My Lai (4) - 16th March 1968

Full credit is due to Yorkshire Television for producing this documentary in 1989, as it is the only one I have researched so far which shows the soldiers involved.

To clue you in if you're the uninitiated, the My Lai 4 massacre happened in March 1968. A platoon of relatively wet about the ears American GI's went into a hamlet in South Vietnam and murdered five hundred children, women and the elderly. At no point during the raid into this hamlet were they shot at by the Vietcong. 

It took until late 1969 for the story to be actually verified. The US army hid it, the press corp in Vietnam didn't print it. The chain of command that morning were all exonerated as doing their duty in the fog of war. Only one CO was put to trial - the man who got him off the charges later employed him in his helicopter company.

The lieutenant on the ground - William Calley - did stand trial however the politics at the time (an aggressive Nixonism) severely relaxed his punishment. Calley was later released and, as the documentary shows, went onto own a business in Georgia. He is still alive and enjoys those freedoms the American constitution likes to boast about. He murdered over a hundred woman and children first though, before he could exercise his rights.  

Historically, the only consolation out of this was the utter humiliation of the US army in this monstrously fought conflict. Crucially, the history of this massacre has and never will be taught to us in schools. It doesn't stand up to scrutiny when we're told who our heroes are.   

Why am I bothering writing about something that happened forty four years ago? I think it is because the message is clear that you cannot trust America and its power. It makes a mockery out of the Everyman. 

I constantly tussle with the idea of how I cannot cope any longer with US cultural and military hegemony. And how I want to shut this country out of my life forever. There seems to be no questioning of its consequences, let alone its intention to sully. 

The story of the My Lai massacre, with its horror of children dying under the protection of their mothers, of boys arms being blown off and then "put out of their misery", can put anyone on that path.

Four Hours In My Lai.

A Red Box Of Tricks

Despite looking like the put-upon younger brother to children television's Sad Sack, George Osborne has yet again used his faulty calculator to inflict more misery upon the shoulders of Britain's vulnerable today.

The cuts to pensioners' pay and people claiming Child Benefit have been incisive. Personal tax allowance has also been handpicked for extra cruelty. Oh, and lest we forget the NHS? 

Economic commentators have come out to denounce the cumbersome nature of Osborne's chicanery - stating that it outdoes Lawson's gilded scythe which was used with aplomb in the 1980s to set free the dirty rich of Britain.    

The incumbent Treasury are sure to be doing the rounds for the sake of their charm offensive (but certainly not for their guilt). Perhaps some amount of doublespeak will justify the challenges they are facing following the fuck up of the banking sector in 2008. In the May 2010 Election all parties were chasing a burst ball down an economically retarded path. Rather naively Nick Clegg - a career opportunist resplendent with heavily rehearsed hand gestures - saw a position of power rather than the principles his party loosely follow. Politically the UK is in a stalemate whilst the economy - trenchant since the freeing up of the markets thirty years ago - is the all out winner.  

All of this is, then, no surprise. It will continue to be unsurprising. 

Larry Elliott makes the point that the huge tax cuts for the rich in the '80s were serving the purpose of making Britain a holiday island for the world's elite. And it did yield a somewhat Ratner's-lite impression that everyone was independently wealthy enough to gorge themselves on the property boom and own a swanky car at the same time. It failed the decade after, however this is not the point. Lawson, and more importantly the Thatcher government underpinning the Treasury at the time, wanted a free market economy for Britain. The UK have had this and continue to have this now - and look at the mess it's left.

So what of this Budget? What modus operandi has it taken if there is not an ideological catch-all behind it? 

Osborne has taken a bruising, almost molester's approach to Britain's pensioners. In a bygone age when we could pride ourselves on having a community the pensioner was characterised as investing their lot in the building society. They'd worked hard, and like  anything that just wants to rest and rest peacefully, withdrawing a pension from trusted sources would be as natural as holidaying to Dorset once or twice a year. 

Robert Maxwell was the first grim sign in a post-Thatcher era that the businessman could do what he wants under the rules set out by the government. Even pension funds. In late 2007 the television screens were full of disturbing images of pensioners standing in line outside Northern Rock branches worrying what was happening to their investments. The building society garnered the most pity in that situation.

Bankers, businessmen and politicians have with ever greater vindictiveness hit the pensioners the hardest in the last twenty years. Politicians, in particular, are the most rank in their hypocrisy. Often they condemn a broken society, especially when elderly people are abused by yobs in their own home. However, are the politicians not more of a threat to the pensioner than an unhugged Hoodie? A burglar can enter a pensioner's home once, and take whatever is lying about. The politician can get unbridled access to the pensioner's bank account anytime. And do all of this whilst wearing a suit and a set of over prepared hand gestures. 

The reason behind it is simple. I would imagine that the operators in power see the elderly as the froth to be whisked away. They cannot fight back because they're not in the mindset to fight back. They have retired after all. Pensioners are not the go-getting, consumer behemoth that will instigate growth in an often deluded economy. On average a pensioner wouldn't spend great swathes of cash in supermarkets, or on holidays, or on cars, or on houses, or on Smartphones, or on computer games, or on televisions, or on all the trinkets that the Treasury wants you to purchase, so that the multi-nationals can see a point in investing in Britain.

Whatever your take on big companies pumping money into the British economy - an economy which was once doing the pumping in an era most pensioners' fathers and grandfathers can remember - a group within its society invariably has to suffer. And this is the point to it all. An average seventy five year old would have seen traditional industries flounder under the Tories (and Labour) in an era that gave way to American and Far East capitalism. The same seventy five year old would then have to suffer the cuts and robberies from a denationalised economy. The retired worker would then have to worry about what their banks were doing with their savings. 

It's as if the Tories, in a very public fit of vengeance, want to put them all in a home with no windows or fresh air. Osborne is a politician who would be the first to drive them there with a very assured smirk on his face. 

Heavy Military Machinery Is Hovering Overhead

Benjamin Netanjahu is, among other things, a great believer in the tradition of a leap year. 

Nearly four years ago he and his Likud government put it upon themselves to attack the Palestinian territories in Gaza in what was considered by the scarce media pack present a series of megalomaniacal bloody onslaughts. However this was on a people on the ground who literally swapped over the role of the Jews' David not for their own wont.

Events at their very real essence get filtered and distorted by the various satellite stations wanting to keep onside the lobby groups lurking in the director's gantry. It's very much how Chinese whispers start and never seem to end. So with every incident, intentional or otherwise, it's a race to win over the "perception agenda". 

Politically Netanjahu knows that this year is going to be crucial for his hell-mended desire to keep Israel afloat. Last year Palestinian political leaders and its peoples' good will went to the UN to apply for recognition within the international community. Strangely - and conspiratorially one would imagine - nothing has yet come to fruition for the Palestinians' democratic right for statehood. With this in mind Likud, perhaps having a hand in the fate of this move by the Palestinians, would have become masters again on the path of their role in the Middle East. 

However stranger things are happening and insurances are constantly being sought. 

Netanjahu, along with AIPAC, have been lobbying hard again for tougher sanctions and, reading in between the lines, an all-out war against Iran. Whether Mossad have been working overtime lately or not, Likud seem spooked at something. Perhaps Likud are concerned that, what with growing distance in the relationship between Netanjahu and Obama, this next year is crucial for them to get their deck sorted out whilst the cat's away. 

Netanjahu was in Washington last week meeting Obama. They exchanged terse language in what was an uneasy confrontation with the media. Netanjahu was on record saying how Israel is a strong country and should remain that way. Now this is tough talk that belies a deeper, hidden concern that he and his Zionist friends are really following, namely: would Washington abandon us and we would be left arms-less and set adrift?

This is the precise reason why Israel is increasingly striking their enemies when there is a US election year. Likud know that if Obama gets re-election then there is another four years of strained relations and international vilification - especially if Palestinian human rights continue to suffer. However if a GOP candidate gets elected then they can be rest assured that AIPAC will get to them before Netanjahu even boards a chartered jet at Jerusalem International Airport.

Will they want to chance their arms at such a gamble? Hardly. The Gaza onslaught three and a half years ago was when the furniture was being moved about in Washington. There will be military maneuvering this year - you can guarantee it because Israel flexes its muscle when the stronger are weak and when the weak remain the weakest.   

As I write this F-16 pilot fighters - sat in planes they bought from the West - are hovering over Gaza like the chill of yet another unnecessary dawn.

Rest In Peace Reamonn Gormley

On a couple of occasions on this blog I have commented on the end of murder trials and how they have reflected the wider society - and how the wider society have affected the cases themselves.

Similarly I want to do the same for the case of Reamonn Gormley. Reamonn died a year ago today at the hands of two polar opposites to him. It was at the hands of these two that he fell on a street in Blantyre, Scotland, cynically stabbed in his neck for his mobile phone and wallet. 

Daryn Maxwell (left) and Barry Smith

Quite often in life good people are taken away from us but in Reamonn's case he was taken away by two societal vacuums. Police mugshots instill many emotions in us: Hindley and Brady is was revulsion; Sutcliffe it was fear; Venables and Thompson it was complete bewilderment. In the faces of the two who were sentenced it is only complete anger. In Maxwell I see all the cliches in a human I wish to avoid, however in those dead, beady eyes, the depressing skinhead hair cut and the overweight stagger something is nagging. Smith is similar: the same GI haircut, the tight, mealy mouth, the dead beady eyes and the tattooed neck. They wouldn't look out of place fulfiling their "Call of Duty" fantasies in Afghanistan, wanting to wipe out any "raghead" who got in their greedy way.

Maxwell's life towards his sentencing and after is worth shit. You can point out the societal causes as to what made him snuff out a life so casually, but it is pointless. I sincerely hope that the prisons which the state has incarcerated these two pieces of shit allow larger stabs wounds to enter every possible important organ that were wasted on them. Better still would be the castration of glands deadened by the dirty carpet thrills of violent computer games and the unceasing diet of  Gregg's pasties. 

Reamonn was an active individual, and did things that helped out his wider society without seeking anything in return. He was loved for this. You can pour scorn on the reactionary tabloids when it comes to persecuting the criminal but with this case something is very different. Perhaps it was a societal murder, but I really do think that Reamonn was taken from the world by two evil and stupid people. I hope that they get theirs. 

We draw strength from people like you, Reamonn. Rest in peace. 

We Don't Need Stepping Stones When We Can Take Great Strides

In November 1977 two men produced an unpublished report called "Stepping Stones". The authors were of little experience politically; John Hoskyns  and Norman S Strauss carved out their careers prior to the report in business. The former with IBM and the latter with Unilever. 

The two men looked at Britain both socially and economically. They wanted to pare down and at best destroy the established order of organised workers and a stagnant UK economy. Their peers in the conservative establishment were fighting a battle they could not see ending. Hoskyns and Strauss saw how the bigger picture of repeated trade union victories were humiliating for Britain's standing in the world markets.  

The timing of their report was culturally perfect. They saw a vulnerability opening in front of them. The same year the film Star Wars depicted one lonely warrior destroying what was seen as a monolithic Empire with one shot from his lazer cannon. The authors got their own shot very much spot-on. 

They executed their ideas scientifically as they saw this process of elimination would lead to the greater success for the people who shared their ideas. 

'Such thinking and planning is perhaps better described simply as "systematic", rather than strategic. Any game...which involves competitors, goals and a choice of routes, each with associated risks, demands a strategy. The question is whether such strategies are developed haphazardly or systematically. The systematic approach requires considerable initial effort, a higher ratio of "thinking time" to "doing time", in the hope of getting the consistently....better performance which in the end separates winners from losers.'

To the hawks within the Tory right this document was the clearest objective they had yet to follow. Immediately it was foisted upon their leader, Margaret Roberts. She was two years before her election victory and here was the blueprint for a country coated in Tory blue. The majority of what was proposed in the report came true. North Sea oil was controlled; the steelworkers, dockers and miners as a community and force were emaciated; the Labour Party was riddled with in-fighting and chaos; the media was used to its full potential to push this agenda; the EU was shunned by xenophobia. 

The two authors were never taught on the national curriculum as far as I and my peers are aware. They may have reached the hearts and minds of those privileged in society and somewhat clinical enough to appreciate this work. Indeed it is frightening how such a force in one document can hold so much portence and rapture without seeing the light of day. 

Hoskyns and Strauss were, however, broaching a political system weighted towards the worker ever since the British worker got organised in the Victorian era. They wanted the scales tilted back to the entrepreneurial industrialist, and the corporate shareholder. British prime ministerial power has been an advocate of the Stepping Stones mantra since Roberts was shoved off her throne in 1990. It has reached the extent that the British Labour party betrayed their very foundations in 1994. In 1979 "Labour wasn't Working", according to the smart guys at Saatchi and Saatchi, however in 1994, under Tony Blair and then Gordon Brown, Labour was working...with the free market economic structure at the very heart of their Treasuries. 

However a Tower of Babel can come down, and coming down is what it is precisely doing now. At a chaotic pace the unions are now beginning to feel the sting of their demise. They are starting to protest. Once the veil of Labour dissolution cleared, the working classes are seeing their lives turn into the cathartic lives their elders experienced in the early 1980s under the Stepping Stone plan. The unemployed, an ever growing benefactor to the taking away of skilled labour, are bearing a brutal attack on their basic of needs. 

In 2008 the world economy suffered a blow-out that has psychologically turned the tables on the ethics of free market engineering. As a "turn around strategy" Stepping Stones stated:

"the more factual, cool and rational that debate (regarding the trade unions of Britain at that time), the more it will open the public's eyes to the unions' existing privileges and destructive role..."

The unions, it could be argued, were not out to make a profit. Their very existence was to protect and harness the welfare of the worker who worked for the men who had the largest houses on the hill overlooking the slums. They were criticised in Stepping Stones for asking for more wages, vilified for collecting together and "holding the country to ransom".Today, "existing privileges" are out of the workers' hands: they're in the hands of the very same people who bought into the idea of Stepping Stones. Banks are now criticised for being bailed out by the taxpayer. Global capitalists fly into the country at short notice when they want to sway a policy the government into their own advantage.  

The time for the zeitgeist to brook is imminent. What Hoskyns and Strauss could not have foreseen when they saw a world in which the working classes were cajoled was the invention of the world wide web. Communication in their time was a relic compared to the speediness of today's. (As you can see, they sent the report to Roberts in a badly typed form.) Normal people, who work in the jobs that keep them quiet and sedated have the tools to arm themselves. They can communicate, they can organise, they can criticise. Blogs are available for free and therefore opinion can be shared and our political representatives can be brought to book. It is tantalising to think how the world would have reacted in 1929, after the Wall Street crash, if everyone had access to an iphone or a PC. History may have taken a twist that could have perhaps averted the Second World War. However that is a different story. 

On the televisions in the 1970s, leading directly up to the Stepping Stones report, there  were talent shows dominating the airwaves. Music was peddling out often benile, pub sing-along tunes that said hardly anything to the people it reached. People were  on the streets protesting against issues that struck them personally. This could be today. 

With the adaptation of the Stepping Stones report to reflect principally and completely on the economic and political conflicts that we inherited out of Thatcherism, we can evaluate what the problems are when a large amount of capital is hoarded. We can evaluate the structure and power of the banks and corporations. We can disable them in the hope of getting the 'consistently....better performance which in the end separates winners from losers.'

To do this we need to take great strides over the stones. 

Win Yourself A Cheap Tray

There is sometimes a grotesque missed opportunity within the flurry of technological advancement. A freedom of choice which in leaps and bounds can help us immensely to those who do choose it. A revolution of the masses tap away at their gadgets, going to places that they can do at a graceful ease.

However where are they going? There comes a point where everyone is saying the same thing in internet subcultures but a point has clearly not been reached. A marker for society isn't put down. 

This stasis goes back to the aged problem of the zero point of the words that sound funny: homo sapiens. Undoubtedly when words became de rigueur and a bounce of bright sorts decided to get creative from this form of species we have been treated to works of pure, other worldly joy. 

But there is a puzzle involved. It hasn't been straightforward. Never has it. If everything were simple then we'd spin off the axis and end up in a better terrestrial stream. It seems that an acute puzzle affects the one precise point of creativity: lasting the course.  

It must be a matter of endurance. It must be a dispelling of pride, arrogance, exorbitance and all the other flowery adjectives. At worst boredom can castrate beauty. At its most obvious we're all massively in love with the idea that as you get older you get stale.  

An example that is both frustrating and glorious at the same time is The Smiths. I take this example as The Smiths sear into a cultural, and sometimes lazy conscience. It's understandable that a career which spanned five years brought out the best in a country bored to tears with the politics affecting their society. 

What bothers me about them is not Andy Rourke continuously chasing Mancunian drug hostels, or Mick Joyce getting his share of the band takings erratically wrong. Nor is it how Johnny Marr was overworked to the point of his quiff collapsing. It was only because they got slack and broke up.

Millions of relationships, not documented in grand poetry, do the same thing too many times. It's a continual hiccuping of missed chances. The failure of the adjudged unfailing. Like witnessing an accident when you don't expect to witness it a shock overtakes the soul and time takes a wicked paternity.  

I feel sorry and hateful for creativity at the exact same time. I don't have a laudable skill in it. By the power of every possible thought imaginable I wish the genuinely gifted ones realise that you may get bored, irritated, doleful, tired, angry, jealous, confused, victim, arrogant, drugged, undrugged, geographical, political, religious, naive....famous.      

We may take for granted that "we know so much about these things". 

In Racist Soil (In Memory of Stephen Lawrence)

London has today seen outside one of its law courts human bouts of stamina that does not need an Olympian fanfare or an expensive ticker tape parade as we shall see magnified later in 2012.

Doreen Neville stood on the steps of the high court to read out a speech that you felt didn’t have the pride of achievement an athlete would show on a podium. In fact it was a speech steeped in a pyrrhic melancholy that will greet the relatives of the Hillsborough relatives when justice is found after their day in court.


When Stephen Lawrence was stabbed to death after immediately hearing the words of "Wot wot nigger" the leaders of Britain were dreaming of a world of "back to basics". It was a nation of quiet bowling greens for the post-Thatcher well-to-do village dwellers. But in the other land of that time there was the underclass struck in the motorway queues waiting upon answers from the Cones Hotline. There was recession not only in the economy but also in the feeling that, with every epoch of self-indulgence, there was a bigger recession culturally. The Cones Hotline didn't seem to actually exist; it was the Established institutions which maintained this situation. 

Stephen Lawrence wanted to become an architect, and with a family that was always supportive to him he would have seen this happen in his life. To him, the career in architecture would be just another life getting fulfilled. The problem was that Stephen stood at a bus shelter late at night in 1990s Britain.  

The five who were captured by the police on camera in 1994 acting out fantasies of racist abuse were and are of a typical breed. But they are not typical in the sense that they can easily be worked out as being white, working class thugs from Eltham in London. There is such a thing we see in our lives as cause and effect. In the pitch battles of wars in the middle ages there were two opposing lines of belligerents and that was it. The big bang. The rest was down to fate and its shaping of history.

David Norris would not know how to “set ‘em alight”, as he threatened towards an imaginary “load of niggers and pakis” in the surveillance video. He and his mates acted on a ten second impulse with a large knife, in the pitch darkness of a South London night in April. Lawrence was with a friend who thought he would be the next victim, but Duwayne Brooks needn’t have worried, as whoever struck the blows with the knife ran away. Ironically, the perpetrators were the scaredest.

The five – Gary Dobson, David Norris, Luke Knight and the Acourt brothers – are the victims of their own lack of self-esteem. It is obvious in the surveillance video. They are the epitome of the chuntering under your breath when you don’t really express what you want to say to someone – or some group – that you don’t like. One of the gang is seen acting out a stabbing with a knife. He is on his own in the room. It is an embarrassing and pathetic sight to watch as he could easily have been playing air guitar or scoring an imaginary goal. He is a boy playing out fantasies that have unfortunately in this case been poisoned by their fathers’ or peers’ prejudices.

And then there are the Metropolitan police who let the basic of crime detection skills slip away as easily it was for the five to do on that night. The role of the Met in their direction of ethnic communities versus the macho idiots who drag up their sons into their inept worldview always stay the same. It happened in the riots in the 1980s and also in the incidents in London last year. The Met is a riddled beast that cast pestilence among the minorities of London because they know that it only takes a special handshake to get away with it.

We are now left with three of the cowards, two of whom are brothers whose surname sounds like what they have to see before they die – a court. The three remaining culprits ran away that night into a freedom that they thought would be protected forever by Metropolitan police institutional racism. For Dobson and Norriss this luxury has lasted for eighteen years. Science can beat the stupidity of corruption, so Knight and the Acourt brothers need not be so complacent.

Andy Warhol famously said that every wannabe without the talent have their fifteen minutes of fame. However, when it comes to seeking justice in this country it takes over fifteen years to reach any level of success. The ones who are looking for the justice are the most talented and honest of people. So, Doreen and Neville Lawrence, take up your place on the podium.

Choking on Popcorn Just to Avoid The Ending

I have just given myself a headache within two hours flat. It wasn't for the want of screaming at white noise with sandpaper allowing itself to scrape the back of the neck that connects to the spinal column. 


It was because I watched The Dark Knight.


Batman returns, shows up, goes for a holiday, comes back again, fills out invoices for a firm in Chepstow that deal in double glazing and patio re-decoration. Often the more flimsy characters in these films ask "Who is he?" I only ask "What is the point of him?"


Christopher Nolan's second interpretation of this sodden Story (a capital S is used for its self-confessed biblical qualities) was all that the year 2008 could harp on about. The next installment is going to do the same next year, and probably early into the year after that. 


First of all, the bull in the room. Or indeed the bull in the room that committed hari-kari in an American hotel room in early 2008. In this film he did what the Hollywood machine wanted him to do - one big blast and then boom! He's gone. The written requiems thereafter were almost automated and the posters put on walls of him saying "Why so serious?" went up quicker than the production of Blu-Tac could have ever anticipated.


His first major scene, reminiscent of the one Jack Nicholson pulled out of the saddle on his one trick pony in the 1989 film, is one where he comes out of a restaurant kitchen. He murders someone gruesomely, he makes idle threats at some terribly one-dimensional gangster characters, and then returns back into the kitchen. I never knew that a ham could walk out of a kitchen by itself and then go straight back in there without being cooked in between.


Really, after that Ledger just gets absorbed into Nolan's nik-nak of a plot. (Ledger would have been surely happier absorbed in his own Hollywood plot.) Violence begats violence. And not in the Biff Bang Pow sense. More like the put-put-put of guns shattering the pain-glass windows of Chicago's skyscrapers. And inside those skyscrapers is the completely out of sync plot of Establishment good trying to get rid of Establishment bad, which as the film goes on starts to stink of the Joker's off ham acting. 


Aaron Eckhart was put in this film for the celluloid to accommodate his massive jaw and hair-straightened blonde hair. His character, his motive, his complete ineptitude for having a plan B were all equally astounding. The motivation point for him to turn into Two-Face was as flimsy as the Joker pointlessly blowing up a hospital at the expense of a budget that could give medical aid to a real hospital.


The human sideways glance that is Maggie Gyllenhaal was put in because I assume someone had to best Nicole Kidman for awful Batman love interests. (By the way, do bats have sex with piss-poor Hollywood actors, normally?) Gyllenhaal has played a similar part in movies before. In the Oliver Stone let-down "World Trade Centre" her role was ranked number 20 behind another list of characters (where in that instance Mohammed Atta was number one). In this little number though she flitted about the sewn up scenes aiding nobody in particular in the search for the plan B.


A scourge of the modern remakes of the Batman franchise was the Batman himself. Christian Bales into significance in this massive mistake of a set-piece. He is lost inexorably in plot holes that are too frequent to mention (for instance, after he saves Gyllenhaal from having a death cab for cutie, why does he not go back up into his own property and dispense of The Ham?) In fact when he turns up as Bruce Wayne he seems like the oily cunt persona he played in American Psycho. Worse still, in the linear catastrophe of what is the final cut of this movie he seems utterly superfluous to the many enemies that wax and wane this story. Oh, and his Batmobile has fat tyres. 


There were honestly only about three scenes in this film full of MANY that caught my attention. I am not a person with slow learning difficulties. The promotional people at Time Warner are neither. But they've made your admittance fee, the Blu-Ray DVD fee, and the enduring, sagging memories of actors who heroically and quite possibly sado-masochistically died in the making of this film seem like a comic book. 

"How To Behave And Why" By Munro Leaf

This is a complete retelling of the children's book "How To Behave and Why" by the author Munro Leaf:

"This is really a book about how to have the most fun in living, and it doesn't matter whether you are a boy or a girl, a man or a woman - the rules are all the same.

How old we are isn't what counts. The two biggest questions to ask ourselves in life, at any age, are: Are most of the people I know glad that I am here. 

Am I glad that I am here, myself?

Anyone who can honestly answer YES to those two questions most of the time has learned to BEHAVE in this world and to live a happy life.

It doesn't matter whether you are a Chinese grandfather, and Eskimo mother or an American boy or girl going to school -

You still have to get along well with other people and have most of them like you, if you want to be happy.

Ever since the days when men stopped living in caves, the good and decent people of the world have found out that there are certain ways we all have to behave if we want to live together pleasantly. 

The good ways, or the good rules for behaving, have lasted a long time - so they must have something.

 No matter where you are or who you are, there are four main things that you have to do if you want to make good friends and keep them.

You have to be HONEST


You have to be FAIR 


You have to be STRONG


and


You have to be WISE....

HONEST people tell the truth.

Other people know that when they say something is so, they can believe it. Now that is very handy, because if you are honest and promise to do something, others will trust you.

They will share things with you, tell you secrets, lend you money, and help you do many of the things you want to do - because they know that what you promise and what you say is true. They can count on it.

Only a dope will tell a lie. 

Some people think they can be smart and fool others when they tell a lie - but sooner or later the truth usually is found out and then the liar is sorry because he knows he won't be trusted or believed the next time.

Nobody knows what to do with a person who doesn't tell the truth.

 How can you believe a word they say? Even if they do tell the truth part of the time, how can you know which times they mean it and which times they don't?

 No - we can't say that just one little lie doesn't count. It counts every time and people can't really know us and like us unless they can believe what we say.

You have to be FAIR

Friendly people find it easy to be FAIR. Being friendly and being fair both come from believing that other people have just as much right to be alive and happy as we have. 

The man or woman or boy or girl who goes around gloomy, with a sour face and is afraid that everybody else is going to make him or her unhappy has a very hard time making friends. 

There are a lot of nice people everywhere and the sooner we meet each other in a friendly way and get to know each other, the better the world will be for all of us.

Our mothers and fathers and sisters and brothers make wonderful friends, if we treat them fairly and do our share to make home a happy place for everyone there.

Remember that the secret of fairness is sharing. Selfish people who won't share with others find themselves left alone and unhappy no matter what they own that could be fun. 

We know now what it means to be FAIR, and we will learn all through life that the friendly person is a happy person most of the time.

You have to be STRONG.

Real strength comes from having a clean, healthy mind and a clean healthy body.

Think it out for yourself. All the power of sixty gorillas won't do you any good if you use it stupidly, and if you don't stay healthy you might as well be a run down mouse.

 Any brave man or woman can tell you that having a clean healthy mind comes from taking the time to think what is right and then doing it no matter how scared you are or when it would be easier to do wrong or even if somebody else tries to talk you into it.

Regular habits are the answer to the question: How can we grow from a weak baby to a strong and healthy man or woman? Eating the right food when we should, keeping clean, playing and exercising, sitting and standing right and getting the right amount of sleep and rest are HOW TO GROW WELL AND STRONG.  

Grown ups aren't some kind of weird monsters that have fun making us do things we don't want to do. They just know a whole lot more than we do because they have been here longer. Listen to what they tell you and you will be surprised how right they usually are.

If we are HONEST, and FAIR, and STRONG we won't find it hard to be wise.

We get along with people and we make good friends when we have polite manners like:

Shaking hands when we meet

Smiling and saying "good morning" or "good afternoon"

Waiting for other people to finish talking before we start 

Helping very old and very young people as much as we can, and being quiet and gentle when we are with them

'I can't be right no matter who I am' is a good thing for all of us to remember. 

Other people have ideas and thoughts - ways to do things, ways to work, ways to play, ways they think of God and their country and their race. Their way can be just as right as your way. Remember that, and be glad you have a chance to choose the best of all ways.

If you have learned to be 

HONESTFAIRSTRONGWISE

then you have learned HOW TO BEHAVE AND WHY"

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. 

The Shrieking Noises in Francis Fukuyama's Worst Dream

There's going to be a time when the old makes way for the new, and the new will not be a complete copy of the old. The guard of the new will slip, and as the modern world goes on, and people will learn to accept to be more enlightened about the crimes of the old, and the diversionary tactics of the old, the new of the old will be faded out. Embarrassed and broken up into fragments. 


All you need to be focused on are these foibles as they concern you and how you live. A jumper can be turned inside out.

Is it a bird or is it a t-shirt?