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.