7/08

6/08

5/08

4/08

3/08

2/08

1/08

12/07

11/07

10/07

9/07

8/07

7/07

6/07

5/07

4/07

3/07

2/07

1/07

12/06

11/06

10/06

9/06

8/06

7/06

6/06

5/06

4/06

3/06

2/06

1/06

12/05

11/05

10/05

9/05

8/05

7/05

6/05

5/05

4/05

3/05

2/05

1/05

12/04

11/04

10/04

9/04

8/04

7/04

6/04

5/04

4/04

3/04

2/04

1/04

12/03

11/03

10/03

9/03

8/03

7/03

6/03

5/03

4/03

3/03

2/03

1/03

12/02

11/02

10/02

9/02

8/02

TALLRITE BLOG 
ARCHIVE
This archive, organized into months, and indexed by time and alphabet,
contains all issues since inception, including the current week.

ISSUE #176 - 25^th May 2008 [422+605=1027]

Click here for PDF Version of Issue #176 (143kb)

Lisbon - Someone Should Make the Case for Change

Within the past week or so, Ireland has kicked off its campaigning for and against ratification of the Lisbon Treaty by popular referendum, scheduled for Thursday 12th June.  This is evidenced by a proliferation of posters on lamposts everywhere.  Within central Dublin, I counted roughly two YES posters for every NO poster, and outside Dublin you see even fewer NO posters, though you can't hide from the lampstands festooned with YES posters.  On the other hand, the NO posters are twice as varied. 

I have been struck by the utter insipidness of the slogans on these posters, which amount to little more than platitudes.  Indeed most of them are so meaningless you could apply the YES posters equally to the NO campaign and vice-versa. 

^[*]By the way, “Cóir” is an Irish word with a bewildering array of translations: crime, due, fair, justice, suited, right, proper, treatment.  Used adjectively, it can mean body-odour, toilet requisites, tax-payer, office accommodation, an unwelcome guest, engine capacity, super-heated water boiler.  As a non-scholar, I can't tell you which of these translations is most proper, or most cóir. 

What is striking is that none of these posters and almost no-one on radio, TV or print, seems to want to quote directly from the actual Treaty of Lisbon in support of their arguments. 

This is understandable because the text is, as I have pointed out previously, so impenetrable, and deliberately so in order to obstruct comprehension. 

There is also a curious dynamic in play.  Apart from the incessant, vacuous slogans, the Naysayers are a lot more vigorous in voicing their objections to specific bits of the treaty than the YESsirs are in explaining exactly why Lisbon is good for Ireland.

It's all very well for the YESsirs to proclaim - incessantly - that Ireland has gained huge benefits and profits Ireland through membership of the EEC/EU, which no-one disputes.  (Indeed as a Naysayer I am wildly enthusiastic about both the EU and the €uro).  But this is an argument for the current EU not the post-Lisbon EU, which will be a very different animal. 

The other main campaigning approach used by the YESsirs is to try to shoot down the Naysayers' objections, calling them myths or whatever. 

So the YESsirs tell the voters they shouldn't worry about the Naysayers's fears of

Of course, some of the Naysayers arguments are so difficult to refute that they have to be ignored.  For example, Ireland will (supposedly) be safe from EU tax-meddlers and army recruiters because it will retain its vetoes in these two areas.  However, if these vetoes are so important, why is the surrender of vetoes in 32 other areas (including international trade) something to be welcomed?  Indeed, Britain thinks it will lose no fewer than 61 vetoes.  Surely vetoes are either worth having or they're not, and it's not easy explaining why it's in Ireland's interest to give away this crucial element of its decision-making.  So the YESsirs stay quiet. 

In other areas, they skate over the hard bits.  For instance, Lisbon will turn into law the EU's Charter of Fundamental Rights, which is full of good stuff like

(And needless to say, not one of these rights is accompanied by any duties.  Rights without duties?  Pure Utopia!)

But the hard bit is that the EU Court of Justice will rule on these rights and definitions and the constituent countries (eg County Ireland) will have to meekly obey.  So, distant unelected judges can decide, for example, what dignity means, when life begins, whether the rights of marriage/children extend to partnerships of gays, triples or other combinations.  They could thus oblige County Ireland to embrace euthanasia, embryo technologies and fatherless conception, without regard to the wishes of its people and with no right of appeal to Ireland's own (now demoted) Supreme Court. 

But, frankly, all this should be irrelevant.  Under any system of justice worth the name, it is up to those who want to make the change to make the case for change.  This the YESsirs are patently failing to do.  Of course, unless voters are prepared to take them at their word, their task is insuperable because it is almost impossible to back up statements with relevant clauses from the impenetrable treaty. 

Quite apart from those mindless, platitudinous posters, it's true that there is a ton of Lisbon explanations in websites, newspaper columns and leaflets, and a consolidated version of the relevant treaties - of Rome (1957), Maastricht (1992) and Lisbon (2008) - has been produced.  But who is to say they are not all stuffed full of lies and distortions designed to push a particular view of Lisbon?  How can you know the information is correct?  After all, none of these documents are what the various EU ministers have signed. 

So we keep coming back to the text of the actual treaty which the 54 of them have signed.  If you can't understand it in its totality, and I guarantee you can't (which is why the authorities have made no hard-copies freely available to the public), then it would be mad to vote “Yes”.  It would be no different, no less insouciant, no less irresponsible than signing a blank cheque. 

Ireland's current EU Commissioner Charlie McCreevy confesses

“I have not [read the treaty]. I don’t think there’s anybody in this room who has read it cover to cover. I don’t expect ordinary decent Irish people … will be sitting down spending hours reading sections about sub-sections referring to other articles and sub-articles.  But there is sufficient analysis done and people have put together a consolidated text which is quite easy to read.  People such as the Referendum Commission have done explanations.”

But he doesn't set forth how a 269 page treaty can be “explained” in a few pamphlets even in the unlikely event they are honestly and competently written, for which there is no guarantee at all.  And if they can, then why didn't the ministers sign the pamphlets instead of the treaty?

Vote “No” or tumble into an unknown black hole. 

Back to List of Contents

Cruel and Unusual Abortion

The British parliament last week shamefully approved a new piece of legislation, the Human Fertilisation and Embryology Bill, which

This appalling and morbid bill, combining both killing and creating, emphasises the secular amoral direction in which modern Western society in some countries such as Britain is wandering.  Moreover, experience shows that once something is permitted, the scope of this permission steadily expands.  When Britain first introduced abortion in 1967 it was principally in order to “save the mother's life”.  Nowadays it can be merely to “save the mother's lifestyle”, in other words abortion on demand.  Likewise, reasons for divorce have drifted from strict criteria such as proven infidelity to unproven incompatibility, which is effectively divorce on demand. 

So we can expect, for instance, that the stricture that human/animal embryos be destroyed at 14 days will be steadily loosened and the role of biological parents in their children's lives will be similarly suppressed over time. 

Much of this new legislation, moreover, flagrantly breaches the vaunted EU Charter of Fundamental Rights, destined to become law once the Lisbon Treaty is smuggled through ratified.   For example, there is supposed to be

But this is of no concern to British legislators because the court of last resort will no longer be the House of Lords, but the far-away judges of the EU Court of Justice, who can be relied upon to rule in favour of the modernist secular consensus that privileges abortion, divorce, gay adoption and suchlike. 

One of the more ghoulish details that came to light during the British debate is that for late-term abortions, the living child must first be killed - the polite word is foeticide - by lethal injection to the heart before being removed (sometimes piecemeal) from the womb.  If it were killed after delivery, the abortionist would lay himself open to a charge of murder. 

As from 18 weeks, many doctors agree that babies are sentient, that is to say conscious and able to feel pain.  Scanned pictures show them thumb-sucking and the kicking in typical baby fashion. 

Nevertheless, this way of killing the 24-week old baby got me thinking about capital punishment in the US, which is usually also carried out through lethal injection, as this is considered the most humane way of taking a life.  Strapped down on a gurney in sight of an array of witnesses, the murderer is given a series of three injections via an intravenous catheter spiked into his arm. 

1. The first is sodium thiopental, a barbiturate anaesthetic, in a dosage some 40 times greater than a hospital would use for surgery. 

2. Then comes pancuronium bromide, which stops breathing by paralyzing the diaphragm and lungs.

3. Finally toxic potassium chloride is introduced which delivers the coup de grâce by causing cardiac arrest. 

You are supposed to die within a couple of minutes of the final dose, but the whole grim procedure takes between five and eighteen minutes. 

But over the last couple of years, following some botched executions, fears have arisen in America that death by lethal injection might in fact inflict “substantial unnecessary pain” and “result in a terrifying, excruciating death”.  This would put it in contravention of the US Constitution's Eighth Amendment which prohibits “cruel and unusual punishments”.  As a result, a seven-month moratorium was imposed across the US last year until a Supreme Court decided this month that executions could resume. 

The USA is indisputably the world's technological leader in pretty much any sphere you care to mention, which includes pharmacology.  I have no expertise in killing people, but I would warrant that the three-injection approach, notwithstanding the misgivings, is indeed the most humane that anyone has been able to dream up, even though the journey to death might last a few minutes longer than the guillotine or the gallows or the firing-squad. 

If on the other hand a single injection directly into the heart were more humane, you can be sure the American Supreme Court would insist on it in place of the triple injection into the arm.  Since it doesn't, you would have to conclude that were execution by cardiac injection ever tried, it would quickly be classified and outlawed as “cruel and unusual punishment”.

So if this is unacceptable as a means for permanently removing convicted multi-murderers from the face of the earth, why is it OK for killing innocent, sentient 24-week-old babies? 

No amount of euphemisms such as termination, woman's choice etc can hide the ugly fact that the deliberate slaughter by cardiac injection of thousands of unborn children, fully capable of feeling pain and perhaps even fear, is “cruel and unusual abortion”.

Back to List of Contents

My (ahem) Latest Crime Novel

Last year, I shared with you the essence of what I modestly called my (ahem) new crime novel, a colourful story set in Ireland and the Czech Republic, which involved armed robbery, amputation, screaming schoolgirls, a commandeered bicycle, post-traumatic stress disorder and a liberal dose of pimping.  Somehow, at the last minute I seemed to have been pre-empted in my storyline so had to abandon my work of fiction. 

So I am now having another go. 

My latest crime novel will take place mainly in Limerick (aka Stab City for its numerous murders).  How about this as an imaginative if preposterous narrative? 

A winsome blonde, by now in her mid-40s, let's call her Sharon, goes to work for a much older boss, PJ, who is a wealthy property magnate.  He has two grown sons in the business, but is separated from his wife.  Sharon and PJ have an affair and in due course she shacks up with him.  Most conveniently, after a few short years his wife dies. 

Sharon then wonders what would be the easiest way to get her hands on her boyfriend's wealth and dreams up a cunning plan. 

She decides to marry PJ.  But he is not eager because this might complicate his inheritance, since his two sons also work in his business which he wants to pass to them and a pre-nuptial agreement to protect their interest would not be valid in Ireland.  He does however agree to pretend to have married her in Italy, and on their return they host a fancy wedding celebration for forty guests, including wedding cake and champagne. 

Meanwhile marries him anyway, using an obscure Mexican website, proxymarriages.com (now defunct) to facilitate the process.  For a thousand US dollars she procures a valid Mexican wedding certificate, without the inconvenience of having to involve - or indeed inform - the lucky groom, and no further expense for a white gown or honeymoon.  She uses the certificate to procure a Irish passport in a her newly married name. 

Then, again via the internet, using the mysterious internet name of LyingEyes98, she contacts an Egyptian poker-dealer and hit-man in his mid-50s who lives in a ménage à trois with both his first wife Lisa and his second wife the fuzzy-haired brunette Theresa in Las Vegas, where he works at the snazzy Bellagio casino.  He employs the (very Las Vegas) name of Tony Luciano for his proper job and HitmanForHire for his moonlighting.  Sometimes describing herself as “the devil in the red dress”, she offers him a triple contract on her new husband and his pair of sons, stipulating that the sons' deaths be “accidents” and her husband's a “suicide”.  The boys would by chance end up poisoned in a country pub and their distraught father would then “jump” off the roof of his holiday penthouse apartment in Spain.   The whole family needs to be eliminated to avoid any difficulties over the substantial legacy to be inherited by the grieving widow. 

A €70,000 package deal is agreed and she sends her HitmanForHire (later to become yet another of her amorous conquests) a down-payment of €15,000 in cash via FedEx. 

The Egyptian flies to Limerick as a tourist in order to carry out his assignment and checks into a modest hotel on the outskirts.   But he evidently forgets to read the small print in the contract, because when he goes to visit the first of the sons, Robert, instead of killing him he offers to spare him, his brother and his dad, in exchange for €100,000.  Oh, and as a sideline he can't resist the temptation of breaking into the family business and stealing some computers and other items. 

However Robert then further spoils the narrative by informing the police who set up a surveillance operation and sting.  In due course, the plot unravels, the Egyptian and Sharon find themselves in court charged with all kinds of crimes and the news media get wind of the story. 

Do you think anyone would buy my book?  What's that?  This isn't fiction?  It's actually true?  No, not again! ... Incredible!

Late Note (6 July 2008):

And, like my earlier novel, this too is a story that just keeps on giving.  LyingEyes98 and HitmanForHire are on trial in Dublin and denying everything. 

It seems Sharon's internet pseudonym, LyingEyes98, comes from the eponymous song by the Eagles about a beautiful young woman moving in with a rich old man and cheating on him. 

Fighting for her freedom, she tries to charm the detectives by addressing them by their first names, and the jury by winking and smiling at them. Not working so far. 

Oh, and HitmanForHire was found with deadly Ricin poison, presumably to do in the two sons ... in his remand cell.  (Don't the police frisk people before banging them up?).  Interestingly, Ricin comes from castor beans which produce castor oil.  The sharp umbrella tip that was used to assassinate the Bulgarian writer Georgi Markov in London in 1978 with a stab to the foot was tipped with ricin. 

HitmanForHire got his current wife Lisa to buy some castor beans and a castor bean plant over the internet where he also downloaded the Ricin recipe.  He then got his long-suffering ex-wife Theresa to cook them up for him back home in Nevada and together they flew to Ireland with the freshly-minted Ricin powder in their luggage.  She then had to fly back home to face an unrelated trial for extortion in California.  Incidentally, that busy girl Theresa had married her previous husband no fewer than three times - that's 50% more often than Liz Taylor and Richard Burton. 

Meawhile, PJ, Sharon's erstwhile paramour, is also a man with secrets.  Sharon had sent an anonymous e-mail sent to Gerry Ryan, a radio DJ, saying PJ wanted her to accost strangers and pick them up for sex.  She also explained to the court that he liked to frequent transvestites and wanted her to work as a hooker and to partake in threesomes with a male escort and himself, though she claims she didn't much like these ideas. 

I will add to this story as further titbits emerge ...

Actually, just have a look at this great summary, written after Sharon and the Egyptian are found guilty as hell in July 2008. 

Sharon, aka LyingEyes, wept as she spent her first night in custody, prompting cruel tabloids headlines of Crying Eyes.

Back to List of Contents

Jet-Man

If you haven't already seen it, you have to watch this exhilarating five-minute video of Yves Rossy, the Jet-Man, soaring at 300 kilometres per hour over the Swiss Alps, with the help of his £123,000 strap-on carbon-fibre wings and four model-aircraft jet-engines. 

Back to List of Contents

Issue 176’s Comments to Cyberspace

Just a few, varied contributions over the past couple of weeks. 

Back to List of Contents

Quotes for Issue 176

- - - - - - - - - - U S - - - - - - - - - -

Quote: “Some seem to believe that we should negotiate with the terrorists and radicals, as if some ingenious argument will persuade them they have been wrong all along.  We have heard this foolish delusion before. As Nazi tanks crossed into Poland in 1939, an American senator declared: ‘Lord, if I could only have talked to Hitler, all this might have been avoided’.  We have an obligation to call this what it is - the false comfort of appeasement, which has been repeatedly discredited by history.”

George W Bush in Tel Aviv to celebrate Israel's 60th birthday,
makes an unmistakeable - though instantly denied - rebuke
of Barak Obama's intention to enter presidential talks
with the tyrants who run Iran, North Korea and Cuba.

Quote: “Actually we like Mr Obama. We hope he will [win] the election”

Top Hamas political adviser Ahmed Yousef
says his terrorist group supports Barack Obama’s presidential ambition. 

Another reason for Americans to vote for Hillary or McCain.

- - - - - - - - - - B U R M A - - - - - - - - - -

Quote: “Our message is to the military rulers. Let the United States come and help you, help the people.”

In the wake of Cyclone Nargis, Asia's deadliest since 1991,
President George Bush urges the illegitimate junta running Burma
to accept humanitarian help from the US Navy nearby,
just as it and the Australian Navy provided immediate, practical onsite aid
following the 2004 tsunami.

The junta refused.  They prefer direct cash infusions, no questions asked,
and typical UN fact-finding missions

- - - - - - - - - - B R I T A I N - - - - - - - - - -

Quote (Prime Minister's Questions, 21 May, last question): “Does he [the Prime Minister] agree with me that Labour is working?”

Prime Minister Gordon Brown (Labour) faces another tough question,
this time from MP Chris Ruane (Labour),
at the weakly Prime Minster's Questions in the House of Commons. 

Quote (Minute 22): “It's important to me that the Irish people are deciding the future of Britain.  Now that's a turn-up for the book!”

Britain's veteran, maverick, socialist, former MP Tony Benn (Labour)
comments on Ireland's Lisbon Treaty referendum,
which is being denied to the British.

- - - - - - - - - - B U S I N E S S - - - - - - - - - -

Quote: “I am not getting a bonus. I felt it would be inappropriate in the context of the very disappointing opening of Terminal 5 in March ... despite the fact it was a record year in terms of our financial performance.”

Willie Walsh, chief executive of British Airways,
voluntarily declines the £700,000 bonus he is entitled to
for having led BA to record profits of £883 million.
The other 42,000 BA staff members
will share a bonus pot of £34 million.

Mr Walsh's honourable precedent will make him
extremely unpopular among his peers in the FTSE 100,
and also among those in his native Ireland where he once headed Aer Lingus.

Back to List of Contents

ISSUE #175 - 4^th May 2008 [383+646=1029]

Click here for PDF Version of Issue #175 (222kb)

Dhimmi Jimmy the Jew-hater

I get a little weary about the Orwellian double-speak that is so popular in these politically-correct these days. People should be more honest. 

People are especially cautious when they dance around the first two of these propositions. 

Fear of being called a racist is almost guaranteed to shut down any discussion; it's even considered vaguely racist to draw attention to someone else's racism if he happens to be non-white (eg accusing Zimbabwe's Robert Mugabe or Barack Obama's Jeremiah Wright). The true meaning of racist has been lost in the genocidal fury and criminality of the 20th century, for all it really means is that someone prefers his/her race over another, or put another way it means that in your view no-one else's race is better than your own.  It may not be true (and probably isn't!), but you'd be odd if you didn't deep down feel it.  Why would anyone think his own race is inferior to another's? 

Meanwhile, Hitler's legacy is such that people are terrified to use the word anti-Semitic with its Holocaust overtones, even when the evidence for anti-Semitism is overwhelming.  For example, it's bad enough to label Hamas as anti-Semitic even when its founding covenant specifically fosters hatred and murder of Jews, but few want to use the word against anyone else. 

But there is one undoubted old anti-Semite wandering round the world sowing Jew-hatred wherever he can.  He is the ex American president responsible for allowing, unchallenged, the launch by Iran of Islam's current war on the West.  Back in 1989 (oops, 1979), Iranian “students” (including a certain Mahmoud Ahmadinejad) invaded sovereign American territory and captured 52 American diplomats, the first attack on American soil since Pearl Harbor nearly four decades earlier.  Jimmy Carter's response was to launch an ill-prepared ill-fated military rescue mission that ended in conflagrations and eight American deaths in the Iranian desert.  I don't really blame him for this, because at least he was trying to do something that was right, however ham-fisted.  However, there is no excuse for following this humiliation by meekly accepting the invasion of the US Embassy in Teheran (legally, embassies are their country's sovereign territory).  An ultimatum to the new Khomeini regime, followed if necessary by a military strike at its heart, would have brought the crisis to a swift end - if not Khomeini himself - and laid down an entirely different marker of American intent for the years ahead. 

Instead the marker was ... do what you like; America will always be too timid to respond or to fight back.  And so it continued, with ever-worsening Islamic attacks on Americans and their interests, until 9/11 finally provoked America to retaliate and call a halt.   

Jimmy Carter's insouciance has cost thousands of lives since he left office.  You'd like to think that was due merely to his incompetence, ignorance, cowardliness (and perhaps greed, because his Islamist friends - the Saudi royal family, the bin Laden family, the Sheikh Zayad Centre in UAE to name but three groups - contribute mightily to his Carter Center and lifestyle). 

But his behaviour on the world stage since leads to a different conclusion that may or may not have had an influence on his negligence in 1989 1979.  For example, Iran's terrorist proxy Hezbollah felt emboldened enough to step up its murderous attacks on primarily Jews but also Americans.