A Coconut Tree Moment

Mid afternoon coffee and cake on the veranda. A man shuffles up a forty foot palm tree directly in front of me in search of coconuts - no harness - no fear. All he has to do is avoid a slip and he will be just fine. The man's flippancy and carefree attitude towards such a death defying act, got me thinking.

In my place of birth, Northern Ireland, people used to be free to take chances. I look back on my childhood with somewhat rose tinted glasses, remembering a time when there was such as thing as an accident - people allowed themselves the luxury of bending rules, to obtain what they wanted.

On a recent trip home, I spent a full year living and working within a system that I barely recognized. The workplace, and society at large, was a place where people where tripping over themselves, not to literally trip up. Accidents, it seems, have become a thing of the past. Now, as a result of a greedy a manipulative legal system, borrowed from the US, there is no such thing as an accident.

"Where there's blame, there's a claim."

I tried to explain this eventuality to a Thai friend and he was very confused indeed.

"But, what do you mean if you fall in work, it's not your fault?" was his perplexed response.

I might as well have been speaking Swahili.

A man in work, climbing up a tree with his own consent in Northern Ireland, would sadly now cause a large degree of nappy wetting. In fact, I could imagine it becoming front page news in a local newspaper, the headline reading:

"Man sacked, and jailed for deliberate and shameful health and safety violation."

One could picture the scene with police, ambulances, fire engines and rapid
response, yellow jacket wearing, private security experts on the street all looking skyward with a look of disgust of their faces.

"Where are his hat, goggles, and safety net"

"Does he have a climbing license from the local council?"

"Just who does he think he is?!"

At what point in the future will a beacon of rationality reveal itself and say:

"Enough of this bullshit. what have we become?"

Depressingly, Probably never.

The precedent has been set. The ball is rolling, and people are making real money out of common sense, at the expense of individual freedom of choice. Personal freedom is not what it was. Stressed workers from builders to engineers, are all tip-toeing round their work places, spouting the latest vomit inducing soundbite from the dinner time news.

"That's a health and safety", I was aggressively told my a superior in my last job in Ireland. "I wasn't aware that health and safety is a noun" was my forward and frustrated reply.

In all honestly, the year I spend back home I felt violated by nonsensical parroting like the aforementioned. Here in Thailand, there may be corruption, chronic dis-organization and borderline anarchy, but at least you feel human - animated. I saw people on the verge of hemorrhaging because a yellow mop bucket, was being used on a red mop bucket's floor space - I kid you not.

For those of you who live in Britain, this will not come as a shock, in fact you are probably thinking

" Yeah, of course you shouldn't be using the incorrect mop, that's simply ridiculous!"

Pithel of this type, has anesthetized an entire generation, squeezing their ability to think straight. Once trivial issues, are now punishable by one the spot fines, or even a lengthy stretch in jail. Personally, I question a governments ultimate intentions when shouting in a car, or arguing with a privately employed traffic warden are criminal offenses.

What's next in this crazy state of affairs; enforced euthanasia to solve the problem of an aging population? Is an aging population a helath and safety issue? Who knows where it will all end?

The point is that anything can become law if twisted in the right way, and repeated often enough. Rapidly, liberty is being eroded, and people are too busy working to pay tax to notice. Like a faulty tap dripping, freedom is being stolen drop by drop; insidiously sucking the joy of life from people, replacing what were everyday actions, into incriminating offenses.

Next time your in the car and your afraid to turn over the radio because there's a policeman nearby, think of the Thai man in the coconut tree, and wonder where it all went wrong.

'Mobocracy' and the Land of Smiles

"I believe the darkest days in Thailand's history are yet to come, as we see no swift solution to ongoing divisiveness," said Prinn Panitchpakdi, an Asia-Pacific analyst.

Today is the Thai New Year, Songkran. For the uninitiated, it is a wonderful celebration that marks the end of the dry season and heralds the start of the wet season with much frivolity. Whole communities take to the streets and propel water by whatever means possible at anything that comes within their visual range. Overloaded pick up trucks stacked with barrels of water drive the streets soaking anyone and everyone with indiscriminate, non-confrontational splashes of new year cheer.

These are the scenes that I have witnessed today in Phuket but the same can not be said of Bangkok. News bulletins are beaming in to my computer screen showing a violence and escalating anarchy on the street of the kingdom's capital. The 'Red Shirts' as they are colloquially know, have been part of highly organised and intricate anti-government campaign calling for the current government to step down. Their campaign has been thrusted forward in recent months and one can't help feeling that an attempted revolution is not far away. If this were to occur, it would be Thailand's nineteenth revolution in sixty years, and the fifth change in prime minister in four years. Political unrest and instability are becoming the norm for this country which is bad news for the fragile economy and wafer thin infrastructure.

Thailand's immediate future will depend on the ability of the Thai army to hold their nerve in the face of petrol bombs and extreme violence. The army have been firing off rounds from M16 assault weapons over the heads of riotous protesters today pushing tensions to a dangerous cliff edge.

The red shirts vitriol is being massaged by the ousted former prime minster Thaksin Shinawatra who is in exile as a result of a corruption conviction he recieved in 2008. Mr Shinawatra has been giving tele-conferences to crowds of thousands on the street via video links from Dubai, stoking the flames with incendiary language and imagery.

The next few days are critical and its impossible to predict what will happen with a very real possibility of more bloodshed or worse.

Mike

G20 protests: Riot police, or rioting police?

From George Monbiot's Blog.

At the G20 protests in London only one group appears to be looking for violent confrontation – and it's not the protesters

The trouble-makers are out in force again. Dressed in black, their faces partly obscured, some of them appear to be interested only in violent confrontation. It's almost as if they are deliberately raising the temperature, pushing and pushing until a fight kicks off. But this isn't some disorganised rabble: these people were bussed in and are plainly acting in concert. There's another dead giveaway. They are all wearing the same slogan: Police.

The police have been talking up violence at the G20 protests for weeks. They briefed journalists and companies in the City of London about the evil designs of the climate campaigners intending to demonstrate there, but refused to let the campaigners attend the briefings and put their own side of the story. They also rebuffed the campaigners when they sought to explain to the police what they wanted to do.

The way officers tooled themselves up in riot gear and waded into a peaceful crowd this afternoon makes it look almost as if they were trying to ensure that their predictions came true. Their bosses appear to have failed either to read or to heed the report by the parliamentary committee on human rights last week, about the misuse of police powers against protesters. "Whilst we recognise police officers should not be placed at risk of serious injury," the report said, "the deployment of riot police can unnecessarily raise the temperature at protests."

But there has always been a conflict of interest inherent in policing. The police are supposed to prevent crime and keep the streets safe. But if they are too successful, they do themselves out of a job. They have a powerful interest in exaggerating threats and, perhaps, an interest in ensuring that sometimes these threats materialise. This could explain what I've seen at one protest after another, where peaceful demonstrations turn into ugly rucks only when the police attack. The wildly disproportionate and unnecessary violence I've sometimes seen the police deploy could scarcely be better designed to provoke a reaction.

If this is so, they lose nothing. They might get the occasional rap over the knuckles from MPs or the police complaints commission. It doesn't seem to bother them. By planting the idea in the public mind that the streets could erupt into catastrophic violence at any time, were it not for the thick blue line thrown around even the mildest protest, they establish the need for a heavy police presence. While the public lives in fear, no government dares to cut the policing budget.

Monbiot.com

Who's For Soma Then?

"By this time the soma had begun to work. Eyes shone, cheeks were flushed, the inner light of universal benevolence broke out on every face in happy, friendly smiles. Even Bernard felt himself a little melted." (Aldus Huxley-Brave New World)

Just finished reading Huxley's 'Brave New World' and as would be expected, many ideas and emotions are flying round in my mind. This magnificent book has hit me like a jack hammer, jolting my perceptions with a 'We are doomed' cattle prod and reinforcing some existing opinions on the world.

Huxley's happiness drug 'Soma' which was referred to as having, "All the advantages of Christianity and alcohol; none of their defects," is something that resonated with me while reading.

The last few decades have seen the use of mood stabilizers and anti depressants as part of daily life in the West.

Doctors, at the beckon call of their pharmaceutical company paymasters, have been dishing out these tablets like there is no tomorrow, reinforcing the idea that internal problems can be solved externally.

I was doing a bit of searching on this topic on the net and found this article on 'The Rabbit Hole' blog.

'Scientists have been chasing after a fear-numbing pill in an effort to create the “Guilt-Free Soldier.”

Dutch scientists believe the heart drug propranolol can double as a deadener of painful memories in people with P.T.S.D. Just knowing such a pill is out there, of course, might also encourage soldiers to commit atrocities, because they will no longer have to live with the pain they have created'.

Link: http://parallelnormal.wordpress.com/2009/03/12/no-fear-factor-another-pill-dulls-the-pain/

Here is a Brief Communication Abstract from the conducted study.

[By Merel Kindt, Marieke Soeter & Bram Vervliet, Nature.com | Sunday, 15 February, 2009.]

Animal studies have shown that fear memories can change when recalled, a process referred to as reconsolidation.

We found that oral administration of the adrenergic receptor antagonist propranolol before memory reactivation in humans erased the behavioral expression of the fear memory 24 h later and prevented the return of fear. Disrupting the reconsolidation of fear memory opens up new avenues for providing a long-term cure for patients with emotional disorders.

Link: http://www.nature.com/neuro/journal/v12/n3/abs/nn.2271.html

Thanks to 'The Rabbit Hole' for bring this story to my attention.

Pikey

Huxley Interview 3

Here's number 3!

Mike

Huxley Interview

I must say, if you do notihng else today watch this video.

Currently reading 'Brave New World' again-this ties in very nicely indeed.

Breathless

Pikey

Dissidents or Dissenters?

Thought I would post this recent Christopher Hitchen's excerpt as it makes typically engaging reading on Northern Ireland.

From: Terrorists, Dissidents, and Copy Editors
Why it matters how the media describe killers in Iraq and Ireland.
By Christopher Hitchens


'Until recently, the same newspaper(The New York Times) used to employ a description of the Provisional Irish Republican Army in Northern Ireland that was slightly less misleading and also somewhat more amusing. Aware of the fact that its readers knew that there were two discrepant kinds of Christianity practiced in the province, the New York Times would do its job of being strictly informative by characterizing the IRA as "overwhelmingly Catholic." One could see what the editors were vainly trying to do—namely, to suggest that very few Ulster Protestants indeed were succumbing to the temptation to enlist in the ranks of the IRA—but the resulting image was nonetheless risible, as if someone encountering a gunman of the IRA would be first and foremost overwhelmed by his Catholicism. (Come to think of it, where was Bill Donohue of the Catholic League when this slander was being promulgated? He usually kindles into flame at much less provocation.)

But now something really depressing has happened and is spreading like weed across the media. Since the Good Friday agreement that committed the IRA to disarmament and the Republican movement to electoral politics, two small, ultraviolent nationalist factions have sworn to continue the armed struggle. In the past week, they have randomly slain members of the army and police. And it has been agreed, apparently without a discussion or an argument, to refer to these gruesome elements as dissidents.

I have consulted the final court of appeal on this, in the form of the Oxford English Dictionary, and the ruling is pretty final. All the origins of the term lie in expressions of argument and opinion, and of "dissent" from ruling systems or ideologies. There is a solitary and obscure reference, from a report in the London Times of 1955, to an obscure Vietnamese sect described as "dissident" and also as launching attacks on local Vietnamese army positions, but otherwise all the sources and authorities are unanimous: The term describes only attitudes and not actions, and it is most famously associated with the intellectual opposition to Soviet totalitarianism. (Prior to that usage, it was principally applied to those religious people of conscience who refused allegiance to the established Catholic and Episcopalian churches, which ironically would perhaps qualify the word dissident as being "overwhelmingly Protestant.")

Thanks for the original link K.

Mike

Could The Leaders Of Sinn Fein Be Doing More?-Soothing Words Are Not Always Enough

With senior leader of Sinn Fein condemning the recent murders in Northern Ireland and the insistence that the Republican movement pass on any information regarding the same, people have heralded halcyon times in Republican openness.

Is this really the case, or are certain factors not being revealed?

The likelihood of Gerry Adams and Martin McGuinness knowing about the timing of these killings is very doubtful, but there is little doubt that the senior figures in Sinn Fein must know who the perpetrators are.

These murders where carried out in a professional, militaristic fashion, leaving little evidence or trace of identification, and is therefore unlikely to be the work of a fanatical teenager.

Those responsible fired at the victims from a distance and then finished them off from point blank range as they lay dying. This levelheadedness, in the face of such a crime points towards a more mature killer, perhaps one with many years experience.

Thus, with many members of the PIRA leaving after the ceasefire, disgusted by the democratic path taken by SinnFein, it is possible that these disaffected individuals were involved in the recent murders.

It stands beyond reasonable doubt that Gerry Adams and Martin McGuinness know who jumped off the ship ten years ago, and the names of these individuals should be presented to the authorities.

Northern Ireland is such a small place and the numbers involved in terrorist activities are so low, therefore individuals who left the organisation have to be compiled, profiled and handed over to the police.

If this was carried out, we really would be witnessing a new age of transparent Republicanism.

Pikey

Good Old New Labour

As the march towards Labour's police states continues to pick up pace in Britain, the public are left in a state of paralysis by what is happening on their fair shores. Lord Haysham called it an 'electoral dictatorship' others have more caustic words echoing around in their psyche.

Almost 60 new powers contained in more than 25 Acts of Parliament have whittled away at freedoms and broken pledges set out in the Human Rights Act and Magna Carta, as a result of laws introduced by Labour since they came to power in 1997.

The Convention on Modern Liberty recent dossier, rightfully criticises draconian police powers to detain terror suspects for 28 days without charge, new stop-and-search powers handed to police (allowing them to stop people without reason at airports and other designated areas), and restrictions on the right of peaceful protest.


When the fevered rhetoric dies down and the dust begins to settle on the pages of the 'objective' broadsheets, we can take time to breath and reassess what has become of Britain, and more frighteningly, where it is headed.

It is the first time such a picture of the erosion of rights under Labour has been published, exercising their right to free speech and providing the government with a clear and comprehensive depiction of how Britain is being run.

Liberty's voice is not alone in the wilderness, it is one shared by many disenfranchised and disillusioned people throughout the land, and surely can't be ignored. A solid platform for dissent and oganisation has been built and with grotesque despoliation a daily occurrence, the growth should be rapid.

With the proliferation of surveillance technology, new laws allowing individuals to be electronically tagged, the legal interception of letters, emails and phone calls, one could be forgiven for mistaking our 'free' society for that of North Korea or China. But no, these latest pearls of wisdom come from Whitehall, an institution rapidly losing face and credibility.

The question many are asking is, 'Where is it all going to end?' Huxleyian and Orwellian images and language resonate in one's mind, and present a very real and present danger for society.

A more pressing question for one to forward could be, 'What can be done to stop it?'

Direct action with violence would provide an opportunity for the government and would see the police state close in further, using fear through the media to validate their means.

It has taken economic quandary to waken people from their docu-soap slumber, and now is the time for free thinking and well informed citizens to educate themselves in the hypocrisy, and organise.

The battle of state vs people has been set in motion, for who will win the war, the jury is out. The power lies with the people and the time is right for action

Pikey

Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance Extract

At the moment I am reading and enjoying immensely 'Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance' by Robert M Pirsig.

This particular passage jumped out at me and I felt that I needed to share it with blog.

'To speak of a certain government and establishment institutions as 'the system' is to speak correctly, since these organisations are founded upon the same structural conceptual relationships as a motorcycle. They are sustained by structural relationships even when they have lost all other meaning and purpose.People arrive at a factory and perform a totally meaningless task from eight to five without question because the structure demands it be that way. There's no villain, no "mean guy" who wants they to live meaningless lives, it's just that the structure, demands it and no one is willing to take on the formidable task of changing the structure because it is meaningless.

But to tear down a factory or to revolt against a government or to avoid repair of a motorcycle because it is a system is to attack effects rather than causes; and as long as the attack is on effects only , no change is possible. The true system, the real system, is our present construction of systematic thought itself, rationality itself, and if a factory is torn down but the rationality that produced it is left standing, then that rationality will simply produce another factory. If a revolution destroys a systematic government, but the systematic patterns of thought that it produced that government are left intact, then those patterns will repeat themselves in the succeeding government. There's so much talk about the system, a so little understanding.

Food for thought.

Pikey

The Bloodshed Continues- Gaza

Excerpts from Mary Riddells article in Daily Telegaph, Thursday, January 8, 2009,

entitled:

'It is time to tell the truth- what Israel is doing in Gaza is wrong.'

She writes:

'This is not simply about security. It is not even just about innocent civilians who have seen their families obliterated and their land, a thin shard of hell, bombed to rubble. It is about humanity itself. As the tanks finally roll out of Gaza, the international community may congratulate itself on finessing the peace. The truth is that Israel has played its game exactly as it chose. If America had demanded a ceasefire sooner, or if the West had threatened embargoes and cried revulsion, then the schoolrooms of Gaza would not be graffiti-painted in its childrens' blood.

'Bring back the politics of denunciation. Yes, Hamas is a vicious neighbour. And yes, the West also has dubious warfare on its conscience. But nothing excuses acts so sickening that, if perpetrated by a less-blessed state, they would be reviled throughout the world as war crimes. Once again, the world has declined to tell Israel, in terms, that it has no divine mandate for destruction.

'The dead of Gaza will be buried soon. Remember them. In this new year, when the innate goodness of the human spirit is held up as the last bulwark against debt, recession, war and adversity, their ghosts should haunt us all’.

Pikey

Good old New Labour

We've had a lot of rights removed over the past decade or so, rights we've had since the magna carta, but which have been discarded without debate or thought.

As an example:

* The government can ban any groups it labels ‘terrorist’ (Terrorism Act 2000)
* The government can monitor any and all private communication (Regulation of Investigatory Powers Act 2000)
* Armed forces can be deployed on UK soil in peacetime (Civil Contingencies Act 2004)
* Property and assets can be seized without warning or compensation (Civil Contingencies Act 2004)
* Spontaneous protest is now illegal around Parliament (Serious Organised Crime and Police Act 2005)
* Without trial, any British citizen can be tagged, put under house arrest and banned from using the telephone or internet (Prevention of Terrorism Act 2005)
* Any citizen can be imprisoned without charge for 28 days (42 days has passed the house of commons) (Terrorism Act 2006)
* The executive can change any current legislation without consulting Parliament, with very few exceptions (Legislative and Regulatory Reform Act 2006)
* Arbitrary punishments with no legal precedents can be issued with little legal recourse, based on hearsay evidence ( Anti-Social Behaviour Act 2003)
* British citizens can be extradicted to the United States with no evidence presented (Extradition Act 2003)
* Compulsory identification for all British citizens, with an unlimited amount of details stored in a central database, which the private sector will have access to (Identity Cards Act 2006)
* Upon arrest the police have claim to your DNA, even if you are released without charge (Criminal Justice Act 2003)

Chinese Nationalism

A good American friend had an experience with a Chinese person that can only really happen if you have lived in this most wierd of places. It reminded me of some of my experiences in the middle kingdon.

This is what she wrote.

I recently recieved a notice from tagged.com alerting me that my Chinese friend Qiande Zhang's birthday was coming up, so I decided to send him a birthday greeting. In the same email I asked him if life is any different for him now that the olympics are in town. He actually lives in Shanghai, not Beijing, but I wondered how far reaching the "rules" were. So I asked about a couple that I thought were especially peculiar:

1) Were stinky cab drivers really banned?

2) If you see a bottle of liquid on the ground, do you really have to pick it up and take a sip to determine if it is a poison?

This is his oh so very wonderful response:

thanks very much. it is so sweet of you. actually i was grown up from my hometown where people celebrate their birthday once in ten years, say when you are ten, or twenty, or thirty. but anyways, thanks for your greetings. it was a big surprise to me.

Olympics, people are just talking about it, watching the TV, counting how many medals China has got. nothing is special than any other Olympics which were not held in China before. maybe the only difference is that this time, common people can buy some tickets and watch some events.

Rules? you mean checking in when you are at the bus station or the train station? Shanghai is fine, like everyday. actually everyday in Shanghai, it is already very safe place. so, there is no difference. stinky cab drivers should be banned in Beijing, but maybe not in those small places, you know that. sip-taking test is only for the bus station or something like this, but not just on the street, nobody would like to take a sip out of a bottle just picked up on the street. so you are right, it is ridiculous.

there are not that many special rules. even there are rules, it is not an option to follow it or not. it is a team work to host the Olympics in China and all these so called rules won't affect us that much. besides, all these rules are bringing good to people, so, why not?

actually there are football matches in Shanghai. these days, friends are buying tickets and watching some games, maybe proud that China can also host the Olympics too.

to me, Olympics is just the opening ceremony. all the culture stuff reflected out of it. i enjoyed it very much. only the Opening ceremony is China. other stuff, like events, are just common stuff, no difference to any other Olympics.

the funny thing is that there was no one English word spoken at the show except by the Chairman of IOC. it was weird. Soul was having an English song even which is very popular now. but not this one in China. what is going on? where is the message of communicating with people from all over the world? is it discrimination to people who doesn't have good enough Chinese literacy? where is culture diversity?

these days, im studying the obsession, stalking, manner, leadership, being submissing, many different stuff etc etc in the Asian culture by watching Japanese soap operas which offer me many different perspectives to look at Asian culture, and Western culture.. also a little bit personal reflection, enjoying.

Weekend in Shanghai means Saturday night. man, cannot wait to get a beer tomorrow night.

Dimitri is back to Shanghai in the end of this month.

take it easy. hope to meet you again in Shanghai.

amazing stuff I think you will agree, none too surprising though.

This was my experience a couple of years ago.

I once had a class of teenagers in wenzhou who when practicing conditionals were asked to question their partner 'What would you do if?' and come up with three responses. After adequate time and prompting was given the students had to perform their mini role play at the front of the class to give an account of their progress.

The first and second pairs of students did the usual dribble, 'What would you do if you were sick?' 'Go hospital,' These types of pre-intermediate noodlings continued for the next pair also.

Then stepped forward a cocky pair of grinning fourteen year olds with a history of being a pain in the hole. One said to the other 'What would you do if you met a Japanese?' The other then promptly and imperiously sneered, 'If I met a Japanese man I would kill him with a gun!.'

I think this is another example of the level of patriotic nationalism that runs through the blood of the average Chinese man.

Pikey

Cheers Lisha

Offensive?

An absolute sketch.

Pikey

For God and Ulster

Today’s Newsletter carries a report in which Rev. Stephen Dickinson objects to the presence of a chinese dragon as part of the proposed 11th Night parade in Tandragee, labelling it as “offensive” and “insults the name of Jesus Christ.”

The story carried over onto the Talkback programme today, when the Rev. Dickinson further elaborated on his objections, arguing that the dragon represented a drift into including ‘pagan’ elements within the Twelfth.

Taken at face value, the Rev. Dickinson’s objections could have been understood from the position of a religious figure not wanting what he believes is a celebration of protestantism to be further diminished in the same way that many religious leaders of all faiths object to the materialist ‘hijacking’ of key dates in their religious calendars.

At one stage he forcefully stated that “we need to put protestantism back into the Order.” However, his argument fell down badly when he skipped over the objections of a caller about what goes on at 11th Night bonfires. (Discussion about 39 mins into programme.)

The incident is also an unfortunate reminder of earlier opposition from within loyalism to the chinese community.

From Slugger O'Toole

I find the actions of these so called Christians repulsive.

The politicians talk of 'progress' and a 'vibrant Ulster' but in reality this is only the case if you are white and middle class.

There is inherent xenophobic undertones to many things I witness now whether that be muttering in the supermarket queue, or outright racist slurs.

The fact is that this has to stop. The demographics of the country are changing and this is the natural state of affairs in a post conflict society, therefore people need to open themselves and embrace their brother and sisters from around the world, who come to Ireland searching for a better life.

If the shoe was on the other foot would we want an opportunity to better ourselves?

Its time to scramble out of the dark ages and evolve. For some in this society that may be a big ask.

Pikey

And theres more..................................

PS: http://www.guardian.co.uk/uk/2006/oct/22/race.ukcrime

Waterboard Bliss.....Perhaps Not

I must admit that I was shocked and a little dissapointed when I read the news about Christopher Hitchens this morning.

The outspoken, belligerent, but brilliant writer who has been an open advocate of the Iraq war took part in a waterboarding experiment to see if the CIA 'interogation' method constitutes torture.

He stood in typically imperious fashion exclaiming "I determined to resist if only for the honor of my navy ancestors who had so often been in peril on the sea", but succumbed after just seconds.

He went on to write: " ... if waterboarding does not constitute torture, then there is no such thing as torture."

The horrors of waterboarding have been highlighted by groups like Amnesty for some time now, but it seems that their detailed analysis is not enough for some people.

Incredibly Hitchens went on to describe waterboarding in his analysis as an "extreme interrogation", although even in the article he says he does "not trust anybody" who does not understand the viewpoint that "when contrasted to actual torture, waterboarding is more like foreplay".

Ok Now everyone can breath a deep sigh of relief.....................
Waterboarding is indeed a nefarious act. Thank you Mr Hitchens for proving it so.



Pikey

Why Bother?

Very funny indeed.

Pikey

Tough on Crime.....

Tough on crime, rough on criminals

Plans to publicly shame criminals could be on the cards


Tony Blair promised to be tough on crime and tough on the causes of crime. His successor Gordon Brown may be about to out-tough him.

Louise Casey, the former head of the government's Respect unit, has drawn up a series of radical measures to fight crime.

Plans to make people serving community sentences wear visible jackets identifying that they are criminals and the possible publication of posters and websites with pictures of offenders are likely to be the most controversial of the plans.

Alongside the Guardian story on the paper's front page is a picture of people kneeling in orange Guanta´namo-style boiler suits with their hands behind their heads. It sends a shiver down the spine until you realise it relates to a separate article about protests against George Bush in London.

Even if the criminals are more likely to be forced to wear high visibility bibs - according to the Mail - rather than orange boiler suits, the plans are unlikely to go down well with civil liberties' groups still fuming over attempts to extend the period terror suspects can be held without trial.

Extract from Haroon Siddique Guardian News Blog.

Scary stuff I think you will agree. It won't be long until the people not wearing high viz will be the ones standing out. Homogenize, work, consume, watch reality TV and let your leaders take control.

To borrow a phrase from the immortal Bill Hicks,

"I'm sure their motives are pure."

Aghh well, break out the victory gin I suppose.

Pikey

Vote Un-Democratic Judas Party

The DUP have showed where their hat lies in the political ring. For DUP MPs Unionism is nothing at all to do with identification with the people of this entire Kingdom or the freedom they enjoy. The very fact they identify with an ideology that calls itself 'Unionism' is at this point in time nothing short of laughable. They have given a firm, two fingered 'fuck you' to the people of the UK, while hiding behind botched top secret issues of national security, using the troubles as an example of their consistent tough stance of terrorism.

The DUP and Lady Sylvia Hermanthe sole UUP MP, who predictably voted with the Brown administration saved Labour's on edge Scotsman from humiliating defeat in a vote that should have brought this government to its knees This is a government that has failed ot listen to the masses and increased the gap between rich and the poor with breathtaking billigerence. Despite this, the DUP saved this floundering Prime Minister and this government to do a deal, which to use their beloved biblical language, did a Judas.

There has rarely been a more stark example of how a political party has lost sight of the wood for the trees. A party that is intent on selling their country out for a short term economic package that brings Britain one step closer to a consumer concentration camp.

Shame on you. All good church goers as well.
Thou shall not.........................be a sell out bastard.
Yeah right.

Pikey

Voltaire Quotes 1694-1778

This enlightenment thinker's belief in civil liberties, social reform despite censorship and questioning of religious dogma, make his ideas essential in todays Britain.

Here are some good quotes:


"Judge a man by his questions rather than by his answers"

"Prejudices are what fools use for reason."

"It is dangerous to be right in matters on which the established authorities are wrong"

"The best government is a benevolent tyranny tempered by an occasional assassination."

"Every man is guilty of all the good he didn't do"

"I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it"

"Everything's fine today, that is our illusion."

"I have never made but one prayer to God, a very short one: 'O Lord, make my enemies ridiculous.' And God granted it."

"The multitude of books is making us ignorant."

"There are some that only employ words for the purpose of disguising their thoughts."

"Use, do not abuse; neither abstinence nor excess ever renders man happy."

"God is always on the side of the big battalions."

"Man is free at the moment he wishes to be."

"Common sense is not so common."

"This is no time to make new enemies."

There are some amazing images cast up by reading these I am sure you will agree.

Pikey