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.