News round-up: Chilcot, Blair and Brangelina

Another picture in the frame this week.

News of Gordon Brown and his offer to loan Barack Obama the painting that inspired Barry in his youth — Hope by Victorian English artist George Frederic Watts. It would have hung in the Oval Office except it's indelibly associated with preacher Jeremiah Wright, the man who introduced it to him and nearly sunk Obama's bid for the presidency when he suggested that vicious US foreign policy might have something to do with terrorist attacks. The devil lying in the detail, it's revealed that Tony Blair's artwork gift to Bush was ... a bust of Conservative Prime Minister Sir Winston Churchill (since replaced by one of Martin Luther King). Considering the first former PM Blair invited into Number 10 wasn't his own party's James Callaghan but Margaret Thatcher, I think this says a lot about where his tiny shrunken political heart truly lay.

A picture speaks a thousand words but still not as many as the ban on the autopsy report of the death of Dr David Kelly for a whacking 70 years. Hmm, I wonder what it is that could worry the government so. After all, we all know that Kelly commited suicide by opening his tiny ulnar artery in one wrist with a blunt garden knife. Don't we?

The body of former United Nations weapons inspector Dr Kelly was found in July 2003 in woods close to his Oxfordshire home, shortly after he was exposed as the source of a BBC news report questioning the Government’s claims that
Saddam Hussein had an arsenal of weapons of mass destruction, which could be deployed within 45 minutes.

Days before Tony Blair appears at the Chilcot inquiry into the Iraq war, Home Secretary Alan Johnson raises UK terror threat level to "severe". Some wags have commented, "Iraq Inquiry not going too well then..." Should we expect something "severe" just before Blair's appearance at Chilcot on Friday? Images of tanks at Heathrow might be handy.

Suzanne Moore on moral compasses versus cowboy boots in today's Mail On Sunday:

[Straw] remains in the Cabinet though he now says the war he backed was ‘self-evidently unlawful’. By this he meant getting rid of Saddam militarily without a UN mandate. Hoon apparently felt the same. ... Though we are talking about thousands of dead Iraqis, hundreds of dead British soldiers, the issue that appears to be most important is that they only did what they were told to do even if they had private doubts. ... Alastair Campbell says he has learned some lessons from Iraq. That you can get away with murder might be one.

Remember this, kids, when they are blinding you with bureaucracy and touting United Nations Security Resolution 1441 as being the Golden Ticket for taking us into war with Iraq:

[Of France and Germany not tabling the second resolution] But they did not table it because we gave assurances to the French and Germans (and Russians and Chinese) that our draft of UNSCR 1441 did not authorise military action. The instructions were to inform those governments that UNSCR 1441 contained "no automatic trigger" which would lead to military action. ... all the FCO material at the time of the adoption of UNSCR 1441 and for weeks afterwards right up until March, took the view that UNSCR 1441 did not provide legal grounds for the invasion.

Aside from getting help to Haiti hours ahead of the US and their 5,000 troops, China has just announced a further $2.64 million in aid to the devastated nation. (Haiti, that is, not the US.)

Brangelina split but agree to divide the kids and $200 million.

Titanic poem and news round-up

A cursory glance at my blog might give the impression that we're all going to hell in a handcart (copyright Richard Littlejohn, Jeremy Clarkson, Rod Liddle and other great minds of our times).

There's the screw-up around the Haiti disaster with the race to impose the Shock Doctrine on a traumatised nation and the slo-o-ow as molasses help to arrive from the US. More from our glorious leaders as Straw moves to save his own skin over Iraq at Chilcott having seen Alastair Campbell blaming JIC and Sir John Scarlett for not having the cojones to challenge Campbell's rewrites which included removing the crucial sentence that Iraq was not an immediate threat to us. And then there's Brown. And Blair.

Elsewhere the war's cheerleaders are saying, yeah, it was all about getting rid of Saddam, so what? This person is being considered for the post of editor for The Independent newspaper and still writes for The Times and the Spectator. Religious fundies of all stripes are falling over each other to get their moment in the spotlight. The milk of human kindness is all dried up as this DJ wanker plays "Jump" as a woman leaps off a bridge and then says, "I'd do it again".

As I can't hibernate or escape to an exotic island, I thought I'd jolly it up and grace my space with some art.

Not sure I can keep up with online poets like Bill Greenwell who posts a good one every week, but I'll try for a monthly. Here's a poem I wrote the other day.

All aboard
10th January 2010

What’s that creaking? Is it metal ripped
And rivets popped
As the vessel sinks another notch?

Who’s that speaking? Is it posts all pipped,
And plans all stopped,
Cries curtailed by the water slopped

Into upturned mouths while the great hulk drops
Into the darkest yet but I’m safe on top

What’s that skidding? Is it deckchairs slipped
From ranks half-cocked
While the orchestra plays its final spot?

Who’s that kidding? Has reason kipped,
Is fraternity mocked,
Are human bonds tied in a fancy slipknot

That each lurch loosens with a sly little sigh
Unheard by those who are warm and dry?

I’ll stay a while with my little pile
Of salvage glittering under a harvest moon
My precious, my ghostly crop. For soon
No food no gas no salt no grit, just slops
Last night I dined in style on ribs and chops
Tomorrow I might suck at straws
As the wind sucks now at my chilling bones
Better that than freezing currents drawing me down
Don’t look down, look up.
Up at those climbed highest to the helm
A realm ruled by flunkies and fops
Who feign and fulminate, feast and grasp
Above the stalking waterline where these last hours I too have dwelled
Til in my turn a desperate hand outheld
Finding no firm clasp in this wintry hell
I lose my footing and like all good men, women, babes and beasts
I drown

Hmm. Wasn't that cheery after all. Sorry about that. Will do better next time.

(Copyright Anna Chen 2010)

Titanic poem and news round-up

A cursory glance at my blog might give the impression that we're all going to hell in a handcart (copyright Richard Littlejohn, Jeremy Clarkson, Rod Liddle and other great minds of our times).

There's the screw-up around the Haiti disaster with the race to impose the Shock Doctrine on a traumatised nation and the slo-o-ow as molasses help to arrive from the US. More from our glorious leaders as Straw moves to save his own skin over Iraq at Chilcott having seen Alastair Campbell blaming JIC and Sir John Scarlett for not having the cojones to challenge Campbell's rewrites which included removing the crucial sentence that Iraq was not an immediate threat to us. And then there's Brown. And Blair.

Elsewhere the war's cheerleaders are saying, yeah, it was all about getting rid of Saddam, so what? This person is being considered for the post of editor for The Independent newspaper and still writes for The Times and the Spectator. Religious fundies of all stripes are falling over each other to get their moment in the spotlight. The milk of human kindness is all dried up as this DJ wanker plays "Jump" as a woman leaps off a bridge and then says, "I'd do it again".

As I can't hibernate or escape to an exotic island, I thought I'd jolly it up and grace my space with some art.

Not sure I can keep up with online poets like Bill Greenwell who posts a good one every week, but I'll try for a monthly. Here's a poem I wrote the other day.

All aboard
10th January 2010

What’s that creaking? Is it metal ripped
And rivets popped
As the vessel sinks another notch?

Who’s that speaking? Is it posts all pipped,
And plans all stopped,
Cries curtailed by the water slopped

Into upturned mouths while the great hulk drops
Into the darkest yet but I’m safe on top

What’s that skidding? Is it deckchairs slipped
From ranks half-cocked
While the orchestra plays its final spot?

Who’s that kidding? Has reason kipped,
Is fraternity mocked,
Are human bonds tied in a fancy slipknot

That each lurch loosens with a sly little sigh
Unheard by those who are warm and dry?

I’ll stay a while with my little pile
Of salvage glittering under a harvest moon
My precious, my ghostly crop. For soon
No food no gas no salt no grit, just slops
Last night I dined in style on ribs and chops
Tomorrow I might suck at straws
As the wind sucks now at my chilling bones
Better that than freezing currents drawing me down
Don’t look down, look up.
Up at those climbed highest to the helm
A realm ruled by flunkies and fops
Who feign and fulminate, feast and grasp
Above the stalking waterline where these last hours I too have dwelled
Til in my turn a desperate hand outheld
Finding no firm clasp in this wintry hell
I lose my footing and like all good men, women, babes and beasts
I drown

Hmm. Wasn't that cheery after all. Sorry about that. Will do better next time.

(Copyright Anna Chen 2010)