Back in the early nineties an attempt to get the Olympic Games to Amsterdam broke down on the indifference and cynicism of the voters, not interested in the glamour and prestige this was supposed to bring to the city, but who did have a sharp eye for how much this would cost and who would end up paying that bill. Since then the Olympic lobby has kept to itself, but with the shining example of London 2012, is slowly starting to bang the drum for Amsterdam 2028, exactly a century after the first and only Dutch Olympics. And this time it’s actually taken seriously, perhaps helped to a not inconsiderable extent by the fact that this date is quite a way aways yet. Not that this means anything will come of it, but seeing how the climate here is slowly shifting towards acceptance, if not enthusiasm of the Olympics, doesn’t make me any happier reading about the way the London Olympics are organised. As I’ve noticed over the years, what happens in Britain is inevitably introduced over here in some degenerated form some years later.
Numpties
Iraq inquiry delayed until after election?
That’s what The Guardian is speculating:
Gordon Brown will announce by the autumn a “long” inquiry into the Iraq war, indicating that the potentially embarrassing report will be delayed until well after the general election expected next year.
Ministers have decided that the inquiry should be wide-ranging, possibly dating back to Margaret Thatcher’s tacit support for Saddam Hussein during the Iran-Iraq war in the 1980s. Its main focus will be on the conduct of the 2003 war and the breakdown of law and order afterwards.
David Lidington, the shadow foreign minister, said: “I think the government are determined to avoid the report being published before the general election. But they do not have even a figleaf of an excuse for a further delay.”
Brown has agreed that an inquiry will be held after the withdrawal of all British combat troops from Iraq, which must take place by 31 July. Government sources insist that no final decisions have been made on the format and timing of the inquiry, though it is expected to meet in private and to be given a lengthy timetable.
Which is depressing enough, but the most depressing bit comes at the end of the article:
Tony Blair would probably welcome any delay in publishing the report. The former prime minister is making active plans to assume the new role of president of the European Council if Irish voters pass the Lisbon treaty in a referendum this autumn.
That this is even a realistic prospect is enough to make you want to slit your wrists (down, not across).
Marsh rips Bono a new one
Bono has always been a smug wanker whose simplistic view of world problems does more harm than good, so it’s nice to see Dave Marsh ripping him a new one:
Maybe he doesn’t want to deal on the spot with descriptions of his repeated appearances at the conferences of the leading capitalist nations where he’s yet to ask his first hard question about anything but Africa; about his settling for promises from world leaders that patently weren’t going to be kept, and never doing more than mewing when they weren’t; about why it is that Zambian economist Dambisa Moyo, by no means an anti-capitalist, observes that she met him “at a party to raise money for Africans, and there were no Africans in the room, except for me,” or why so many other Africans have complained that he claims to speak for them but has never so much as asked their permission.
(via Through the Scary Door.)
The only thing Blair deserves costs about thirty cents
But since this is a fundamentally unjust world, he’ll get one million dollars for his
“global leadership”:
Tony Blair has won a prestigious million-dollar (£697,000) prize for his leadership on the world stage, it was announced today.
The former prime minister, now a Middle East peace envoy, will receive the Dan David prize for “his exceptional leadership and steadfast determination in helping to engineer agreements and forge lasting solutions to areas in conflict”.
The award is presented by the Dan David Foundation, based at Tel Aviv University, and a spokesman for Blair said the money would be donated to the former Labour leader’s charity for religious understanding, the Tony Blair Faith Foundation.
It sounds absurd to give Blair this prize — and you’ll notice the word “Iraq” doesn’t occur in the announcement — until you realise who‘s giving this award. Dan David is an avowed zionist and his foundation is located at Tel Aviv University; zionist usually have little problems with mountains of corpses, if they’re Arab corpses. Furthermore, Blair was very helpful to Israel not just with Iraq, but also with the War on Lebanon, helping delay the ceasefire to give the IDF more time to kill civilians.
It would of course be impolite to mention Blair gets this money for helping get rid of an enemy of Israel or perpetuating mass murder, hence the blather about “asking the important questions” and “morally courageous leadership”. Note that the Israelis aren’t the only ones to thank Blair for delivered services; he’s made a very nice living hovering up nice cushy jobs after he left office. That’s why he went along with Bush all these years. Never mind whether or not he genuinely believed in the War on Terror in the end he did it all for the old do-re-mi, his staunch Christianity no barrier for starting an immoral war that killed some million Iraqis now.
He’s not the only Christian crusader. Our own prime minister, the great moral scold and Harry Potter (grown up to be an accountant) lookalike Jan Peter Balkenende, fought tooth and nail to keep an inquiry into the War on Iraq from happening. Yet he would call himself a moral man, an examplar to the nation, always happy to disapprove of binge drinking teenagers or something, but who so far has not shown any recognition of the sheer monstrosity of what happened, what is still happening in Iraq and Afghanistan. None of the great and the good have, whether they were pro or anti-war back in 2003. It was just another policy choice for them, not a moral question and it could’ve gone either way if the incentives were right.
Biggest douche in the universe
No, not socalled psychic John Edward, but heckuva job Brownie, the guy who helped fuck up disaster recovery in New Orleans after Katrina so much. You’d think somebody so monumental incompetent would shut the fuck up forever afterwards, but the fool seems to have reinvented himself as a low-rent conservative media personality, de rigeur blog and all.
Which is where the Sadly-Nosians found him, talking smack about Dr. Mads Gilbert, a medical relief worker in Gaza. Apparantly Brownie can, with his great expertise in humanitarian relief efforts, tell when a video of a Palestinian child dying in hospital is “so fake it’s funny, but only after the Kerning Kommandos at Little Green fascists alerted him to it.
Un-fucking-believable. The guy who did his best to make Katrina as big a disaster as possible, somebody who in a just world would’ve become a ditchdigger in Patagonia out of pure shame, is fisking a medicial relief worker in Gaza. It’s beyond satire, but it is fitting; it’s not like Brownie cared much about the suffering of brown people much back in 2005. Somebody who was so criminally neglectant doing his job protecting Americans isn’t going to lose much sleep on the question of why Palestinians would put together such an elaborate fake when there are so many real victims of Israeli bombs
lying around…
The real question is why this asshole can still get speaking arrangements? Who is paying for the priviledge of hearing him speak, unless it’s to applaud his job performance with an impromptu tribute of tomatoes or dogshit?