Via Jesus’ General comes this toecurlingly awful rapping fundie granny.
Forgive her, she knows not what she does. Fo’ shizzle.
(Can’t say I’m surprised at the existence of GodTube, especially in light of the daft hubris that produced the laughable Conservapedia)
When it comes to the arms trade the British government are the deranged offspring of a Ferengi and Franz Kafka, insatiable greed and bureacratic ineptitude combined in one nightmare package.
Here’s a nice encapsulation of the sick situation by activist/comedian Mark Thomas at the 2007 Birmingham Police and Security Fair :
[…]
In the middle of the hall was Mr Xia, a Chinese man with three electro-shock weapons on display for all to see. He demonstrated them for me while I filmed him. A bargain at £3.25 each. At least, I thought, it shouldn’t be hard to find a cop at the police and security fair. How foolishly naive. The Association of Chief of Police Officers had a stall around the corner from Mr Xia, but with no one there. The nearest Customs officer, I was told, was at the airport. The closest thing I found to an on-duty officer were two life-size cardboard cutout cops, on sale as a deterrent to thieves. Eventually, I found the fair organiser’s office.
Mr Xia was arrested, and two weeks later I got a phone call from Solihull CID. “Mr Xia has pleaded guilty to the possession of prohibited firearms,” said the voice, “but I think it is illegal to try and sell these weapons.”
“You would be right.”
“And I think Mr Xia was trying to sell them.”
“He was at a trade fair.”
“Would you give us a statement and let us see the film you shot at the fair?”
“Yes, I would be happy to.”
“And one more thing – if you wouldn’t mind, could you bring up copies of the relevant legislation?”
While it’s long been an open secret in Britain that our national earnings are underpinned by international arms sales – we make 46 billion a year out of it – what’s not often mentioned is that we’re also one of the biggest enablers of the worldwide and domestic trade in illegal small arms and torture equipment.
The British government’s attitude to arms sales is hypocritical to the nth degree. On one hand it subscribes to the “Guns bad, mmmkay?” school of thought for domestic consumption; on the other it allows illegal arms and torture weapons to be sold under its nose to pretty much anyone from at home and abroad, so long as they have the money.
You’d be surprised at who has a financial interest in the arms and repression industry:
45 UK UNIVERSITIES own over £15m worth of shares in the arms trade. Three institutions – University College London (UCL), Trinity Hall Cambridge and the University of Liverpool – each own shares worth over £1million.
British academics, MPs, police and media alike bemoan the growing gun culture that leads to the murders of so many young men and shed crocodile tears even as they condemn: “Tsk tsk”, they say. “Oh dear, black drugs and gun culture, tragic isn’t it? Oh well, at least it’s not our children.”
Yet while all that international money is sloshing around London they’ll happily turn a blind eye either by passivity or ineptitude,to the international gun culture that is the Daddy of the gun culture in our cities.
As a spokesperson for the University of Liverpool explains; “The university has a legal obligation to maximise returns on its investments as it is accountable to its beneficiaries. We would not choose to invest in arms if other opportunities to fulfil our financial obligations were equally available.”
Oh well, then, that’s fine. Profit trumps morals, my duh.
It’s a sad fact that in our post-imperial and industrial days of decline we are a fading, insignificant offshore island in a big scary world. Our only remaining diplomatic bargaining chips are a] guns and b] money. These days we can only wield power in the world by
a] enabling, supporting and protecting the international trade in arms and weapons of repression, come what may and
b] by having a whole city full of handy banks for managing the subsequent profits and lots of accountants and lawyers to evade any inconvenient legislation (that’s when they’re not actually orchestrating it on a massive scale).
and
c] By knowing where the bodies are buried. *Cough* Banco Ambrosiano.*Cough*
that last’s influence probably outweights the first two.
Mind you, the relevant laws are such an absolute dogs breakfast as to be almost totally ineffectual anyway and of course lets not forget that we in our turn are mere passive instruments of US foreign policy, just another tool to be used by Washington to do politics by the back door.
The voters have expressed their justified disgust with this hypocrisy by demonstrating peacefully yet forcefully, only to find themselves subjected to the most draconian of the post-911 terror laws. A state of terrorist emergency was first declared in metropolitan London in Feb 2001, but no-one knew until the law was used not against terrorists but against legitimate arms trade prorestors.
The Metropolitan Police are using anti-terrorist legislation against protesters demonstrating at Europe’s biggest annual arms fair which was opened today by Geoff Hoon, UK defence minister, in London’s Docklands. The police have invoked Section 44 of Terrorism Act 2000 which allows assistant chief constables (or the commander in the case of the Metropolitan police) to authorise extended stop and search where they
“consider it expedient for the prevention of acts of terrorism”
Section 44 was also used extensively during the protests and peace camp at Fairford RAF airbase in the build-up to the Iraq War (1). This is contrary to clear undertakings from the Home Secretary to the House of Commons that Section 44 notices would only be used where there is good reason to suspect terrorist activity. Protestors have already won a judicial review of police mass detention tactics during the Fairford protests (2), while Liberty has said it will seek a judicial review of the Met Police’s use of Section 44 in the Docklands.
There has been much made in the press of how the police have “braced themselves for violent protests” (e.g. The Guardian, 6 September 2003) and the £1 million pound cost of the policing operation. Sixteen arrests were reported on the evening news, while inside, cluster bombs, which the exhibition organisers had last week said should not be included, were among the exhibits.
That that state of emergency hasn’t been lifted since and it was what eventually resulted in the effective ‘shoot to kill’ policy that then allowed the extra-judicial murder of Jean-Charles Menezes by trigger happy police.
Which makes the persistence of anti arms-trade protestors all the more admirable.
A nondescript large industrial unit in Lenton, Nottingham had its anonymity taken away by local Disarm DSEI / anti-arms trade protesters on Tuesday when they descended on Heckler and Koch’s UK headquarters.
H&K are the world’s second largest maker of pistols and machine-guns for soldiers and death squads across the world, including Turkey, Iran, Mexico, Thailand, Pakistan, Saudi Arabia and Burma/Myanmar. Their weapons are in use in over 90 countries, including by British police, and the company has evaded EU arms controls to sell weapons to war-zones in Sudan, Indonesia, Sri Lanka and Sierra Leone. Over half a million people are killed worldwide by small-arms annually.
A productive bit of research led a couple of intrepid investigators to buzz the company and ask “Excuse me, is this the Nottingham Small Arms Factory?” Although they didn’t get a response as such, their suspicions were confirmed when armed police turned up minutes later and detained them for 45 minutes under the Terrorism Act.
The subsequent demo made it clear that gun merchants are not welcome in the city (which, by the way, has the highest gun crime rate in the UK). The peaceful protest obviously hit a raw nerve as the forty or so people in attendance attracted an almost equal number of cops, including members of the (London-based political squad) Forward Intelligence Team.
Local rag, the Nottingham Evening Post, showed just how weak its commitment to reporting is when they pulled the story from page 2 after being told by a police press officer that it would be ‘irresponsible’ for the media to publish the arms company’s address (…yes, so obviously it’s: NSAF Ltd, Unit 3, Easter Park, Lenton Lane, Nottingham NG7 2PX). See http://disarmdsei.evey.org
It’s easy to see a grand establishment conspiracy in all this but I’m inclined to think it’s more a typical mixture of jaw-dropping venality, sheer ineptitude and passive complicity.
Or am I?
When you think of a world in the grip of accelerating climate change, potential social disorder and subject to an increasing scramble, even to the death, for temperate land and resources and you consider how few natural resources we actually have, then controlling the weapons of repression and the gold begins to look less like conspiracy and more like an actual strategy.
Looked at in that light the arms traders’re doing our young a favour by training them in weapons skills for the the apocalyptic future. You could even say it’s a public service.
See what I mean about Kafka and the Ferengi…..
I don’t know about you, but i would really like to know why this man wasn’t charged and tried with terrorist offences’ let alone banged up indefinitely or put under a Control Order, as so many others have been:
Former BNP candidate is jailed
A former British National Party candidate who amassed a stash of explosive chemicals in anticipation of a future civil war has been jailed for two-and-a-half years.
Robert Cottage, 49, was cleared after two trials of conspiracy to cause explosions but earlier pleaded guilty to possession of the chemicals.
Police discovered a huge stockpile of chemicals and food at his home in Colne, Lancashire last September.
Officers mounted the operation after Cottage’s wife told a social worker she was concerned about the substances and her husband’s belief that immigrants were swamping Britain.
He feared the country was on the brink of civil war.
He appeared at Manchester’s Crown Square Court to be sentenced in relation to the charge of possession.
Cottage’s barrister Alistair Webster QC said his client accepted he had bought the potassium nitrate and sulphur planning to manufacture gunpowder, but said this would only be used to create “thunder flash” style bangers to scare off intruders.
Sentencing Cottage, Mrs Justice Swift said Cottage’s actions had been “criminal and potentially dangerous”.
She added a pre-sentence report said Cottage held “over valued ideas” but said there was a low risk of him committing further offences.
She said: “It is important to understand that Cottage’s intention was that if he ever had to use the thunder flashes it was only for the purpose of deterrents. I am satisfied it was Cottage’s views on how he put it, ‘the evils of uncontrolled immigration’, would lead to civil war which would be imminent and inevitable.”
Oh well that’s all right then, since he was paranoid. Every paranoid should be able to stockpile explosive, if it makes them feel more secure. He’s a low risk, they say, only a danger to non-whites; so what’s our problem?
Apparently it’s OK to be a virulent racist and plan explosions, but innocently pass on a sim card with some credit on it to a relative and you get banged up and then deported, your life and career ruined for ever.
The amusingly-named Ed Balls, Gordon Brown’s former right-hand man and no Secretary of State for Children, Skills and Families says Antisocial Behaviour Orders have been a failure and appears to be trailing a u-turn in policy.
About bloody time. The ASBO, with drugs, poverty and a rampant consumer culture, has helped create a lost generation in Britain that’s way beyond antisocial and accelerating and no-one seens to care.
No-one knows what is to be done and the default policy is just round em up, stick a label on ’em and write them off forever. What’s resulted is a permanent population of excluded youth who live at the margins and pick off what they can, as the law-abiding, knowing the police are useless, pull up their metaphorical drawbridges against what they imagine is a ravening horde of feral youth.
It’s been way past time for a rethink. Could it be? Could a Brown government be prepared to not only dump the ASBO but to rethink their entire youth justice polcy?
I wish I could be that hopeful.
hen Jacqui Smith and 7 other minsitersd admitted their own dopesmoking youth there was an opportunity for a real public coversation and real change – but the cabinet has had a chance to entirely rethink its drugs policy in a radical way and has flunked it, saying to the nations’ youth ” We smoked dope and that was a youthful indiscretion – but you, you’re a criminal”. It then promptly proposied to reclassify cannabis upwards because it was shown that it might cause a propensity to mental illness in the still- growing brains of young Crispin or Emily and stop them getting into Durham or Bristol..
Well, yes, so does binge-drinking at Rock in August or alcopops round the back of the Aldi but heaven forbid Tesco or Sainsbury’s or Allied Domecq or whoever should stop making money from drink sales. This country’s whole public attitude to intoxicating subtsances and their regulation and use is a sick joke.
The most hypocritical thing of all is that the shadow economy of the whole nation is run on drugs money. The government in effect relies on drugs money to supplement the incomes of unemployed youth and stop them from rioting – why else would it expect a teenager living on their own to live on forty quid a week?
But the money that circulates in the drugs ecoinomy on the street doesn’t xtay there and enrich local businesses or families; in a neat reverse of Reaganesque economic theory the wealth trickles up.
I wonder how many of the neighbours in those posh gated communities in Cheshire or Surrey or wherever, that they’ve retreated to to get away from the crime and the druggies and the chavs, know how many of their neighbours are making money, albeit indirectly, from drugs? How many private schools or lucury car dealers, or estate agents are unwittingly laundering drug money when they accept fees from the new rich?
Drugs are the elephant in the roon when it comes to criime, and youth crime in particular. It’s insane the way British people use drugs in private and condemn them in public, all the while consigning a cohort of its own young to social nothingness for supplying them. Where do they think that twenty quid for a teenth went? Into the building society?
Even more insane is that there is a legal drug that does more damage to more people than any amount of drugs, and which is available 24hrs a day with the government even taking a cut of the proceeds.
Until the government gets to grips with the concept of the use, regulation and yes, taxation of intoxicants of whatever nature this growing divide in society between the young urban and exurban poor and the comfortable suburbans and metropolitans will only become even more marked.
But first Labour has to admit to itself, and the British in general have to admit to themselves, their own complicity in the drugs trade, even if it’s only a toke and a movie on a Saturday night or a couple of E’s at a Labour Party Conference fringe do. That joint came from somewhere, it didn’t just miraculously appear.
The nation as a whole has a substance abuse problem, it’s just that some substances are more illegal than others If we don’t want to become a fearful, locked-down society preyed upon by the armed young urban poor we have to stage our own intervention and work out a sensible decriminalisation, use, treatment and regulation policy that doesn’t turn a cohort of each succeeding generation of children into criminals with nothing to lose.
UPDATE
Diaper fetishes, financial shenanigans, brothels, corrupt senators – courtesy of a commenter at Tbogg comes a fascinating New Orleans political blog, Your Right Hand Thief, which lifts the lid on sexual corruption and hypocrisy in the Katrina-devastated city. It’s damned good reading, once you get the cast of characters sorted out in your head, but it’s not for the easily shocked.
In New Orleans not just the infrastructure’s buggered; the politicians are too. The difference is the politicians enjoy it. Take a particularly vile Louisiana Senator named Vitter, whose sexual predilections allegedly include a taste for wearing dirty diapers. (This seems to be becoming a popular pastime amongst politicians on both sides of the Atlantic, if persistent rumours are true. But I digress.)
Vitter’s just been named on the DC Madam’s list (download from cloggie.org here) and is also said to be a customer of the infamous Canal St Madam too:
Tonight I got confirmation from a solid inside source who has no ideological ax to grind. The source said Vitter was a client at Canal Street, and provided some additional details that shed light on Maier’s comment that there was “more to the business than sex”. [Update: Based on her comments about Vitter not having “unusual predilections”, I would interpret this comment to mean something like companionship and social interaction rather than fetishes… etc.] These details are not for the faint of heart, either.
We’re talking about, among other things, Diaper Fetishism. That’s right folks, according to a trusted inside source, Vitter was well known among other Canal Street Brothel patrons to like diapers as well as other bizarre “fetishes”. I don’t have much more info than that from my source, except that some of the other patrons at the brothel included a well known business-minded New Orleans Republican and a well known Democratic ex-governor. There are many other well known patrons who never held public office, too. You’ve probably heard various names floated about.
Now, don’t get me wrong. I love that New Orleans has more than its share of sex fetishists and preeverts who can’t come missionary. This ain’t a vanilla town, kids.
But the thought of Vitter prancing around in a dipey is a bit jarring, especially since I’m changing those nasty things every day. I can’t help picturing the scene and wondering about the details. I assume they were adult sized. But were they cloth or disposable? Did they get dirty? Was there a diaper genie available? What about a tube of Boudreaux’s? Were they customized in Vitter Blue? How old were Vitter’s children when this was going on? Did he change diapers in the morning and then wear them at night?
Enquiring minds would like to know – including mine now. I’m hooked.
But although this is a great blog for lovers of the picaresque and of sex scandals in a steamy southern setting, it’s important to remember it’s not fiction. It’s horribly, disgustingly real: Vitter and his friends’ disgusting political, financial and sexual corruption is worsening the lives of families already devastated by nature and poltical negligence. First they were fucked over by nature, the Corps of Engineers and FEMA: now they’re being fucked over even more by people who care only about the money to be made out of their disaster, not about getting people home.
The hurricane season is coming. The Corps of Engineers’ new maps show New Orleans is still not protected, and its elected representatives are out drinking, catting, coming in their shitty nappies and making lucrative deals while doing so.
Click image to download .pdf
Three weeks late, the Army Corps of Engineers released maps today revealing the West Bank’s severe vulnerability to storm surges, a predicament that hasn’t changed in the two years since Hurricane Katrina, given that the region awaits major improvements to its gaping line of levees and floodwalls.
It’s a source of continued surprise to me that there hasn’t been an armed insurrection in New Orleans – but then I guess that’s why they made sure the refugees couldn’t return to see what the bloated vultures are doing to their city.
Only 21 percent of the 77,000 rental units in the five parishes in the New Orleans metropolitan area are slated to be rebuilt through government grants and tax credits, according to a recent study by PolicyLink, a nonprofit research institute, with a disproportionate number for families on teacher or police officer salaries, rather than much lower-paid home health aides or hotel clerks. Rents on the remaining units have doubled or even tripled.
Despite pitched opposition, the federal Department of Housing and Urban Development is going forward with plans to demolish and redevelop the city’s four largest housing projects, knocking out 3,000 apartments that were occupied by low-income families before the storm and adding middle-income families to the mix. So far, there is money in place to rebuild only about 1,000 units affordable enough for previous residents.
At the state level, officials have allocated $6.3 billion for the Road Home’s assistance program for homeowners, dwarfing the $869 million allocated to the Small Rental Property Program, which housing advocates say is the most likely to replace affordable units quickly.
Clever- no rental homes, no problem with those pesky Katrina refugees. Plenty of room for carpetbaggers and whores though.
What’s happening to New Orleans and its people is a lesson to all of us who think we are safe from natural disaster. I’ll give NOLAnian blogger Gentilly Girl the last word:
[…]
Without our area America would never have come out of the Great Depression, never could have been the liberator in WW II, and never could have placed Humans on the Moon. This Nation would never have achieved the status it has today without using US. WE ARE the major power for this country, and even today, we are the basis of much of what the U.S. is and can be.
We gave willingly as dutiful citizens, but then there came a storm in August, 2005. Our protections against such storms, promised by the same Nation that was destroying our lands, freakin’ damned FAILED, AND MANY OF US DIED OR BECAME HOMELESS. Our world, our little part of it, almost died. Many voices called for our death, but we would not hear them. We are rebuilding OUR land.
Our place almost died. Can you understand that statement? Look around what you perceive as your community being totally gone. Can you stomach that? That your friends, neighbors, shops and eateries are wiped from the face of the Earth? To know that the faces you have known for years are no longer next door or around the corner? To realize that the children (who you hated because of their pranks and noise), are no longer in the place their parents lived in? That they aren’t there to remind you of the continuity of culture? That you are no longer a part of the Dance of Life?
Can you imagine that in the place where you live?Can you?
UPDATE:
Commenters as Democratic Undergriound have given the good Senator the sobriquet “Vitter The Shitter”.
Wahahahahahahahaha.