God Bless America!

Did anyone see that show on Oprah Winfrey about the woman who had been hoarding everything in her house for 13 years? I've never seen anything like it and not because of the sheer volume of things that she collected over that period.

Her 11-bedroom house was wall-to-wall with every conceivable item, though being a woman, the vast majority as you can imagine, was taken up with clothes, shoes, and handbags. Despite its size, you could barely move in the house so cluttered was it with items, many of which hadn't even been taken out of their store wrappers. Even her three garages were completely jam-packed with stuff and could barely be opened because of this. Likewise her huge basement was full of household items, many never even touched from the day were first bought.It took a 10,000 square feet warehouse to store all the items once they were removed by Oprah's team amassing several tons of items in the process.What bothers me most though is not that she was sick and needed the help. (She didn't just need psychological help but medical help as well because, due to the lack of space, air couldn't circulate in the house which resulted in black fungus (the worst kind of fungus) and her's and her husband's health suffered as a consequence.) No, my problem is that here we have a woman who is clearly sick psychologically, and needs help, but who probably never missed a meal in her life (and she looked like she could easily afford to). If you can afford to live in such a large house, and can afford to continuously shop for items you don't need, you are obviously not someone who has any financial problems. Yet what was the result of all this?

Oprah, provided her with a world renowned psychologist, an expert in the area of hoarders like her, who counseled her back to normal health. Then she had her entire house, all 11 bedrooms + kitchen and dining areas (even the toilets) kitted out with the best furniture you could imagine, all free of charge?! Whoa! Wait a minute? She got a complete refurbishment of state-of-the-art furniture for what? Being a rich sick woman? I'm sorry but that's obscene! What about the millions in Dharfur or the Congo or a gazillion other places that don't even have a pot to piss in? Where's the justice in that?

This is one of my pet hates about Americans. They live way beyond their means; they have a Media that feeds them a daily diet of disinformation; they have greedy brokerage houses who not only bankrupt their own firms (Lehman Bros, Fanny Mae, Freddy Mac etc.)but in the same breath cause financial volatility around the world and then, when the shit hits the fan, they have well-meaning entrepreneurs who will happily bail them out in order for us to watch great TV. God Bless America!

A Pregnant what? A pregnant man? Get away!

Has anyone seen that guy who just had another baby today? Yes, he apparently already has one. Am I the only person to have never heard about it? Umm...how exactly does that work? I'm no scientist, but I imagine he first needs to have a womb. Actually, our 'mom-to-be' or should that be 'mom-and-dad-to-be' is a transexual, or to give the out the proper term, 'transgender'. His name is Thomas Beatie, and what possessed him to do it is something of a mystery to me. If he was originally a woman, then the obvious question is why didn't he want to have a baby when he was a woman? In other words, why change your pyscho-sexual as well as physical gender, in order to keep your womb?


According to an ABC article (http://abcnews.go.com/GMA/Story?id=5028746&page=1) 'Beatie said he shaves while resting his arm on his baby bump and may even consider having more children.' Yeah? Well I use my beer gut to shave so there you go! He even says, and this is the really funny part, 'It's My Right, Pregnant Man Tells Oprah.'

Something is definitely wrong with the world today. Don't get me wrong - I'm not homophobic, and I support gay & lesbian marriages, but there is something distinctly unwholesome about this, like giving pigs hearts to human patients with angina, or giving free NHS surgery of vaginal 'tucks' and labia corrective surgery to young women in order to make them feel good about themselves by having good looking, tight vaginas. Has the world gone mad?

Am I merely someone showing my age, or do other people think, like me, that this is really odd?

The Wandering Thai!

Long ago we used to hear the story of the Wandering Jew which so often permeates Western literature. Nowadays, in Asia, we have that poor old man called Thaksin Shinawatra who, it seems is a Wandering Thai without a home despite his 2 billion dollar wealth.

A former Thai prime minister, he was ousted in a bloodless coup in 2007 whilst he was giving a speech to the United Nations in New York. Off he then went to buy up an English football team called Manchester City so that he could win back the support of the Thai people who are absolutely crazy about football especially the Premier League in England.

That didn't work and he ended up selling the club because he needed the money owing to the fact that The Royal Thai government seized a large chunk of his assets held in Thai banks due to corruption charges. He was then sentenced to two years in jail in absentia whereupon (unlike another famous citizen, Socrates, who ate his hemlock rather than disobey the laws of the land) he promptly declared that the charges were politically motivated.

And now we hear that his visa has been revoked from the UK which means that when he leaves his current abode (he's holding up in China apparently and building a 30 million dollar mansion there) he'll have nowhere to go. England doesn't want him, The Phillipines doesn't either (the government under Gloria Aroyyo publicly stated so yesterday) so he is fast becoming a complete outcast. Thaksin must be thinking about the words of that song now - like Van 'the man' Morrison says: 'Gonna shout it every night, Gonna shout it every day, G.L.O.R.I.A, G.L.O.R.I.A'

Perhaps the Burmese will take him as he is known to have had strong ties (not Thais) with his former, near neighbours, the military junta, and especially General Than Shwe allowing them to traffic their drugs along the Golden Triangle, the border with China, Laos and Thailand, and lock up Nobel Prize winning citizens like Aung San Suu Kyi who won an election in the country but was then subsequently jailed as a reward for her troubles.

Poor, poor man! What dreadful luck could have befallen such a clearly talented individual? What could he have done that was wrong to invite such a terrible punishment? What pound of flesh could he have asked for to bring about such rancour and bitterness? Well, the Thai people loved him for a while. His populist policies were selling 'like hot cakes' for a time: he brought in the 30-baht health scheme, where all citizens (read the poorest of the poor who were not surprisingly the ones who voted him into power) were guaranteed medical care for less than one US dollar. The One Tambon (no, not tampon, 'tambon' which is an area or region in Thailand, One Product)OTOP program which helped promote and sell local handicraft and locally produced products around the world. Oh yes! He was flying high for a while and it seemed like he could do no wrong. But then the bubble burst and his enemies surrounded him and stole his piece of the pie when his back was turned in New York! What ingrates, I ask you!!

His biggest mistake, and one which most Thai people even now refuse to accept, was his selling off state assets. They could forgive the fact that he had his hand in the proverbial cookie jar like an underfed Pooh Bear; they could forgive his crackdown on supposed drug dealers killing 2,000 people in extra judicial killings in 3 months (and thinking he was doing the Thai economy a favour by saving the cost of a trial for each suspect); they could even forgive him for the death of 120 people in the Tak Bai incident where protesters were herded onto the back of a truck after being savagely beaten by the police (I know because I saw the video myself), in 35 degree Celcius heat, handcuffed, forced to lie face down. The official verdict was that it was an accident. Yeah! Right, sure. Whatever you say Bro! But the selling off to Temasek Holdings, a Singapore company, of radio waves that belonged to the country, not his own company, Shin Corp, that was the last straw, the one that proverbially broke the camel's back!

I think there is a home for him. He should be captured and brought to jail on the charges he has been convicted of. There is a jail in Thailand called Bang Kwang - it's not as famous as its sister prison - The Bangkok Hilton, but it's a hovel of a place that would scare the screaming be-jesus out of Dante with his infernal capital of Hell - Pandemonium! Thaksin should be arrested wherever he is like that Taiwanese ex-president yesterday, Chen Shui-bian, who we all saw on CNN, waving his handcuffed hands in protest, thrown in to the cell, the door locked and the key thrown away. He deserves nothing less for the punishment he has meted out to those who had no rights or a voice to be heard!

A Political Houdini?

Am I the only person to notice this? The political Houdini magic trick has almost been pulled off? Doesn't it seem weird how Bush has come onto the political landscape, spent the 3 trillion dollar surplus that Clinton left him on wars and degrading the American image abroad? That he deliberately engineered a crisis like 9/11 to scare the living daylights out of the American people (who lets face it, aren't the most politically savvy or worldly wise anyway given the staple diet offered to them by their media outlets).

And now, right at the end of his presidency, the economy is in crisis, markets up and down like a playground swing, the economy in freefall, and he just walks away into the sunset like a cowboy of the American past, his job done successfully? He told us we were either with him or against him and that he'd always get who he wanted, like it said on thsoe wanted posters, dead or alive. Well he sure got Sadaam Hussein but the other one seems to have eluded him yet now right at the end he doesn't even seem to be looking. Why?

An historian might say this was simply a failed presidency full of missed opportunities and poor decisions. Those more cynical might say it was a clear plan, hatched probably by Dick Chaney to steer the world towards Neo Conservative values. Who knows, maybe they engineered the whole thing - the entire presidency? The vast increase in oil revenues benefitted who exactly? Qui bono? The Saudias? The Bushes have been doing business with them for 30 years. Other oil rich countries? We will never know what secret deals have been done with others to maintain this myth of Osama Bin Laden. A man who lives in some of the harshest terrain in the mountains of Pakistan who, like Neitzshe's Ubermensch, Superman, comes down from the mountain to change the world.
And tomorrow we will be swapping Osama with Obama if the polls live up to their predictions. But what if the politicians have got together like in David Rothkoph's 'Superclass' book which has as its central premise that only about 5-6,000 people run the world from people like Bush, George Soros, Cheney, Rupert Murdoch et al and they engineer every aspect of our lives to suit their own purposes. Read up on the Council of Foreign Relations if you want to know more about the shady people he's talking about too as that organisation, many people believe, is a front for the kinds of people David Rothkoph is talking about.

Seems to me like Bush has done very well for himself; a recovering alcoholic, born again Christian. His faith now must be as unshakeable as the Tower of Babylon. He has seemingly got everything he wanted.

All Roads Lead to …Saudia Arabia

I am now safely ensconced in Saudia Arabia (city undisclosed) working for a company as a teacher. My first impressions are mixed. As many before me, I had the impression that this country would be awash with terrorists, oppressed women, crazy drivers, inedible food but nothing could be further from the truth. In fact I have met a lot of kind people, a relaxed ambience, malls the size of Manhattan, gas prices lower than a cheeseburger, and facilities that would impress a sheikh.

I think there is a lot to be said for the impressions we get of foreign lands from our media outlets. Every other day you hear stories from Saudia Arabia of women being raped, or thieves being either beheaded or having their hands lopped off; of locals who run amok in other countries with bombs strapped to their torsos, of Arabs who consider a good day as one spent buying up everything that isn’t nailed down. Whilst some of this is undoubtedly true, as always, a little bit of discretion is necessary is one is to see the real picture.

I remember once being in college when I was about 19 and talking to a guy from Colrane, Northern Island. I had grown up listening to the BBC and other local TV channels telling me that everywhere in that forsaken land was full of mad, angry terrorists who would stop at nothing to blow up innocent people or kneecap those who didn’t toe their line (all puns intended!!) But this guy laughed when I asked him the following question – “isn’t it a bit dangerous living there?” The truth was, he’d never even seen a bomb let alone a dead body lying in the road so what does that tell us about the quality of the news we get? Well, it tells me that nothing is what it seems until you see it with your own eyes and experience it for yourself.

I had to laugh this morning when I was in a local mall. As I had a bit of time to kill before the shops opened, I picked up a local newspaper called Arab News. In it was a reference to a local Saudia lady who had the misfortune to be found with a Syrian man in a Starbucks drinking nothing other than a latte. She and the man were arrested by an organization called, and this is a funny name, the Commission for the Promotion of Virtue and the Prevention of Vice. It would seem that the lady in question had somehow contravened some or other article of this commission’s rules and was hauled to an interrogation centre for questioning whereby her mobile phone was confiscated and she was strip searched by members of the said commission (it was not mentioned as to whether the searchers were male or female).

It is hard to believe that such institutions exist and it reminds me of something from an Orwell novel e.g. 1984, where we learnt for the first time organizations like the Ministry of Truth, Ministry of Peace, Ministry of Love, and the Ministry of Plenty. But despite these anomalies, I think there is a lot to enjoy here and a freedom that few could imagine. Yes, we should be mindful of De Coqueville’s assertion that we can ‘judge a nation by the way it treats its prisoners’, especially if they are routinely tortured or beheaded as is sometimes the case in Saudia Arabia, but there is as always another side to the coin and we mustn’t ever forget that and allow our media outlets to paint a picture for us that is wholly inaccurate!

I’ll be posting more on my experiences here as they happen so stay tuned.

To be or not to be (an American…?)

Is it me, or has anyone else noticed the state of the USA today? There used to be a time when America led the world both politically and morally. She set the standards. She was looked up to. She was called ‘The world’s policeman’ for the way she held the moral as well as political clout to intervene in conflicts around the world, and had the ability to solve them. It was said too that ‘when America gets a cold, everyone else sneezes’. Now it seems that it’s America herself who’s got the cold.

Having just watched Michael Moore’s ‘Sicko’, I now see another side of this supposedly great nation; a nation clearly in decline both morally and politically. In one scene, an American woman living in Paris says that one of the reasons why America is such a bad place to live is because Americans are afraid of their government. This is a sad indictment of the realities of living in the richest country in the world; a country that is held by others as a paradigm for how to live; where people from the poorest countries of the world want to get to, to experience the ‘American dream’.

Healthcare is the main theme this time around for Michael Moore, and he makes a strong case for the way huge American drug and insurance companies are run for profit, who then pay off the politicians with cash donations, and where doctors and medical executives are given huge bonuses when they deny sick people the opportunity of a life-saving operation and who subsequently die. Even firefighters from 9/11 and volunteers to Ground Zero who all gave up their time to dig out bodies have been forced to go to Cuba for free medical care because their own government turned their back on them when they needed medical care as a direct result of their involvement in the clean up after 9/11. What kind of society is it that has bred a ‘me’ philosophy instead of a ‘we’ he asks?

America’s relationship with the rest of the world has never been worse with Americans and American interests despised globally. Undoubtedly, George Bush’s ‘You’re with us or against us’ philosophy has done a lot to divide America from many of its former allies, but there are a number of other factors that have contributed to this too. The refusal to formally sign up to the Kyoto Protocol on Climate Change (when the USA is the biggest polluter and consumes two-thirds of the world’s energy), it’s invasion of Iraq (without full international approval or the ‘smoking gun’ to give it an air of legitimacy), it’s gung ho attitude to other nations that don’t follow the American political line: North Korea, Iran and the so-called aspects of the ‘Axis of Evil’, and it’s unstated insistence that militaristic solutions are not always to be kept as a last resort. The list is endless and only goes to serve further notice that America now is in a very dark place; a place from which it’s unlikely to ever recover.

When you look at the economic perspective, it doesn’t add much needed light. America has just finally accepted that it’s in a recession. What that means is that the incumbent president, whether he be the first black man, Barak Obama, or the first woman, Hilary Clinton, will inherit a nation in complete meltdown. This is like a businessman buying a new company only to find that it’s teetering on bankruptcy. And when you remember that when Bush came to power almost 8 years ago, he inherited the biggest budget surplus in American history – some three trillion dollars of tax payer’s money which he went on to spend mostly on exporting war around the world.

It is this greed and general disregard for others that so characterizes modern liberal democracies like America and is something we should all take notice of. One has only to look at other successful societies of the past: the Greeks and subsequent demise as the premier state of its day to see a common parallel; add too the fall of the Holy Roman Empire, to see that ‘what goes around, comes around.’ In other words, America is now on her way out as a major superpower. No longer can she keep on sucking other countries dry. Recently, the billionaire financier George Soros was asked the question as to why America is now in recession, to which he replied - ‘America consumes 6% more than it produces, sucking up all the savings of the world.’ I can't help but be reminded of the comment by Will Durant, “A great civilization is not conquered from without until it has destroyed itself from within.”

So the question worth asking is how is America going to solve this problem? What will the first woman or the first black man do to heal the damage done by the Bush years? To put America back at the forefront of political leadership that it has come to accept as its rightful place in the world? It’s interesting to note too whether it would have even been possible for these two firsts (black, female president) ever having any real chance of coming about had it not been for the disaster that has resulted politically because of Bush and his Neo–Conservative policies which have so disenfranchised others around the world?

The only thing I can say with any real certainty is that I’m glad I’m not an American for the road ahead is a long, economically uncertain one, full of surprises!