Something quite dramatic happened after 9/11. Not just the understandable anger that followed the terrorist atrocity, and the human desire for revenge. What also died on that tragic day was the reputation of the US media. Blinded by grief perhaps, the US media, the champion of free press the world over rolled over and bared its throat to the top dog, the President of the United States. Unlike most dogs, Bush then tore out its throat. In the build up to the war and during&n...
This week in Camodia, a judge heard the case of a woman accused of murdering her two nieces. When arrested she was found in possession of the gold earrings of one of her nieces. The prosecution argued that the woman had lured her two nieces into the jungle on a pretence of having a picnic, whereupon she murdered the young pair for the earrings. A novel twist on babes in the wood perhaps. In her defence, the Cambodian woman argued that while in the jungle, a demon spirit possessed...
President Musharraf of Pakistan has today called on religeous clerics to review of both the Blasphemy law and the strict Hudood law. The Hudood law covers crimes of adultery and rape. Under this law, a rape victim has to produce four witnesses in court to confirm her assault, otherwise she can be tried on charges of wilful adultery while the rapist goes free. Presumably a woman that has been gang-raped by ten men needs up to forty witnesses otherwise she has commited ten counts o...
Dear all, Those that have read me in the past will know that I thoroughly disapprove of the poorly planned, immoral and criminally incompetent schoolboy adventure in Iraq. Sadly everything that I predicted has come to pass, as any half-witted poorly educated idiot with just enough brain cells to scrape over a very thin wafered water biscuit could see from the beginning. I have been furious at the systematic torture and murder of helpless detainees in US custody. I have been a...
'Okay there General Fuckup.' 'Morning Mr.President sir!' 'At ease soldier, now what's all this ah hear about our boys in Eye-rack having a little well deserved R&R?' 'Uh, you probably mean the torturing sir' 'Torture General? What's that then Fuckup?' 'Uh, when we attach electrodes to someones genitals sir, or beat them to death, or make them wear womens panties.' 'Wearing womens panties eh General? That's torture? Ah kinda like to wear womens....' 'Er, that's perhaps as ...
It is 1978. The cargo ship Munchen set sail to cross the Atlantic. Munchen was a state-of-the-art cargo ship. The December storms predicted when she set out to cross the Atlantic did not concern her German crew. The voyage was perfectly routine until at 3am on 12 December she sent out a garbled mayday message from the mid-Atlantic. Rescue attempts began immediately with over a hundred ships combing the ocean. The ship was never found. She went down with all 27 hands. An exhaustive...
Tales from Coober Pedy. Coober Pedy is the nearest to a gold rush frontier town that I have ever encountered. Scowling, swarthy, leather faced men eye the stranger with suspicion, the last thing they want is another potential prospector staking a claim. They mutter and glare darkly at attempts at conversation, and the fly strewn air means anything than a dash from shop to pub is as uncomfortable as trying to talk to one of the local prospec...
Dear all, In the outback, other than keeping whip snakes out of your swag bag, there is little to do other than gather around the camp fire with scrubby old diggers and swap tales of BLOOD CHILLING TERROR! On one particularly chill night, with a host of stars crowding the sky, an old aboriginal opal miner from Coober Pedy bade us gather around the flickering flames and crackling gum-bark to hear tell of the min-min lights. The min-min lights were named by the abor...
A small Chinese man pushes porter from the vast red-bricked megalith of Market City towards the rat infested destinations of of Chinatowns restaurants. His cargo is wide punnets of purple broccoli, and he sings to himself in a strange, alien sort of nasaly wail as he coughs and spits his way eyes shut throught the familiar songlines between gawping tourists and touting waiters. A beautiful young woman in impossibly tight white jeans that draw the male eye to consider, is she or isn...
From the Australian Newspaper: 'There was another story doing the rounds in Sydney some years ago which, one could only assume, was a furphy but which, delightfully for those who live off the grist in the gossip mill, turned out to be true. It was divorce time for a well-heeled couple and things were unusually acrimonious. He was in London on business, she here in the family mansion from which he had not moved. The telephone ran hot with screaming, tantrums, threats and accusations. Sh...
This week the Libyan Prime Minister said that his country was not responsible for the Lockerbie bombing in 1988. He said that his country only argreed to take responsibility so that sanctions and travel restrictions would be lifted and ordinary Libyans could then 'get at the white women who were easy' Following outrage in the US, the Prime MInister later withdrew his remark, saying 'Okay then we did do it'. The US has accepted the retraction saying 'They have done what they needed...
from the Australian Newspaper: ' My hairdresser sucked me in; she told me it had happened only last weekend. Her best friend in the whole world, a legend in the iconoclastic world of straight blow-dries, had been clearing up the salon on her late-night shift. Caught up in the intricacies of separating hundreds of small pieces of foil in readiness for the next day's bleachings, at first she didn't hear the rapping on the glass door. When she did, the hapless young man standin...
Dear all, I was shocked last night to see a debate on the Larry King show, carried by the moronic CNN news channel. I was shocked in many ways. Firstly the level of the arguments on both sides was so childish that it was almost unwatchable. I have never seen people present arguments that you could literally drive a truck through. The background is that in California, the mayor? has given approval for some 300 same sex couples to be married. This is important, because this all...
About one hundred years ago, a speaker at the Royal Academy of Science stood up and proudly announced that the time was fast approaching where mankinf\d would fundamentally understand all that there was to know about the entire universe. All that really remained was a matter of dotting the i's and crossing the t's. He recieved a standing ovation. A century and a bit later, that statement has never seemed so foolish. It's an old truism, but we've learned one sure thing, that the mor...
We're all stuck in a hierarchy where the strongest rules, right? Might is right, ignorance is strength and if you disagree I'll punch your lights out. For millennia people have lives in a subservient way bowing down to some superior or other. People need to be ruled, they cannot imagine a life without it, force is good. Violence protects, people respect violence - that's why we should all carry guns, the ultimate leveller. Now every noodle armed choirboy can be as violent as ...