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It’s been a while now since the financial world went to hell in a hand-basket but not that big a while, as we all continue to struggle with the impact how are the banks making out? Well, they’re fine to be honest, they’re back to making money & doing their best to make as much of it as possible by charging plenty of interest whilst paying almost none. To look at an average bank now you wouldn’t believe that the current economic turmoil had anything to do with them whatsoever, I had hopes that the banks might have come out of the mess with a better or at least more realistic attitude but this is certainly not the case. If anything they’ve proved that they can do pretty much as they please & that if the brown stuff ever does hit the fan again then it’s in our best interests to act in their best interests. Frankly the whole thing stinks to high heaven & anyone who wants to believe that they’ll be responsible in the future when they have no chance of suffering the consequences of their actions is a bloody fool. (continue reading…)

I’m not going to mess about here, this isn’t a post that pretends to explain whether Fridays are evil, they are & that’s all there is to it, the only real question is whether they’re evil by design or intent? I mean Fridays do seem to set out to destroy us, oh they’re great at first, when you’re sat at school first thing Monday morning the coming Friday looks like a beacon of hope in an otherwise bloody bleak world. It shines with the promise of fun & freedom where you can escape the pressures of life & just let it all go. It’s still keeping its’ glorious glow long after our school days are over, it’s still the end of the week after all but now we’re allowed out later at night & after a heavy week drudging the boards for pennies Friday & the bright lights beckon cheerfully. There’s hope attached to Friday that Monday just can’t carry off, yes Saturday always gets top billing but deep down we all know that Friday is king of the hill & that Wednesday is boring, Tuesday’s hardly a day at all & who cares about Thursday? The only reason anyone gets worked up over Thursday is because it’s Friday the day after, & so it goes on, the years pass & we’re lulled into thinking that Fridays are our friend, it’s not though, Friday is out to get all of us. (continue reading…)

It looks simple enough, Cameron got the most MPs so he gets to be in charge, only he doesn’t, at least not quite because he didn’t get enough MPs to really strut his stuff. So Brown’s still at Number 10 for now but he’s not really the PM since by all accounts he ought to be in opposition & fighting for his rubbish job. This leaves Clegg with all the power but as leader of the smallest big party he hasn’t got the big stick he needs to wring anything like what he wants out of the Tories. Meanwhile the world plods on & we meander along looking slightly bemused by it all, the people have truly spoken this time & proved once & for all that we haven’t got a clue as to what we want. It’s a hardly shocking result given the candidates but it’s not a help, I quite like the idea of a hated Tory minority government, it begs the question as to who goes next I suppose but it would serve them right for the eighties. One thing’s for sure, whatever happens in the next week or so I can see the next election coming a lot sooner than in four years time, I can’t see any coalition lasting long beneath the strain of the cuts coming. No matter who’s doing it there’s going to be a massive outcry from a great many sections of both private & public endeavour, the cuts may be needed but they’ll still be hated. (continue reading…)

It’s generally accepted that Facebook is a massive phenomena & has hundreds of millions of users, it’s safe to say that just amongst my family I can think of only three members who don’t regularly spend a portion of their day there. It’s brilliant for keeping in touch with people & when it’s late & we’ve all retired for the day we can still catch up & hang with the people we like. It’s almost the same for the children too, instead of huge ‘phone bills being the result of chatting to their mates they can gossip away freely without messing up anyones’ day. There are a few differences though, the beauty of Facebook is that it allows where people were earlier to carry on, the downside of course is exactly the same thing & it’s nowhere more apparent than amongst the kids. Bullying used to be schooltime only unless you were unlucky enough to live too near the bully, now it can go on & on with the added problem of attracting more & more people to latch onto a victim, there’s been a lot done to stop this & it does sort of work, except for the fake accounts. (continue reading…)

Aside from a strange Puritan element that continues to run throughout the UK & is apparently obsessed about whether anyone who has had sex has had a better time than we have & whether it was allowed sex or immoral sex the only other topic with staying power is immigration. It’s going to be an even bigger topic as we hit the election proper as no-one in any government can draft legislation that fits with the odd ideas we seem to have about sex, immigration however is another story. No-one even wants to bring up the subject properly or discuss it with any vigour unless we’re talking about the ranting fools who believe that immigration causes cancer, it only came up in the leadership debates because it really had to since the harder times get the more society seeks a scapegoat. If all the immigrants were bankers I’d be standing with them but I don’t actually believe that a group of plumbers, cleaners & factory workers ruined the economy, it was more that our economy wasn’t, in a very particular sense, real. It may be that deporting all the immigrants in the UK will free up services & allow more social housing to become vacant & this will be great news since we’ll need all of them to repatriate all our emigrants that get sent home in retaliation. (continue reading…)

The recent revelations from across the world have rocked the catholic church & the resultant press has hardly put them in the best of lights, decades of abuse & the handling of it by the church has done the image no good at all. This will matter little to those whose lives have been blighted by the nefarious activities of people who they were brought up to trust but in a day & age where religion is polarised or ignored the institution itself must be quaking under the strain. It has to be said though that there seems to be a bit of an over-reaction going on, I see no reason for genuine shock at the sudden proving of a widely suspected problem. I’m fine with the outrage & the investigations & hopefully anyone still alive & guilty will have several books thrown at them but surprise? (continue reading…)

Welcome to the Burmese version of democratic elections, there’ll be a vote at some point but it’s going to be mainly for show by the look of things as the ruling Generals are busy stacking the decks against anyone they disapprove of, this is quite a long list. The new laws they’ve brought in don’t do justice to the word ” Fix ” but as the most blatant stand on ensuring that the election process gives out the correct result you can’t but admire their

" Tomorrows' headlines are excellent, I couldn't have done it better myself "

resolute dishonesty. Who they’re trying to kid is another matter entirely as whoever gets to vote in their show is going to be in no doubt that no-one they want to vote for is going to be allowed to stand, they might as well issue the results now & save themselves the expense of going through the motions. I’d call it a sham but that’s quite a cute description & whatever’s happening in Burma is far from cute, this is no big deal for the ruling Junta of course, if the worst happens & somehow the wrong candidates win they can always just write some new laws & then pretend that it never happened. (continue reading…)

Could it be a meeting of minds & the start of a beautiful friendship? Probably not, more than likely it’s just grandstanding & more subterfuge & rhetoric but it is nice to see that even despots get to be out & about, & the two leaders do have some common ground. They were both elected amid accusations of fraud for starters although in his defence Karzai hasn’t really denied attempting to rig his, they’re both not universally revered in their respective countries either by sizeable chunks of the populations so they will have things to chat about. Karzai does come off slightly worse in that

" So then you get it right under the mountain, right under "

respect since the Green movement of Iran has so far thankfully refrained from guns, bombs & shells unlike the Taliban who sort of insist on it. They could of course disagree on the role America is playing in Afghanistan, Tehran would like the Americans to go home & never leave their home shores again whilst Karzai is probably aware that he’s only in power because of their presence. To be fair though it’s always easy to know what Ahmadinejad thinks on the subject of America no matter what the context is, he’s against them with a sort of obsessive zeal that sounds mostly jealous in places, okay so he’s not the biggest fan of the UK either but it’s America that winds him up. (continue reading…)

He was by all accounts a bit of a complete bastard, he was responsible for the deaths of millions in some of the most awful ways known to mankind, he set new standards to the depths plumbed by human nature & even had his own dog shot yet still we can’t get enough of him. There are books, documentaries, films & articles galore that seem to suggest the unpalatable truth that true evil contains its’ own sick glamour that we all in some way fall for, not I hasten to add to embrace or endorse, simply that we’re drawn to the subject continuously. Go into any book shop or film store & there will be serial killer material all over the place, real crimes investigated with all the gruesome details lovingly represented along with the obligatory biography of evil telling us how it all really happened. Real life horror is a genre all by itself yet Hitler trumps all of these by the sheer volumes that are still coming out to this day, to put some perspective on just how bad he was, Hitler was so bad that he made Stalin look like one of the good guys, Stalin, the man who killed almost as many Russians as Hitler did & committed atrocities across Europe just couldn’t compete. (continue reading…)

What’s that, a dictator that can’t let go? Hold me back people, I’m in shock I tell you, that a man who’s taken so much from his country & his people is willing to take even more is truly humbling, in times past your average dictator wasn’t in it for the long haul, they’d hang in there long enough to fill a few Swiss bank accounts & settle the odd score & then they’d be off, not Mugabe though, he’s still game enough to cling on no matter what. It may come as a shock & a worry to those people in Zimbabwe with hope of constructing a country from the wreckage of Zimbabwe but to the rest of

& the paperboys' wage slip gambolled 'neath the African sky

the world there is little surprise to be found here, personally I was expecting the old ” President for life ” gambit but given the age of the incumbent it probably is anyway. What is a vague surprise is the thought that maybe Mugabe actually thinks he has anything left to offer a country that he has so systematically destroyed other than possibly his absence, what is there left to break exactly? Unless he’s preparing to run against himself in a quest to bring himself to justice there’s a fair chance that we’re in for another round of dodgy & violent elections based on the ” Vote for me or else ” school of staying in power, if it wasn’t so serious it’d just be a bad joke but strangely enough no-one’s laughing in Zimbabwe. (continue reading…)