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)