Tony Blair Get a Peace Medal

At least it's not a Nobel.

So Tony Blair, who dragged us into two wars - one with a certain amount of justification, the other most assuredly not - and seems to have spent his Middle Eastern Envoy role as one big fucking jolly on the taxpayers expense, gets a medal.

Now I can see the NI argument, although John Major's government did a hell of a lot of groundwork, but given how the little turd infamously told the world it was not a time for quips and then proceeded to provide one I'd much rather see him awarded a punch in the face.

Never mind, bit of extra cash for Cherie, eh?

Belt Tightening, G8 Style

Nothing quite like leading by example is there?

Not all of Canada is happy with the bill - $1.1bn (£732m) it cost, to talk about the need for greater austerity. This includes $57,000 for a fake lake in the media centre. The G8 meeting was held in a lakeside resort some 100 miles north of Toronto, so to bring some spirit of place inside this vast aircraft hanger of an exhibition centre, they've build a deck flanked by racks of canoes, with spacious wooden chairs, overlooking a cinema-sized screen playing scenes of boating or tracking shots across forests and lakes. Huge speakers twitter bird song which unfortunately competes with the coarse shrieks and roars of "homo footballus" watching another big screen nearby.

They've spent over a billion dollars (I assume  that's US dollars, not the Canuckistani Monopoly-board stuff) on a meeting. About spending less. Thank fuck it wasn't about spending more, otherwise they may have spent the UK's GDP on an artificial ocean on the fucking moon, and shipped up hookers with cash machines installed in their vaginas!

Words don't fail me, I just don't think I could type 'cunts' in a large enough font, or in such number, to adequately express my complete, utter and frothing contempt for these creatures. Surely everyone, of all political stripes, skin colour, religious beliefs and creeds can come together - with even the most ultra-Zionist Jew hugging the most anti-semite Hamas member hugging in agreement - that these fuckers have to go.

The message from the G8 and G20 was plain, simple and clear:

We all have to tighten our belts. And of course when we say 'we', we mean 'you'

Arseholes to the lot of them.

Death Penalty

Over at Boaty and D, they've been discussing the death penalty, and felt it was worth a quick post.

Now I proclaim myself as someone who is for the death penalty in principle, but not in practice - the concept of some people needing to be permanently removed from society is a sound one. If you have someone who cannot or will not be rehabilitated, or has committed a crime that any length of incarceration would exceed their lifespan, then it is only rational that they need to be excised from the world.

Now that only works on the assumption that the person is 100% guilty, and that is where the doubts creep in. The police and justice system hardly provide comfort in that regard. There are plenty of tales of miscarriages of justice, and no doubt more will come out of the woodwork - in such cases any execution would be cold blooded murder.

And I'm not sure I could sanction such a thing in my name.

There are arguments that in some cases, in the US for example, where death would be seen as a preferable to having to live in jail - one that makes Lord of the Flies look like an Enid Blyton book - for years of rape and beatings, before being released. As arguments go it's pretty pisspoor, and is, if anything, an argument of making prisons a place to punish criminals and not enclaves of barbarism.

All said and done, there is a place for a death sentence, but the criteria to which it is applied must be so strict that it is only ever applied to the true monsters, and with such a weight of evidence required it is even then a rarity.

As technology improves, that too would have to be taken into account - a CCTV tape of someone killing someone now pretty much proves it happened, short of a TV show plot or two, but in another 10 years? Then you could probably kill someone, film it and edit it to show Elvis committing the crime.

Death is the ultimate sanction, and should be treated with all the care, paranoia and surplus of doubt it deserves.

Back From Hols

Holy Mother of all of Fuckdom, do I pick times to go on the lam! Labour leadership, mad fucker going gun-crazy in Cumbria and all the fall out of the Israeli commando cock-up on the flotilla of aid... And Michael Jackson dying! No, wait, that was last time, it was Stuart Cable this time. And he was hardly Keith Moon so y'know, who really gives a shit?

Anyway, I found somewhere in the Canaries that played Devo and Men Without Hats. Happy days!

I shall return with some abusive musings when the booze has subsided and the gross horror that is the real world has suitably left its size 9 imprint on on my scrotum. Tomorrow probably...