this story whether art is imitating life or vice versa.

Raccoon rapist's penis bitten off

Love this story:

AN enraged raccoon has bitten off a man's penis as the pervert tried to rape the animal.

Russian Alexander Kirilov, 44, was on a drunken weekend with friends when he leapt on the terrified animal.

“When I saw the raccoon I thought I’d have some fun,” he told stunned surgeons in Moscow.

Now Russian plastic surgeons are trying to restore his mangled manhood.

How times change

One thing I'm going to try and avoid doing on this blog is discussing Palestine/Israel/Gaza/Hamas/Likud if only because its actually quite boring and there's only about 678,543,987,321 other sites on the web where you can find that very subject being discussed ad nauseum (and I mean nauseum) 24/7/365.

However I do find it remarkable that in my lifetime we've gone from a situation where Gerry Adams was once considered as bad, if not worse, than any Hamas leader, to now being some sort of elder statesman figure who writes opinion pieces like this for The Guardian.

Maybe it is the beard that does it.

The one boom that won't end

Sorry Mum and Dad, because you guys are some of the few exceptions that prove the rule on this one, but I have to say it: want to know why the world is spiralling into depression? Blame the Baby Boomers.

I'm hardly the first to say it, but it bears repeating. My parents generation, those born between 1945 and the early Sixties to use the best working definition, are by far and away the most selfish generation of the modern era and they aren't about to stop.

Let's look at the facts. By the time my grandfather was in his early 30s like me, he'd survived a depression in his youth, fought in a savage war, spent three years in a Nazi POW camp and already had five or six kids. But it was men and women of his generation who demanded rewards for their sacrifices and they got them - these were the people who gave us universal free education, free health care in many countries, the social welfare state as we know it.

Then came the Baby Boomers. Turning 18, they did campaign and achieve some notable social change like advancing feminism and working to reduce racism and other forms of discrimination. But as they got older, this generation that had known nothing but prosperity came to demand to be kept in the style to which they had grown accustomed.

Canny politicians, usually on the center-right (a political spectrum that includes Bill Clinton, John Howard and Tony Blair) saw that the baby boomers were a decisive demographic bloc and they were politically motivated too. So to woo them, these politicians promised to take from the baby boomer's children what the baby boomer's parents had fought and died to win, so the boomers could go on living it up.

The principle of free education was sacrificed. Put simply, if you are my age and have student debt - people in the UK and Australia, where tertiary education was once free routinely leave uni with tens of thousands owing - that debt is effectively money the government is taking from you to give to your parents in the form of the various tax, pension, lifestyle and other breaks and goodies it needs to get elected and re-elected.

Other methods of keeping the Boomers sweet were more insidious. Having created a culture of property-price obsession alien to their parents - and even to their contemporaries in France and Germany - the Anglosphere boomers thus implicitly demanded that government keep house prices rising, so they could take their banks advice and withdraw equity from their home to fritter on five holidays a year, knowing that by the time they got back, their house would have risen in value sufficiently to cover the spending.

This lead DIRECTLY to governments looseing up the restrictions on money supply and the price of money. To keep the wheel turning, more and more people needed to be brought into the game to keep those in the middle being pushed - albeit by illusion - ever higher. Thus the sub-prime debacle and its associated knock-ons all over the English-speaking West.

But if you think the current economic maelstrom will stop them, you're wrong. By dint of their Dads all fucking their Mums at once (as they say in sociological circles), the Boomers remain a demographic and electoral force. And advances in science mean they will be alive and voting for decades yet. Already we are seeing them use their electoral power to force taxpayers - the young - to subsidise vastly expensive drugs for them when they grow old, even when they grow terminally ill. Having done away with free health carew when they were fit and healthy and didn't need it, they are now demanding it be re-instated just as they grow frail and vulnerable. You and your children will have to work an extra two hours a day to keep a 103 year with liver cancer alive, pissing and shitting in a hospital bed, for an extra month.

This is the future for my generation and our children and their children. So when your parents tell you how they spent 3 lovely months driving around Australia, just remember, really, you paid for it. And your kids will be paying for it for a long while yet too.

Brits love Obama, Obama maybe not so keen on Brits

It is difficult to overstate how much the Brits love Obama. Labour loves him because he is not Bush, though they kid themselves that he's 'left' while Cameron's Tories love him because they seem him as closer to their world view. They are probably accurate, although its a shame for them Obama has already dismissed Cameron as a lightweight. The Lib Dems are positively gagging for his firm hand on their naughty bottoms while Alex Salmond has already invited him over for haggis, neeps and tatties.

But the problem for Britain is not so much individual leaders - though its hard to see anyone being thrilled of having that one-eyed freak Brown come over and hector you about stuff - but the very nature of Britain itself. It has been widely reported that Obama doesn't do the 'special relationship' thing. It's also been reported that he's privately found the British diplomats and Foreign Ofice mandarins in Washington he's encountered to be slimy, supercilious and patronising. Which of course they are.

In this piece from The Guardian, Simon Tisdall gives a good account of why Obama may not be so keen on the Brits. Hint: British soldiers torturing his Grandad in Kenya may not have helped.

Call for stingrays to put down barbs and talk

Aside from an American economy that is in meltdown, the Great Obama is going to have a fair few overseas problems to deal with. Obviously, there is the perpetually bloodthirsty and increasingly tiresome 'Our God Says We're Right' lot in Israel/Palestine. Then Iraq to extricate himself from. And Afghanistan to pour more troops into - there's a good idea - and a whole host of other vexing issues from the collapse of Britain to Vladimir Putin's cagey hydrocarbon chess games. At some point he'll have to put up with the insufferable Carla Bruni and her slimy dwarf of a husband poking around the White House too. Bet she 'sings' one of her interminable and godawful 'songs' too. Puke.

Anyway.

In Australia, we know deep down that we don't really rate that high on the international scale. Perhaps if we had the baws to declare ourselves a Republic, or sign a treaty with our indigenous people, Obama might think about heading Down Under for the occasion. Aside from that, we're a long, long way down the to-do list.

Which is a shame, because we need Obama's gravitas and ability to bridge the gap in the increasingly vicious stingray insurgency that's taking place in our waters. Now I'm a typical pinko commie liberal type who can understand, if not sympathise, with the stingray's arguments. Yes, for decades we've polluted their environment and mercilessly slain them with big nets and the like.

Hands up Australia: the stingrays are entitled to defend themselves against attack and we've been the historical agressors in this conflict.

But I think the organisation and effectiveness of the stingray resistance has caught us all by surprise. They are using classic guerilla tactics, striking and fleeing, going for high-profile targets like footballers.

The stingray high command knows the impact of their textbook 'spectacular' that took out Steve Irwin will never fade from the Australian psyche. All they have to do is hit a relatively well-known sportsman, or celeb, every few months and the terror grips our nation's very soul once again. Which national treasure could be next? Gretel Kileen? Jennifer Hawkins? Rove - gulp - McManus?

But I say to the stingrays put down your barbs. We are making progress. Look: when one of your cartilage-based cousins the sharks attacks us, we say we don't want it hunted. We harass the Japanese about hunting the whales. We are becoming better at dealing with the sea, and its myriad finny denizens.

This peace process won't come easily, I know that. The road will be hard and steep and strewn with many obstacles. But together we can surmount them and live as two people in one sea, humans and stingrays, washed by the waves of mutual respect and balmed by the salt of understanding.

Mr President, make it happen.

Could have done better

I've had a stiffy for Glasvegas for a while now and the Flowers And Football Tops track in particular. It's very rare that a song manages to capture a time and place and a snapshot of a given society so well. I reckon economic downturn is a boon to the snappily lyriced Anglo-Celtic pop song - see Squeeze's Up The Junction, Elvis Costello doing Oliver's Army, Bruce Springsteen's The River and Paul Kelly's timeless ... miraculous ... To Her Door for a start. YouTube them for more, I cannae be arsed linking it them all.

So when the good boys and girls from Dalmarnock announced they were releasing F+FT as a single, I was most happy. James Allan denies, and who are we to argue, that the song is based on Kriss Donald's murder. But the, you guessed it, flowers and football tops outside Donald's house became the defining image of that awful crime and by their existence, reminded you of every other Sellik/Rangers and Lilies/Roses combination you've seen on the news. Which is about once every ten days going by the current Scottish murder stats.

Shame then that the video for this great song is so unbelievably shite. I would have done it so much better. This is obvious.

Kill the judges first

As Homer Simpson once said, anyone in the great United States could end up Chief Justice of the Supreme Court. You'd reckon that Homer's chosen candidate, his son Bart, could have made a better go of the swearing in than the actual chud in the robes, John Roberts.

Snowy off the trams would have been more reliable.

Republican appointed judicial incompetence aside; I thought Obama's inauguration went well. The speech was good. Loads of people claimed it had no 'hair on the back of the neck' moment. I'm presuming these people have well-shaven necks, because the bits where he re-affirmed his promise to withdraw from Iraq, committed himself to renewable energy and actually even vaguely hinted at introducing a notion of progressive re-distribution in the US certainly got me going.

Yes, he'll disappoint in some areas. Given he's appointed the war criminal apologist Rahm Emanuel as his chief of staff, I can't see Israel getting short shrift. And realpolitik in matters as yet unknown will surely occur. But I can't yet bring myself to side with the cynical view that Obama is just another puppet in the perpetual balancing act that is the US elites managing robber capitalism; that just when their people, their people being the world now, are at the point of rebelling against their economic slavery, the elites re-calibrate the scale by inserting a totally controlled candidate that says a lot, and does just enough, to maintain the inequitable system without upsetting its fundamentals. If that is true, then we are well and truly fucked.

I believe Obama has the potential to be different. However I also believe Jack Ziebell might be the missing midfield class North needs to take the flag this year. Both have an equally challenging task ahead of them.

(Oh sweet Jesus I've just re-read what I've written above. I won't delete it. We all deserve the opportunity to go bull goose looney sometimes. Given the US and the UK are about to go bankrupt, and probably take the rest of the world down with them - albeit only for about a decade or so, the last Depression didn't kill our great-grandparents, just really, really pissed them off - I think I deserve that.)

God, if you're listening, if you're one of us, just a slob like one of us - here's a deal, a la The Diamond As Big As The Ritz: let either Obama or Ziebell be successful. I don't care which.

The Last Days Of Bush

Welcome to this new blog, The Age Of F.D. Obama.

From the timing of its inception, and the slightly up itself neologism of a title, you can see I’m using Barack Obama as the hook. Everyone else does.

But this blog won’t just focus on the American President. It will be a typically self-indulgent gathering of my thoughts, opinions, views, musings etc. But it is an acknowledgement that, for better or worse, each new American Presidency ushers in a different era. How can you think about the 90s without recalling Bill Clinton looking the camera in the eye and declaring that he did not have sex with that woman, Ms Lewinsky? And the defining event of this decade is undoubtedly George Bush’s war in Iraq.

How will things be different in a world where Obama leads what remains by far the richest and most powerful nation on Earth? Don’t believe the hype about China: they still trail the US in every measure by a substantial measure. And as the sub prime debacle has shown us, when America sneezes, the world still catches a cold. Except now, it would appear America has just had an economic heart attack, meaning the rest of us will be in for an interesting ride. Early prediction: Ireland and the UK to go bankrupt like Iceland at some point this year, probably in weeks rather than months for the Emerald Isle.

What trends will we see in the Obama era? What new music will there be? There hasn’t been a genuinely new style of music since the electronic explosion of the late 80s and early 90s. In terms of sport, the English Premier League, which grew in popularity from the end of the last major recession in the early 1990s to become the world’s favourite competition is reaching the point of unsustainability as Man City prepare to pay £100m for Kaka. Obama is a keen basketballer and soccer has lost momentum to the President’s chosen game in the vast market of China.Will these years see the bouncing round ball replace the rolling one in the world’s attention?

The global economy will be different too. That’s a fact. As Seamus Milne observes in The Guardian, there seems to be a thought among many in government that we can get back to ‘how it was’, that if we throw enough of the taxpayers cash – that’s you and me folks – at banks, then they’ll be able to return to the good old days of entirely unsustainable, entirely immoral, and quite possibly criminal, business practices based on easy credit. The Age of F.D Obama will demonstrate how painfully false that notion is. A profound shift is underway. Already, Obama has expressed support for workers occupying a factory to demand unpaid wages. Traditionally US Presidents send in the military during labour disputes, not side with the workers.

As is mandatory for the first post on any new blog, I promise I will update this regularly. And this time, by jingo by Crikey, I actually mean it. Oh, and leave comments. I like comments, if only because deleting them gives me a misplaced sense of importance.