Anywhere But Here Is Better

Life is one big Theatre of the Absurd

 

No need for explanations or diatribes. You couldn't make this up. Enjoy!

 

Papal butler Gabriele to be imprisoned in Vatican police cell

Papal butler Paolo Gabriele will be locked up in a Vatican police cell Thursday, the Church announced. Gabriele had been under house arrest since he was found guilty on October 6 of stealing documents from Pope Benedict XIV's apartments, and the prosecution in the trial decided not to appeal against his 18-month prison sentence, AFP reported. A judicial source said he would not appeal the verdict.  http://rt.com/news/line/2012-10-25/#id39524

 but...

The Roman Catholic Church has protected evil for too long

It has become a painfully self-evident truth – surely, even to the silent onlookers at the Vatican – that the longer Cardinal Seán Brady stays in place as Primate of All Ireland, the greater the damage inflicted on the reputation of the Catholic Church in Ireland and beyond. This is not simply because his presence has become a reminder of the cover-up of paedophile abuse by priests, but also because it illustrates a continuing problem: that, after all this time, Cardinal Brady just doesn’t get it.

By “get it” I mean that he still seems to believe that he personally behaved appropriately in the circumstances by which the late Father Brendan Smyth, a rapacious paedophile of almost unimaginable moral corruption, was tacitly permitted by the Church to continue brutally abusing children for 40 years, long after the ecclesiastical authorities knew what he was up to.  http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/europe/ireland/9246727/The-Roman-Catholic-Church-has-protected-evil-for-too-long.html

 

 

 

Prolific robber jailed for seven years

A robber has been jailed for more than seven years after he admitted a string of offences.

Nicholas Atkinson was sentenced to 90 months after pleading guilty to five robberies, one attempted robbery and a theft. He took cash on each occasion.

He pleaded guilty to business robberies [and] asked Judge John Gosling to take three other crimes into account when passing sentence. http://www.derbyshire.police.uk/News-and-Appeals/Brought-to-Justice/2012/September/28Sept-Prolific-robber-jailed-for-seven-years.aspx

 

but...

Guess Which Wall Street CEO Is Even More Admired Than Jamie Dimon

Goldman Sachs' leader Lloyd Blankfein beat out JPMorgan's Jamie Dimon as the top rated Wall Street CEO, according to a survey [that] asked employees if they approved of the way the CEO is leading their company. http://articles.businessinsider.com/2012-04-04/wall_street/31285969_1_lloyd-blankfein-approval-rating-survey

 

 

 

Obama's UN General Assembly speech condemns extremism

US President Barack Obama has urged global leaders to rally against extremism in an address to the UN General Assembly in New York.

Mr Obama said it was the obligation of all leaders to speak out forcefully against violence and extremism.

Mr Obama also again stressed the US would not allow Iran nuclear weapons. He said the US would "do what we must" to stop Tehran acquiring nuclear arms. http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-middle-east-19709969

 

but...

U.S. Drones Spotted Over Somalia; Pres. Obama Issues Executive Order

Not a single day passes without a new story about the increase in the global and domestic use of drones.

While the U.S. military keeps mum about its use of drones around the world, it is known that drones are deployed and launched from American military bases in Djibouti, the Seychelles, and Ethiopia.

Perhaps there is more to the crescendo of American military activity in Somalia than is being discussed. On July 20, President Obama issued another of his nearly weekly executive orders, this one aiming to cripple the power of “terrorists” in Somalia.

President Obama writes in his edict that he intends to address this emergency by cutting off “exports of charcoal from Somalia, which generate significant revenue for al-Shabaab.”

"It is crucial that the trade in charcoal from Somalia be prohibited to diminish this source of al-Shabaab's revenue and further discourage the group from engaging in terrorist acts," the fact sheet declares.

Of course, one mustn’t overlook the green angle in the war against international terrorism. The sale of charcoal by al-Shabaab, the Treasury Department insists, "has led to environmental degradation that has contributed to the ongoing humanitarian crisis in the Horn of Africa."  http://thenewamerican.com/world-news/africa/item/12229-us-drones-spotted-over-somalia-pres-obama-issues-eo

 

 

CLEANING UP POLITICS

We have a wide-ranging programme to improve the political system we inherited from Labour. We are bringing forward reforms which aim to restore people's faith in their politics and politicians. We want our political system to be more accountable and more transparent. http://www.conservatives.com/Policy/Where_we_stand/Cleaning_Up_Politics.aspx

 

but...

 

MPs Expenses: Senior Politicians Among Those Renting Homes While Claiming Money

MPs were embroiled in a new expenses row today after it emerged that 27 are letting out London homes at the same time as claiming public money to rent in the city.

Former defence secretary Liam Fox, shadow ministers Andy Burnham, Jim Murphy and Chris Bryant, and Communities Minister Don Foster are among those listed as raking in income from properties while receiving up to £20,000 a year in expenses.

Although the practice does not break any rules, it will fuel concerns that politicians are still able to profit from Commons allowances. http://www.huffingtonpost.co.uk/2012/10/19/mps-expenses-senior-politicians-among-those-renting-homes-while-claiming-money_n_1986286.html

 

 

 

I could go on, but this is far too easy.

 

 

 

 

Legislators. Regulators. Prosecutors. Broadcasters. Speculators. Perpetrators. Bedfellows all.

So, here we are, more than four years into the worst economic crisis since the First Great Depression, and no one in the high echelons of the global financial and banking community has been properly investigated or prosecuted for fraud or theft, despite plenty of evidence stacking up that an eye-popping level of corruption is rife in this sector. Of course, this means that not a single greedster has gone to jail.

Now, a lot of people in the general public - well, maybe it's only a handful who bother to look up from their mass media dumbing machines - are angry about this, and wonder why nothing has been done in terms of the exercise of the law. They probably think it's because the machinery of justice is moving painfully slowly, and that eventually some action will be taken, surely.

I'm sorry to be the bearer of more bad news, but I contend that no member of the plutocracy (some label them the kleptocracy) will ever go to jail over the wholesale theft of taxpayers' money that has occurred since late 2007.

I won't go into details here about the mechanism in play that has resulted in billions and billions of dollars, pounds and euros of government (i.e. taxpayers') money being funnelled into the private accounts of the active orchestrators of the global "collapse". (Interesting that the collapse has resulted in an increase in the wealth at the top table.) There are plenty of other places on the web that explain this nefarious scheme - revealed by people more expert than I in fathoming the intricacies of the double and triple-dealings of those zero-empathy characters whom the infuriated commentator Max Keiser fetchingly terms the banksters. (He also calls them financial terrorists, which is an amusing ironic twist in this age of the eternal War on Terror.)

Regarding the lack of prosecution and conviction, the truth needs to be told that the legislators, the regulators and the prosecutors are indistinguishable from the perpetrators. Let me repeat this. The people who are appointed by the government and paid by public money to uphold The Law and act against criminal fraud are in bed with the fraudsters.

 

No comment

 

The evidence from near and afar is that the full weight of the law is applied to common street muggers, who get thrown into prison gulags with alacrity, but the lauded and lionised Wall Street heist-meisters continue to be accorded the blessings of their rapacious organisations, million-dollar bonuses and dinner with the president/prime minister.

To add luxury-priced gasoline to a raging fire, the mass media controlled by the plutocracy is playing the same game, focusing on titillating minutiae such as telephotographed celebrity breasts and the gaffes of minor politicians so as to shield the top tier perps from proper scrutiny. News Corp - primarily through Fox News and its sister gutter newspapers including the once esteemed (London) Times - is only the most blatant of the cabal of apologists who have usurped the previously sacrosanct role of investigative journalism. The BBC is far more subtle in its descent into dumb-dumb land, as befits a nation famed for the lovingly incestuous relationship between senior politicians and the news broadcasters.

 

The only kind of bias now discussed

 

The police forces of several countries at the heart of the world-spanning corruption have morphed into private protection forces for the puppet-masters, wading into lawful street protesters like stick-wielding zombies on acid. I'd dearly like to know how the boys in blue are being briefed (a.k.a. whipped up) by politicised senior officers before going into battle on the streets. If you knew the sheer scale of recent purchases of urban war weaponry and ammunition by those previously considered to be humble protectors of law-abiding citizens, you would either weep or run for the woods.

There's not a lot more to say about these cosy bedfellows. We're living in a world that works only for a few at the top of the mud heap. Except for brief moments, it has always been thus. The problem isn't that there's corruption - in nature, corruption is a natural process of decay, and our species is decaying, no question about that. No, the problem is one of denied optimism. For a short period, we grew up with dreams of making a better world, with expectations that there would be growing opportunity and at least a chance of building a society where people were tolerant and respectful of each other and where conflict and hastened death could be avoided through dialogue and equitable sharing and conservation of limited natural resources.

This optimism is all but extinguished. Governments have shown themselves to be mere shell companies that exist only to provide a thinning veneer of respectability for the financial rapists who from the shadows dominate economic life. Why anyone would wish to vote any more is beyond me. No one in any mainstream party has the slightest interest in representing the ordinary person - they only claim to when they are duplicitously hunting for votes. Time and time again to the point of exhausting ennui, after each election the "governing" group always revert to dancing to the puppeteers' tunes - these smarmy professional liars with their shiny faces, sharp suits and smug attitude that they know best, all of which denote limited intellect and naked personal ambition.

I've said it before, but it's worth repeating, if only to make some sense of the mess. The core problem is our in-built defectiveness as a species. Although we are rather glibly defined as Homo sapiens, we are anything but sapient. We are on the whole bumbling, oafish thugs lacking wisdom, careering through the world consuming, pilfering and destroying everything in our path, with no thought as to consequences or the requirement to conserve. "Use it today, fuck tomorrow" is the unspoken mantra that pervades all economic activity, a perfect example of which is nuclear power generation - among a great many examples.

 

Astonishing foresight

 

We have got to where we are today as a natural outcome of the Darwinian process of so-called survival of the fittest. It took me a long while to understand this, but I now realise that 'fittest' has no qualitative meaning. We're not the best species in the sense of goodness, we're just the best in terms of adapting and utilising the environment for our own selfish ends. It is a blind process that has reached its pinnacle with the current insanity of annihilating the very fabric of the biosphere that has nourished life for billions of years.

The crude way of putting this is that we shit on our own doorstep, even though we apparently know that shitting on our doorstep threatens our future health and survival.

 Occasionally I have wondered what it would feel like to have been a descendant of someone like Hitler or Stalin - to know that your forebearer was responsible for colossal levels of death, destruction and living misery. How could I live with myself, knowing that I shared genes with that monstrous being? Well, here's a wake-up call. We are all members of the gene pool that has dominated life on earth to the point of its serious impairment. En route to today, we exterminated all manner of other species great and small, including our stronger but less cunning cousins the Neanderthals. We are the descendants of the bad boy in the jungle - and this completely explains where we are in 2012.

The bad boy is still being the bad boy. Nothing has been learnt on a species level to moderate the bad boy mentality, save for a relatively few 'aberrants' who somehow summon the wisdom to question our collective behaviour.

The iota of hope for the future rests with these aberrants. It will take some kind of miracle, or some unexpected tangential mutation, but if sufficient numbers of nascent sapients survive whatever crisis culminates from the brutish bestiality of today, there might be another way of living life that puts the blind and stupid behaviour of Homo sapiens to bed, once and for all.

 

Night night, y'all

 

 

Louise et Angélique

Louise was aged just 15 and Angélique was 18. Lives cut short in 1904. Ten years before the Great War. Thirty five years before the outbreak of WWII. Before Stalin, Hitler, Mussolini, Franco, Chairman Mao, Pol Pot, Gaddafi, Hussein, Bush-Cheney, Blair and other tyrants. Before airplanes, films, television, motorways, washing machines, fast food, rocket ships, computers, mobile phones and other blessed innovations.

Louise and Angélique toiled in a Parisian factory. An embroidery factory, if you please. Louise was sad because her mother had just died. More than sad. It seems she discussed the idea of suicide with her friend Angélique. Angélique was a true friend, prepared to accompany Louise on her journey from life.

 

Did they find life so hard, so cheerless, so bleak that, on the brink of womanhood, they felt no optimism at all about the future? Was hope completely extinguished? Were their fingers numb and their spirits deadened from embroidering cloth twelve hours a day week after week?

Suicide was the last resort, but they took it. Together.

“Friends Die Together” intoned the newspaper headline. Probably no headlines would have punctuated their lives, had they lived. We would never have heard about Louise and Angélique marrying decent men, and having a handful of pink babies between them. Their children never grew up and made more children. All these missing souls never had the chance to breathe, to laugh, to change the world for the better.

 

    Today, it is 2012.

It happened one hundred and eight years ago, on July 5^th. A boatman found them, after the river found them. Floating, just floating. Side by side.

Louise was aged just 15 and Angélique was 18.

 

 

The End of Rant

I've been quite quiet recently. It's more than three months since I last posted anything of consequence on this electronic noticeboard for accidental visitors. The fact is, I'm calm. I haven't had any anties in my panties (now there's a thought) for quite some time. But today I have decided to break my mum-ness, rather reluctantly I confess - rather like the hole dweller in Life of Brian who has sworn himself to silence, only to be rudely intruded upon by a fleeing messiah-in-denial.

 

 

 

The reason I have awoken from my reality and re-entered the fantasyland that passes for human life on this 'ere planet is hard to explain. The best I can do is enumerate some factors that have (un)happily coincided to disturb my existential slumber. (I say 'factors' rather than 'facts' because the only fact of which I am certain is that 1 apple plus 1 apple equals 2 apples. All else is pure conjecture, regardless of what is spewed forth daily by those preachy characters with an agenda standing on mighty pedestals.)

1. The current president of the Land of the Fee (sic) recently went on record to condemn extremism in this world. This coming from the executive order signer who is permitting the largest extra-judicial culling of US and foreign citizens in US history. Heard of drones? Good luck trying to find the true running total of people wiped out without so much as an investigation, let alone an innocent-until-proven-guilty trial. Taking countless bystanders along for the paradise ride.

2. About 11 people keep an eye on UK government chicanery by watching the Parliament channel on the good 'ole BBC, but untold millions went amok trying to get a gander at the future queen of England's tits, and similar numbers collapsed YouTube looking for footage of a numpty using up ridiculous amounts of cash falling out of a high altitude balloon capsule. A real hero would have dropped food and medicine parcels across sub-Saharan Africa - anonymously.

3. The head honcho of the governing Conservative Party - Dave, Our Shiny Dear Leader - announced to all and sundry that, "I'm not here to defend privilege, I'm here to spread it."  No one seemed to pipe up and explain to him - and to everyone else listening with shiny eyes - that the concept of privilege by definition necessitates 'haves' and 'have-nots'. The code is that if you cannot get "on" in life with the help of daddy's money, you may as well open the door now to the wolves gathering outside.

Eh? Spreading what?

 

4. There is a wholesale dismantling and selling-off of the UK's National Health Service going on as we speak, masked by the complete lie that the feckless coalition government has "ring-fenced" frontline health services. Don't believe me? Speak to any doctor, nurse or clinician. What has already happened to dentristy (regular teeth care is now a privilege with a hefty pay-on-the-spot price tag) will soon happen to general medical care for all but a handful of services. The NHS is being hawked off just as the railways were, with the virtual-monopoly franchise holders given a licence to fleece the public for the sake of showcasing "enterprise Britain". Ex-friend of the young Richard Branson should be ashamed of himself for having anything to do with this project.

5. Last, but by no means least, the continuing meek mootings of the UK's self-styled Liberal Democrats are demonstrating the political truism: who needs principles when you can have power?  The agenda being perpetrated by the "coalition" government is pure Conservatism with a big C. (Another C-word comes to mind.) The only reason I can fathom for the Liberals' continuing spinelessness is that they know they are doomed at the ballot box come what may, so they choose to rake in another three years of luscious ministerial privileges rather than walk out now and derail the runaway government train driven in reality by the City of London's blindly corrupt greedsters.

 See what I mean? The end of rant.

 Funnily enough (I'm utterly hysterical with laughter) there are some quite serious problems in the world, none of which are specifically mentioned above. We would do well to lift our heads from the mass media dumbing machines and heed what is happening to the biosphere, rather than dwell on the mundane inadequacies of the privileged class. On the other hand, maybe it's best in the long run if we distract ourselves and simply watch in stunned admiration as "our leaders" fit castors to the deckchairs on the Titanic as the behemoth heads blithely into the sunset.

On this note, see you. [Looks in the mirror and departs, stage left.]

 

 hmm... how do I get out of here...