A Justice Won't Fix It.

How can you know in all its simplicity that the people you're asked to look up to are respectable? 

Jimmy Saville wandered around this question as much as he wandered the long corridors of Leeds General Infirmary as a voluntary porter.  

Of course it's all ethereal and conjecture. The crimes committed by Catholic priests in many years unpunished were the same. 

Subjectively you're basing proof on novels by David Peace and the hunt for the Yorkshire Ripper....

I particularly love the song by Ian Elms, "The Street Enters The Home". Always set aside as a budding icon of our English televisual age being masterly and kingly. No constraints, no problem. And more importantly, no questions asked.

Your icons are squeaky clean. Your icons are not squeaky clean.

Rest in peace any untraceable victim.

One Justice Begats Another

In a cold courtroom a decision is made public by a dozen souls told to make a decision. A man in elder garb then makes a statement after the jury has done their collective bit. The person in the dock is then led away never to get a public appearance in his or her lifetime. 

The simplicity is devilish. 

And so is devilish the simplicity of Robert Black taking away Jennifer Cardy in 1981. By all accounts he didn't take her away in a graceful way. He was older, stronger and more wary about what he would do to her. She was younger, weaker and not wary of what was happening to her soul.

The court in Armagh, itself a town blackened with a history of death in a similar era, today exercised an order. Black was suspected and rightly brought to trial. In turn this put an order of words into the media to slice and dice for its wider public. And here endeth the lesson of Jennifer Cardy's life.

But it should not stop at nothing.

As a criminal Robert Black does warrant more than an arrest and a conviction. He has been indicted for three murders of underage girls, and again with a grisly sense of foreboding there could be more unsolved murders bearing his mark. Where does this stop? Robert Black fits into a bracket of society that needs a very simple answer: extermination.

We are in the midst of a world of people doing wrong, being allowed to do wrong. In the context of war it has been easily written by historians that a fog exists. In the field of gang warfare a smaller war takes place. But with the unerring coldness of murder, especially with the slaughtering of infants, only one simple person succeeds. 


In the context of living with a world stuck in the detritus of century's religions, followed by the century's history of not knowing, one single question needs to be honoured. 

What masks complete justice is law. Law makes a very special assumption that a justice at its basic of levels is untamed and wild. It pours cold water on the kneejerk reaction of retribution, despite ignoring completely the rawest of emotions Robert Black put into extinguishing the smile from Jennifer Cardy's cheeks. Court cases indelibly become a second funeral, the facts are dead along with the victim. Daughters should run away and disappear only in the context of being free after the years of growing up and learning with their parents or guardians. Twelve jurors should not even bear witness to this as it's nothing to do with them. 

Like anyone who has done something terrible with no compelling reason to explain it, Robert Black should have the same done to him. Not by a mob. Not by the Daily Mail. But by an equal of stature and venom. No courts, no media interest, no trail. 

Jennifer Cardy's mother will of course sleep easier this evening, but how will Black sleep? Perhaps he shouldn't. 

The jury's back: he shouldn't.

A North African Obituary

Today has played out  like the dream I had last night. Nothing went right. It was about school. There was always the dinner break misery of the playground bullies casting a shadow over the brutalistic, grey structure of the Science building and getting a victory only good for themselves. As the victim my body shrank inside itself. A justness wasn't to be seen anywhere and it made me feel useless. Only the pervading memory of the Science building being destroyed made it all shimmy with some hope. 


The flow of people setting down an agenda would compare this with the regime of Muammar Gaddafi. But it's fuzzy, like a dream. Anyone in a dream who is a protagonist doesn't have a face. They're a ghost of your past terrorising your present and your future. The problem is that everyone has ghosts and they stalk us all.


Gaddafi's image was part of my childhood. He was implicated heavily in an event which happened when i was eight years old. i didn't know about the politics behind a destroyed Pan Am jetliner, I only saw the wreck of it. Like an eight year old today the same image of a dead body jostled and made into a macabre trophy, but bullies who wrecked my dream last night would have the same effect.


Muammar, your images have been more important and lingering to an eight year old from the 1980s than to someone of the same age listening to a transistor radio today hearing the buzz of nothing.


Hope can die on a playground, set against the worst scenario only the dream could muster. But forever blessed will be our strangest of idols.


RIP

"New Libya"

"Gaddafi would not consent to taking loans from IMF or World Bank at high interest

rates. In other words Libya was INDEPENDENT! That is the real reason for the

war in Libya! He may be a dictator, but that is not the US problem. Also

Gaddafi called on all Oil producing countries NOT to accept payment for oil

in USD or Euros. He recommended that oil get paid for in GOLD and that

would have bankrupted just about every Western Country as most of them do

not have gold reserves to match the rate at which they print their useless

currencies."

Gaddafi didn't play ball with the West and has today become yet another victim in a very, very, long list of "dictators" to fall under the Federal Reserve Act from 1913.

There will be a flush of US dollars in Northern Africa from today and the NTC will be at heel.

"New Libya" sounds suspiciously like "New Labour", and we all know what happened there. 

Want to Buy A Toxic Sub-Prime Bank?

This has just aired on the TV. It was great. It showed this often complex problem of understanding banks and mergers in a light very much like an Adam Curtis documentary would. It mixed archive footage of the history of RBS along with ironic sound score. Goodwin was the venture capitalist's venture capitalist, the "smartest guy on the market" with the grossest managerial tendencies which kind of made you feel sorry for the merchant bankers he barracked within the board room. The freeing up of the markets since a lot of right-wing wankers thought it a good idea in the 1970s and 80s has never been showed up in such a toxic way.

A Land of Milk & Honey

When I am making an effort in anything worldly then something ridiculous comes up to make it an error of judgement at the behest of politics and moral untrustworthyness. But what if this article is saying is true how is it that IBM have known to support the Israeli economy, seeing that "This wedge of land and the huge ideals it represents are very important to IBM"? Guilt? Profit? To make me not bother applying for jobs in today's market in the first place?


I damn my curiosity as I am the firm conviction that any corporation with enough power and scope can transcend all religions, all prejudices, all war and all guilt with what seems a regimental PR machine and sheer unbridled ruthlessness. IBM started up its business links with Israel FOUR years after the war and its nefarious dealings with the Nazis. 


That is some pair of balls they have on them.

Too Much Time on The Jobs

Steve Jobs was a Buddhist.


First of all, peace be with his mortal soul. That it cannot be denied.


What can be denied, and should be denied is the inevitable consumer-lite Princess Diana outpourings of mass grief that will occur in his death's immediate impact. Just because you spend $300 for what is essentially not the answer to the universe's infinite question does not warrant the acceptance that you were close to the man.


Apple Inc. is the executive producer to the bourgeois version of a televisual soap opera. Its most popular selling items have all been marketed and factory-produced to look pure and wholesome. The department stores they're sold in are meant to provide some cyber-advanced Laura Ashley Zen to the well-versed, technologically minded customer.


And on the flipside to the high street, let us not forget the working conditions in which the ants in the organisation have to endure. 


Jobs did his ardent best, much like Bill Gates, to show the world he exploited that he was one of us but doing something the American business class like to think "is a bit more special". I never believed this. Sincerity is harder to swallow if you're a chief executive of a highly successful corporation in the elite stock markets. 


I've met people hopelessly swept away with the i-phone phenomenon. They've struck me as nothing but social bores. Constantly they jangle an array of apps very much like you'd jangle a set of house keys at a newborn baby. Ten or twenty years previously they would have done the same thing only with those devices that helped find your car keys if you whistled for it. For this, I thank Mr. Jobs with a very bitter regret. 


And last of all, my girlfriend has a Macbook and I find it to be the most awkward and infuriating piece of computer hardware to navigate. It makes the simplest of tasks seem like a very boring sermon delivered in a very stale church. Give me the whistling keys any day.