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.