Invasion of the Bodysnatchers - Not my idea of a Brucey Bone-us

OK with a title like that I should be making salacious allegations about Bruce Forsyth's sex life with women many years if not decades his junior, but I'm not... Bruce is far to good at making them himself and in any case most of them are true, which given Bruce's still impressive dancing-ability sheds more light on that business about the male ability to dance being an evolutionary pre-requisite...

No really it apparently is - yesterday's Metro said that scientists said so - or rather that the scientist's PR has spun this tenuous 'Darren Gough is evolutionarily successful' celeb news link to their otherwise rather specialist interest thesis...but whatever, it works for me, at a Metro-level.

So there may yet be some basis for the notion that its actually OK, if slightly eugenic, to say that people who don't appreciate good music should be shot...

Anyway enough of such things, I just thought that the notion that someone is flaying corpses in New York for bone extraction was worth a second look - and was momentarily distracted by the thought that the latest set of perfect teeth in the mouth of say Tom Cruise could be built from bits of Alistair Cooke. No really, you see Alistair Cooke's bones have been 'stolen' well recycled at any rate to be made into dental implants (among other things) - and when I say 'really' that does not apply to Mr Cruise, by the way, that's 'not really' terribly likely - so no newspaper ads denying it please Tom and no lawsuits, there's a good bhuddhist.

What I like is the way his step-daughter gets to the heart (or was that marrow) of the matter. Which is that the people who recieved bits of her Stepfather got a bad deal; rather than complaining that she had a rather lighter than expected urn to scatter in Central Park.

Then again maybe she didn't have any expectations, but just for the record I for one was surprised when I felt the weight of such a container for the first time fairly recently. And I can tell you that that scene in Meet the Parents with the cat is mighty possible if you want to go and use an actual urn-shaped urn - those things have crap centres of balance and their bases are FAR too small for true stability in a cat-imbued environment.

On the up-side though if anyone nicks my relatives bones before they are cremated I hope I will now be able to tell. So get urn lifting my friends unless you think the body snatchers are welcome to the abandoned shells of the recently deceased... Who the hell said Victorian Christmases were out of fashion, huh?

The Ape man cometh...well sort of

Oh to be a crazy dictator. It appears uncle Joe Stalin had a plan up his sleeve to defeat capitalism after all. That's right he planned his very own Planet of the Apes army.

According to archive files Stalin ordered the creation of Planet of the Apes-style warriors by crossing humans with apes.

Stalin reportedly told the scientist: "I want a new invincible human being, insensitive to pain, resistant and indifferent about the quality of food they eat."

Well who doesn't. Cutting down on the food bill was obviously an issue for Joe, what with millions dying after the failure of collectivization in the 1930s. You get the feeling he would have loved Lord or the Rings, wait with the whole ape like army of grunts on the march.

You can see it now. Stalin at the Politburo as he bangs the table "Together my ape men and I will rule the world".


 Die puny capitalist die

Read the full story here.

Rat A TAT TAT - WoT the Fuck was that Jack?

There was a certain irony in the fact that Monday's paper's were plastered with front page pictures of a cloud of black smoke from a burning oil store...

Poison Clouds Hit Tonight yelled the London Evening Standard, though a story inside by Justin Davenport revealed that the front page was off the mark, poison clouds had already hit and Sir Ian Blair knew all about it, "Oh yes he did" Wotcha mean?? "HE'S BEHIND YOU!!"

OK OK lets stop the pantomine pillory or was that the punch and judy politics? I get so confused these days...

Speaking at Together Against Terror (or TAT) Sir Ian announced what we had all seen coming for, well, at least a day (from Hertfordshire): "The sky is dark" - hey, but wait a minute Sir Frodo's Tolkeinistic call to, well, fear, I suppose, had nothing to do with not smoking while filling up your tanker in Hemel - oh no. Oh no?

So what Sauronic threat did we face, if not the combustion of complex hydrocarbon chains in Herts?

Sir Scary Police continued,
"We know there are people in the UK as we speak who are planning to mount atrocities and who will use suicide as a weapon."

He then got all metaphysical and in a particularly Shelley-ian moment announced "We are in a different place than before"

Which at any rate has the virtue of literacy unlike Uncle Tony's claim that he was going to arrest everyone who had too much cash on them in order, as he put it in an interview with BBC News, "To make the bad people in fear" - TO WHAT PM?? - to make the bad people in fear Chris, not the people going about their everyday business - and I've tried it, you know I have, and the normal law just doesn't work - I've tried it again and again and again - for years...
Oh shut up you illiterate, at least your scaremongering namesake top cop can speak english (Jesus!) - but what about this 'abnormal law' business - that almost seems like an admission (at last) of quite what an abominable range of unseemly and abnormal powers your unconstitutional little regime has been accumulating through its various legal innovations since autumn 2001 - whatever next, openly admitting that its now a crime to voice an opinion without asking the permission of the police first?

OK, OK, I know its only a crime if its within the earshot of you or your MPs Mr Prime Minister... whatever - could someone email that smug bastard Peter Hain who was appearing on Radio 4 going on about why he was right to break the law to oppose white only sports tours of the UK during apartheid?

Maybe Peter could explain why he voted for the law that convicted Maya Evans

And maybe one of our Tolkeinistic Blair twins could reveal why it makes sense to imprison supposed Enemies of the state plotting terrorism for four years without bothering to ask (or should I say investigate? discover? confirm?) what they were or weren't plotting

Maybe they're waiting for Jack Straw to go on holiday so that someone can offer them an amazing prize of a free holiday in Poland. See, when someone actually asked Jack (about some similar rapscallions) he said that the fact that you had to buy an over-priced washing machine (or was that put your head in it) in order to claim your free holiday COULD constitute torture and so he went and vetoed the whole holiday?!?

Since then, there have been over 200 free holiday flights full of lucky winners passing through British airports but Jack has had no reason to check the rules of the competitions they won because the lotteries they entered were held under US and other jurisdictions - and in any case none of the holiday camps to which they were flying were on British soil.

In case anyone got a bit lost or disorientated after all that time in the air, the CIA, who were running the competitions (which were about building huge haystack-like sculptures out of tiny needles), kept the doors to the holiday charter planes locked at all times - so noone got to see anything suspicious; as Jack explained in a written answer to parliament and an interview on Today so unconvincing that the interviewer just let him talk - a favourite barristers' trick which an experienced jurist like Jack should really have been wise to.

Apparently there is absolutely no evidence at all to suggest that the CIA have been giving away more free holidays since the start of the War on Terror (or WoT). In fact Jack said it was all pretty much 'normal CIA business' as far as he was concerned.

"Knock, Knock, Rat a-TAT TAT"
What the flying fuck is that?
~ I dunno but I'm pretty sure its dead now

Truths and myths

For once I agree with the Muslim Council of Britain and the Tory party - it really is outrageous not to hold a public enquiry over 7/7.

Can you imagine how New Labour would have responded had they been in Opposition?

Not only does it lay bare the government's fear of being further exposed over Iraq, it also misses an opportunity to really examine the underlying causes of the attack, an opportunity sadly missed by the Home Office Task Force which further embedded extreme Islam into government policy.

While I'm at it, a word on Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad's "myth" making about the Holocaust.

Although the man's obviously an anti-semitic crackpot whose recent call for Israel to be "wiped off the map" placed him beyond the pale, I do think his observation that...

They have created a myth today that they call the massacre of Jews and they consider it a principle above God, religions and the prophets.

... does not entirely merit the BBC standfirst:

Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad has courted further controversy by explicitly calling the Nazi Holocaust of European Jewry a "myth".

Although the implication in the news headlines is that he is a Holocaust denier (as indeed he probably is, but that is not my point) I think he is correct in observing that in a Barthian sense the West has "mythologised" the Holocaust.

Although it was an act of extraordinary evil, so too was the Turkish slaughter of the Armenians, the Bolsheviks of non-Bolsheviks, and Belgians of over 3 million Congolese, yet the German slaughter of the Jews is set apart.

So what's the difference? Well, for one thing the Turks, Bolsheviks, and Belgians got away with it, while the Germans didn't and the results were captured on film. For another, it happened in Europe and was perpetrated by one of the most supposedly civilised nations in the world. It held up a mirror to the anti-semitic shame of us all, if you like.

A further element of myth is that it transforms the subject matter into something unreal, untouchable. And here we also have evidence - if Europeans really cared about genocide so much, then why did we not lift a finger in Rwanda? Or even closer to home in Bosnia? For me, all the "never again" pieties expressed by our politicians became myths in the blood-drenched fields outside Srebenica.

So although he may be a crackpot, his malevolent crowd-pleasing does challenge our complacency - by mythologising the Holocaust as a unique event, we are encouraged to believe it could never happen again. Rwanda and Bosnia suggest otherwise.

Blair's legacy

Max "Hitler" Hastings on Blair's legacy...

It is hard to imagine any political historian, never mind the British public, attributing our involvement in this shambles to anything beyond the misjudgment of one man, the prime minister. Posterity will be no more impressed by Blair's professed honourable intentions than by those of Anthony Eden in Egypt, half a century ago.

The memory of Blair's government will be dominated by this disastrous foreign war, rather than, for instance, by his maintenance of a successful economy at home and brilliant speeches to successive Labour party conferences.

More than that, though, I suspect that for those who support progressive politics, Blair's legacy may not simply be "Iraq", it could be a Conservative government.

Ticket to oblivion

There seems a kind of grotesque inevitability about Muriel's progression from Belgian teen to suicide bomber...

Muriel... had a long relationship with an Algerian, who converted her to Islam in 2001...

Initially, she wore a hijab, or Islamic veil, but soon started wearing the head-to-toe chador that leaves the face visible...

Finally she wore a burka. She became ever more estranged from her parents. "When we saw them, they imposed their rules. We were at home, but my husband had to eat in the kitchen with Issam while the women ate together in the sitting room... " M Degauque said...

In mid-September they left, telling their landlord they were going to Kenya to try to find Goris's father. "She wore a burka all the time. I never saw her face, only her eyes," [the landlord said]...

Instead of going to Kenya, Muriel and her husband entered Iraq. Days later she had blown herself up, taking up to six US soldiers with her.

She had finally succeeded in blotting herself out.

Too easy to use this excuse?

Sorry, couldn't resist this - a name check on Harry's Place.

The Foreign Minister of China when asked in the 1950's about the consequences of the French Revolution answered "It's too early to tell" . A couple of years on from the toppling of Saddam is probably too soon to start writing the second draft of history but I think some of the broader outlines of that eventual narrative are becoming clearer for those prepared to see them.

Earlier in the post, Marcus quotes Times columnist Gerard Baker's measurement of success in Iraq: ...potential threats removed; future wars that don't have to be fought. It is numbered in the unenumerable: the slow awakening of human freedom; the steady, incremental spread of dignity it brings to people cowed and trampled for decades.

Well, it really is too early to tell, isn't it, but for each of those clauses I could find a reason why the war in Iraq failed, and indeed never should have been fought.

On a personal note some of the thinking behind TETT was for me consistent with what my opposition to the war was about: a profound wariness of ideologically-driven change and its unforseen consequences. For me, war, and particularly offensive war (I'm not a pacifist, sadly) is an essentially evil tool, so it seemed clear to me that only bad was likely to come of it, never mind the good intentions. I can see little in Iraq to prove me wrong, regardless of the muscular efforts of the posters on Harry's Place, ironically one of my favourite places on the web.

Sent to Manchester

Although the article doesn't mention it, I couldn't help wondering if Government plans to merge The Commission for Racial Equality into a Manchester-based equality body, which will also contain the Equal Opportunities Commission and the Disability Rights Commission were not unconnected with chair Trevor Phillips' outspoken criticism of new Labour's pro-segregation agenda. I've got to say, I had always had Phillips down as an arch-Blairite until he got this job. Hell hath no fury, eh?

On the Grauniad grapevine

I suppose I should be pleased the city where I have my second home is finally getting some recognition and Ostend may even begin to become the next, well, East End (as much as I like it, it'll never be Provence).

So why did I sigh when I saw the article? Maybe it was because I had always harboured a dream of writing a film script about Marvin In Ostend, the germ of which has now been exposed to the entire Guardian readership. But mostly, I think, it's because while I may have gone on about how cool it is when greeted with the usual sceptical reaction, I didn't actually want it to "become" cool like its London namesake. Not very likely, I know, but in these novelty-hungry times anything's possible. Babyshambles at the Kursaal anyone?

The insurgency speaks

I was struck by this piece of juxtaposition this morning in The Times. Two stories about the war in Iraq printed either side of a double page spread.

Al-Qaeda 'sorry' for Muslim dead
By Our Foreign Staff

THE head of al-Qaeda in Iraq said in an internet audiotape that the Muslim wedding parties the group bombed last week in Amman were not its target.

And then on the opposite page this piece:

Blast kills 75 worshippers at prayers in Shia mosque
By Richard Beeston, Diplomatic Editor

SUICIDE bombers wearing explosive vests killed at least 75 Shia Muslim worshippers in Iraq yesterday, prompting fears of a new wave of sectarian violence ahead of elections less than a month away.

The insurgency is certainly speaking, and you don't have to read between the lines to know what it's saying. You just have to read.

Use of weapons

Much excitement about the use by US forces of phosphorus weapons in Iraq. These are not banned weapons, but they are deeply unpleasant sticking to anything, including flesh, and burning on through.

US forces have used them chiefly to smoke out entrenched insurgents and apparently they were sporadically used in the battle for Falluja.

Labour MPs and the Guardian are concerned about their use despite phosphorus weapons not being banned. I take it they get that once these people are smoked out that if they don't surrender they will be shot or blown up?

"Since the Guardian columnist George Monbiot highlighted discrepancies in US accounts of weapons used in the bloody battle of Falluja this week, the Pentagon has backtracked on earlier denials by the state department and its ambassador to the UK, Robert Tuttle, that white phosphorus had been deployed.

"The charge was first made by Iraqi insurgents, aware of the potency of the issue in view of Saddam Hussein's notorious use of chemicals against his own people, and taken up by the Italian TV channel RAI."

Okay, yes these weapons are unpleasant, but they are legitimate parts of any army's arsenal – hence the not banned bit. We use them, but again like the Americans that's to clear out enemy positions. They're scary and really that's the point so people generally run. Job done.

Isn't that a good thing? Well it would be if you actually thought that it was right to criticise a group of people who indiscriminately kill and time and time again choose soft targets over military ones.

The anti war lobby, of course, does not criticise these people, but are ready to come down any front possible against the US and British forces and how they prosecute the fight against terror. Yes, of course, we should be open to criticism, but only where it is legitimate and right to do so.

What the anti war lobby would prefer is if American and British forces had one hand tied behind their back and really didn't use live bullets. That would even things up. While that isn't possible they look for other avenues and this is one. A smokescreen designed to eat away at morale and to rob the forces trying to bring democracy and stability in Iraq of the ability to do so.

The bit from the Guardian that really sticks is that the charge was first made by Iraqi insurgents? You mean those people who blow up wedding parties with suicide bombers? Who blow up children or anything other motherfugger they can get a car close to? You mean those people who refuse to negotiate and rarely surrender. They're complaining? Oh come on.

It seems to clearly echo the IRA who would insist they were fighting a war right up to the point that some of the boys were ambushed and killed. At that point there would be calls for an investigation, for a judicial inquiry and for charges to be brought.

How long will it be before the anti war lobby is calling for the rights of insurgents to be protected?

The last ditch

Pleased to see the Tories failed in their attempt to halt the new licencing laws. I'm sure there will be a rise in intemperate drinking, but rigorous application of new police powers combined with the passage of time should make things settle down.

But what I found extraordinary was the language Tory spokesman Theresa May used.

"This is a deeply unpopular law and the volume of evidence urging the government to think again is overwhelming," May said.

"It is sheer lunacy to say to a country gripped by binge drinking that it is okay to drink more and for longer.

"Conservatives have pledged to fight this to the end. This is our last ditch effort and we are determined that every MP should be accountable and on the record for introducing this law.

"We hope that Labour MPs will face up to the devastating impact on their constituents of backing this law and have the courage to vote with us to postpone it."

Golly. We will fight them in the saloon bar, eh? Wouldn't it be great to see a politician use this kind of language about something that really mattered?

Nadia Anjuman

Remembering Afghan poet Nadia Anjuman, 25, "slain for her verse" by her husband. I look forward to its condemnation in The Guardian Comment section.

Take one ghastly dehumanised moron...

Shortly after he was elected, the Mayor said: "Only some ghastly dehumanised moron would want to get rid of the Routemaster."

In the manner of its death, the Routemaster shows how, in modern Britain, something which works and is loved can be replaced by something which fails and is hated, for reasons which are entirely unnecessary.

With friends like these...

So, you're a relatively obscure left-leaning Observer commentator whose controversial cheerleading for Gulf War II - the Toppling of Saddam vaults you to the big time. Soon the letter pages are busy with admonishments and support, your name becomes synonymous with a self-styled brand of "muscular" liberalism and you go on to be made an offer you can't refuse by a certain former Australian who in slimmer, more youthful times you would presumably have placed at the right side of satan, alongside a certain former Prime Minister.

Back to the future and the sitting PM has just faced his first parliamentary defeat. Both his Commons majority and his authority were devastated by the war you played such a key part promoting. Your reaction? Why, it's time for him to go.

Bombs in Jordan

A friend texted me last night. She's going to Bolivia and thought I might know someone who had been. I did a quick bit of maths and came up with zero people. So I called her just to find out what the story was as the only thing I know about Bolivia is that they like to march, but then so do a lot of people.

Its some Christian Aid thing about the water privitisation that all went badly wrong leaving people without water. Who would have guessed?

"I thought I'd ask you as you've been to some dangerous places," she told me.

Not strictly true. I mean I went to South London once and really it was quite scary, and then I guess I'd been to Israel and to Jordan more recently, but that was all five star hotels and lap of luxury stuff. No real sign of danger, although the Palestinian kid at Petra was pretty pushy, but that's about it.

A little later I'm watching the news and the al qaeda Islamofascists blew up three hotels in Amman killing 57 and wounding 117.


 

Those killed included the father of the bride and the father of the groom at a wedding party at the Radisson SAS hotel in central Amman, which in July I spent a couple of days and nights at drinking cocktails and lounging by the pool.

So I guess on reflection that would have shaken my cocktail.

Whose liberty?

As someone opposed to the war in Iraq, I can't say I'm overwhelmed with pleasure at Blair's Common's defeat.

I believe that while a 90 day detention period could be abused by the police, the safeguards introduced before the vote would have provided a reasonable compromise in difficult circumstances.

It's all very well for us to get sniffy about civil liberties, but what of the liberty of the 7/7 dead and injured and their families? The police requested the 90 day time period because the scale of today's threat meant that they would often have to act quickly in order to avert an attack and it could take longer than 14 days to gather sufficient evidence to charge a suspect. In France an investigating judge can order a suspect held for two years before trial, so talk of this being extraordinary in Europe was bollocks. This was not internment.

And no, I don't necessarily believe the police, nor Blair. I don't doubt injustices would result because of this legislation. But surely the risk of a three month loss of liberty, no matter how unfair, is worth it if it saves just one single life?

Arson and forgetting

Back in the UK and the festival of smugness that is the British media on the French riots, I listened to Labour MEP Claude Moraes pontificate on the causes. Apparently France is 20 years behind the UK, where thankfully we don't have anything like this.

So much for two tube attacks and 52 dead then. Personally I would go with a few thousand burned out cars any day.

Shit head(s)

Can I just say FUCK YOU to the shit head who stole the window wiper from my car. Fortunately I noticed it this wet evening en route to get some air put in the tyres and not on a stormy foreign highway...

And while I'm at it, instead of saying "this isn't a playground you know" to the two macho East European youths sounding loudly off and shoving each other boisterously on the way home this evening until one pushed the other into me, meekly minding my business along with the other tube passengers, can I add FUCK YOU TOO.

It's about respect really, isn't it? Where's the progress, Tony?

Winterval

Listened to the head stamp keeper or whatever of the Royal Mail eat humble pie this morning over issuing a Christmas stamp that some Hindus found offensive (straight after an item on Lambeth scrapping Christmas for "winterval"). I wondered why, if the keepers at the Bombay musueum where the image was borrowed from were "delighted" with the image being used, British Hindus were so quick to take offence?