Royal Wedding Blues Pt II: the ruling class are 'avin' a larf, innit?

The gargoyles and grotesques who attended yesterday's publicly-funded royal wedding give us a glimpse of a confident, decidedly non-democratic ruling class in the ascendent. With a government of their own clobbering the very people who turned up to celebrate, they must be very happy indeed.

While I loathe the Blairs for their greed, worship of wealth and status above their own constituency, and his addiction to wars, the fact that the office of Prime Minister, one voted in by a landslide (even if he did turn out to be a scumbag), was snubbed like this, says more about what they think of UK subjects (for we are not free men and women despite all the PR to the contrary) than what they might think of the Blairs.

Meanwhile, lawful peaceful protest was crushed in a way that must have made the Bahrain torturer and Saudi despots feel utterly at home, and more bad news about further cuts to our NHS was buried.

Peter Hain may moan that Ed Miliband was given no TV coverage, but I think the BBC did him a big favour. Who'd want to advertise their consorting with this company? We need Ed to stand up to this carve-up, not tug his forelock in obeisance to his betters.

Which reminds me: that speech by Kate's brother, James Middleton, reading Romans 12, urging the Firm and their peers to 'associate with the lowly'. How sad it that? The rich man in his castle, the poor man at his gate and all that.

I appeal to you, brothers and sisters, by the mercies of God, to present your bodies as a living sacrifice, holy and acceptable to God, which is your spiritual worship. Do not be conformed to this world, but be transformed by the renewing of your minds, so that you may discern what is the will of God - what is good and acceptable and perfect. Let love be genuine; hate what is evil, hold fast to what is good; love one another with mutual affection; outdo one another in showing honour. Do not lag in zeal, be ardent in spirit, serve the Lord. Rejoice in hope, be patient in suffering, persevere in prayer. Contribute to the needs of the saints; extend hospitality to strangers. Bless those who persecute you; bless and do not curse them. Rejoice with those who rejoice, weep with those who weep. Live in harmony with one another; do not be haughty, but associate with the lowly; do not claim to be wiser than you are. Do not repay anyone evil for evil, but take thought for what is noble in the sight of all. If it is possible, so far as it depends on you, live peaceably with all.

Yep, they get to decide 'what is the will of God', just like the 'mad mullahs'. 'Hate what is evil' but you get to decide what constitutes 'evil', and, wondrously, it is never anything you yourself have done. 'Serve the lord', especially if you or your mates are that lord. Sounds like a cushy number to me.

I say never trust anyone who says they have a hotline to the Divinity. Call for the men in white coats, instead.

Will and Kate are the pretty face of a ruthless bunch of rulers who have only just begun their counterattack on the workers and peasants who got too uppity after World War II; a period, coincidentally, of unprecedented creativity by the masses.

UPDATE: Saturday 30th April. An emboldened ruling class cleanses networking site of dissent. This lot will put China in the shade.

Defending Free Speech from the Zombie Flash Mob: royal wedding blues

7PM. My mate Roz Kaveney, poet extraordinaire, has joined my sedate birthday celebrations and reports that the Queer Resistance Zombie Flash Mob was put under heavy manners on royal wedding day since Chris Knight and his guillotine mates (both of them) were arrested last night.

Despite sitting quietly in Soho Square, Queer Resistance and the Sisters of Perpetual Indulgence were approached by huffy plod and told to leave or face arrest (see video below). When asked why, they said, 'Some people aren't happy you are here.' Roz says it was breach of the peace by 'harshing someone's buzz.' At least they weren't the poor sods in Starbucks who were arrested for drinking tea while made up like zombies.

Ms Kaveney sees it both ways. She says, 'If they didn't do this, we'd end up like China.'

It's a dirty job but someone's gotta do it.

From Grassy Knoll to The Mall: Royal Wedding Expectations Shot

Americans have the best take on this monarchy stuff. Thanks to Rigorous Intuition for the above inspiration.

On the day that a Bahrain torturer attended the royal wedding while protesters in his homeland are being slaughtered, but Tony Blair and his power-worshipping wife did not (so it's not all negative, then), bad news is buried and another nail is hammered into the coffin of democracy.

Republicans (in the British sense) everywhere are being arrested, reminiscent of baptism scene in the last reel of The Godfather where members of the opposition are wiped out with every glorious crescendo of tiny boys' voices. Telepathic Heights raided. The Zombie Flash crew and anarchists in Soho: arrested and intimidated. The Brockley Guillotiners (aged 45 to 68): arrested. The NHS is told to institute further cuts as the BBC tweets: 'The regulator of NHS foundation trusts in England has warned hospitals they must make even bigger efficiency savings than previously thought'. And thousands of the very people who'll be hit the hardest when the boot in the face kicks-in for real string up bunting instead of royal purple parasites, and hold street parties instead of shooting the guilty parties.

Sigh!

Peter Hain complained that Ed Miliband was cut out of BBC TV coverage while there was plenty of David Cameron and Ramsay MacClegg, but this is surely a narrow escape as no-one with good taste and vestigial republican beliefs would want to be seen dead in this company.

OK, on to my birthday celebrations.

Laurie Penny's Royal Wedding of Mass Distraction

Walpurgis Eve Royal Wedding: commoner to be sacrificed

Kate Middleton's Friday night nuptuals

I KNEW it! One look at the date of the royal wedding between William and Kate makes it as clear as a Swarovski crystal gunsight what the occult aristocracy shoring up the monarchy have in store for commoner Kate Middleton. As any fule kno, 29th April is Walpurgis Eve, going into the witches' sabbath itself on the 30th, when deals made with satanic forces are at their most potent.

I've already predicted that the first-born will be sacrificed to ensure the continuation of the monarchy, but Stewart Lee has uncovered a Wicker Man scenario that makes much more sense than the Rosemary's Baby nightmare I foresaw. The first-born is a decoy. Duck, Kate. It's your lowly blood they want to fill up on like the contents of an overturned petrol tanker at an M11 truck stop.

The lash-up between the royal family and Beelzebub is already resulting in weaker minds among us being seduced by the romance of royalty, and renowned republicans are folding like origami. Only the other day I found myself in a room full of Orwell Prize progressive where a full two-thirds of the audience now found the royals more attractive than Marilyn Monroe and James Dean put together, and whose leader asked what was so great about elections and republics anyway? The Intellectual giant of the Fabian Society, Sunder Katwala, proudly swore allegiance to the Her Dark Majesty Liz The Queen of Everything and promised that, despite having once been a fearsome republican, he was all better now.

And what of poor Wills? Never mind: his second marriage will be happier and longer-lived. After all, he has his Dad to guide him through this one.

BTW, my birthday falls on 30th April. Heh!

Truly, there are terrible primal arcana of earth which had better be left unknown and unevoked; dread secrets which have nothing to do with man, and which man may learn only in exchange for peace and sanity; cryptic truths which make the knower evermore an alien among his kind, and cause him to walk alone on earth.
-From "The Diary of Alonzo Typer" Howard Phillips Lovecraft

Carnival of Republicanism here

UPDATE: 13:50 Thursday 28th. Squats raided before the royal wedding. Democracy upheld. Rah!

Farewell Poly Styrene: O Death, Up Yours

Today we bid a sad farewell to Poly Styrene who has died from cancer.

One of the first women who swept to prominence on the punk wave of the 1970s, Poly made a massive impact. She challenged the insipid standards of female beauty of the time with unconventional looks that included a mouthful of metal, puppy-fat that had yet to melt, and a spiky attitude that refused to capitulate to the usual mind-numbing requirements of a moribund music industry but carved out an identity of her own.

When she sang, 'Some people think little girls should be seen and not heard, but I think, O bondage, up yours,' you knew something had changed forever.

She had a troubled life following her heyday. Hit by a fire engine, misdiagnosed with schizophrenia, she was incarcerated in a mental hospital and only seemed to find peace when she joined a Hari Krishna sect.

Goodbye, Poly. A cultural pioneer who made the world a better place. O Death, up yours.

Thames Clipper video: Tower Bridge to Embankment, London

A lovely trip through the centre of London the other week by Thames Clipper, under the shadow of the absurdly huge Shard-enfreude which looks like the Tyrrell Corporation in Blade Runner.

Includes Tower Bridge, the Tower of London, City Hall, The Shard, Globe Theatre, Millennium Bridge, Tate Modern, St Paul's Cathedral, National Theatre, Royal Festival Hall, London Eye, Big Ben and Hungerford Bridge.

Only a fiver with a travel or Oyster card.

The Myth of the Liberal Media

How did Noam Chomsky become a hate figure among the liberal left?

Few question the sneering tone used by people who define themselves as leftist whenever the professor's name comes up. However, I just watched this clip and thought that, although it's five years old, it's nevertheless still accurate, still applicable, and needs saying often. "Are the media by their institutional structure free to allow expression of opinion from whatever source?" Having been banned by the Guardian as well as the Great Chinese Firewall, I say no, niet, nein, non, never, no way.

I shall have to dig out Chomsky's classic: Manufacturing Consent. Along with Edward Said's Orientalism, a must-read that gives you X-ray vision when looking at the 'natural' order of things, and makes visible the invisible. Better than spinach for strengthening your brain muscles.

Libya: the hypocrisy of liberal intervention

Brilliant article by Johann Hari in the Independent yesterday on the real reasons behind the West's compulsion to stage "humanitarian" intervention with things that go bang in countries whose people we helped keep down with more things that go bang.

Take the present round of Middle Eastern revolutions rocking our oil-owning buddies including Libya, where the current NATO offensive is mashing up the rebel opposition in a series of friendly fire incidents:

"David Cameron's instinctive response to the Arab revolutions was to jump on a plane and tour the palaces of the region's dictators selling them the most hi-tech weapons of repression available. Nicolas Sarkozy's instinctive response to the Arab revolutions was to offer urgent aid to the Tunisian tyrant in crushing his people. Barack Obama's instinctive response to the Arab revolutions was to refuse to trim the billions in aid going to Hosni Mubarak and his murderous secret police, and for his Vice-President to declare: 'I would not refer to him as a dictator.'"

In Pakistan, the US has been sending in drones to kill those identified as Taliban. Glossed with a ludicrous concept of "precision bombing" straight out of the first Iraq War, this needle-in-a-haystack enterprise relies on dodgy information and, unsurprisingly, results in a kill ratio of 50 civilians for every alleged terrorist. Being this reckless with civilians' lives means that, for many potential recruits to the fundamentalist cause, it is the American government that is the terrorist.

Yet for other civilians for whom some can make a case for NATO protection:

" ... 'armies of business' had invaded Congo to pillage its resources and sell them to the knowing West. The most valuable loot is coltan, which is used to make the metal in our mobile phones and games consoles and laptops. The "armies of business" fought and killed to control the mines and send it to us. The UN listed some of the major Western corporations fuelling this trade, and said if they were stopped, it would largely end the war."

"By contrast, when the Congolese government recently nationalized a mine belonging to US and British corporations, there was a fire-burst of fury in the press. You can kill five million people and we'll politely look away; but take away the property of rich people, and we get really angry. ... We are almost never prompted to look at the equally real and equally huge abuses by our own country, its allies and its corporations – which we have much more control over – and ask the same question."

Had China done this we would, rightly, never hear the end of it. Every time I read the liberal press slamming China for using its purchasing power in Africa, I shall think of the damage we are still doing to people in Africa, the Middle East and Pakistan at the barrel of a gun, and reread this article. Ever wonder why we never hear about the African Debt any more? One thing we can surely thank China for is putting Bono's out of our misery and out of business.

As for any humanitarian advantage resulting from our attacks, Hari cuts to the likely outcome:

" ... any coincidental humanitarian gain in the short term will be eclipsed as soon as the local population clash with the real reason for the war. Then our governments will back their renewed vicious repression - just as the US and Britain did in Iraq, with a policy of effectively sanctioning the resumption of torture when the population became uppity and objected to the occupation. ... But if you are still convinced our governments are acting for humanitarian reasons, I've got a round-trip plane ticket for you to some rubble in Pakistan and Congo. The people there would love to hear your argument."

Keep your ears peeled for Johann Hari's programme for BBC Radio 4's 4Thought on this subject.

Yellow Peril fear stalks America as well as Britain

BWA-HA-HA!!! Puny white people, we will have your nuts in the palm of our six-fingered hands before you can say 'Fu Manchu'. Bow down before us and buy your crap what we made for you according to your own designs. The Great Obamao forces healthcare onto your inferior physiques and prepares you for conquest. Surrender to us the arch-criminal of history Niall Ferguson so we can ram his goolies in a blender once our super electron microscopes have detected them, for we are the greatest size-queens of them all and Niall is a scaredy-cat terrified by our might. Look upon our works and be afraid, for after the cheap and tasty takeaways, you will pay.

Oh, HOW you will pay ...

BWA-HA-HA!!!

Hat-tip honours go to The Hathor Legacy. And here and here.