Paris Hilton thinks she’s above the law (in so far as she can ‘think’ at all)

I’m just going to quote FordPrefect because he said it so well here:

Paris Hilton is a stupid selfish whore. Oh, be as rude about her as you like! She’s famous for having sex on video, taking drugs on video and being racist on video so she can’t accuse other people of lowering the tone.

Paris Hilton is going to jail. Probably. Her counsel went with the I-forgot-I-was-banned-from-driving-when-I-drove defence because it’s vacuous enough to be true, but she got 45 days of glorious incarceration anyway. Try showing a paparazzo your coochie from in there. You can’t, can you? Where’s your rat-dog now?

But Paris Hilton thinks she deserves special treatment and has petitioned Gov. Schwarzenegger to intervene. People who think celebrities (and I use the term loosely, like I called her a “woman”) should not be above the law are counter-petitioning. Please, Lord, give us this one thing.

She really is a vile and despicable human being. I’m a-signing…

Giuliani and Reid

Today is one fucking appointment and arrangment after another (with the last one at 8.30 tonight), and I’m going to get no writing done at all. I haven’t got any writing done in too long, but I suppose I was in Ireland for a while.

I need to drink more coffee, very quickly, or I’ll never get through it all.

And why the hell is it so cold in our house in the mornings? My feet and hands are surely about to fall off.

The BBC website is my favourite place in the world, and I spend way too much time there. That would be another reason for the non-writing sometimes, I suppose.

But look: Giuliani joins race for president.

Former New York Mayor Rudolph Giuliani has officially joined the running for the Republican nomination for the 2008 US presidential election. The Federal Election Commission said Mr Giuliani had filed a “statement of candidacy” – a one-page form outlining a candidate’s wish to seek office.

Does this make anyone else giggle? Not only is it the the 40th (approx.) person running for the White House but it’s Giuliani! That just doesn’t fit or something. It’s just stooopid. Mind you, I’ll cut my arm off if he gets in.

Oh and this: Sex register to include email.

Sex offenders could be forced to register their e-mail addresses to prevent them approaching children on the internet, the government says. Home Secretary John Reid said he was also considering making paedophiles add their chatroom names to their other details on the Sex Offenders Register.

If there are any more temporary things in the world than email addresses and online IDs, I would like you to tell me. Sex offenders put their handles on the sex offender register and turn around and make new ones the next day. He’s forgotten that a sex offender is generally much, much smarter than your average offender. Job’s a good ‘un. John Reid has, once again, conjured up a totalitarian idea which can only serve to increase bureaucracy ten-fold with little positive effect. Of course, it’s only a gesture to placate the proletariat because Reid, like Blair, never fails to assume that we can’t see through these sorts of policies. Were it not for the fact that Blair has hair and Reid doesn’t, I would think that they were clones. Maybe he and Giuliani are clones…

Man, I’m running late already.

Great Britain is Great, Great, Great (except it’s not)

I can see where Douglas Alexander wants to go with this, but it’s just not accurate. As an Irish person living in England, I’m fairly certain that there is not the wonderful harmony between the four nations (Northern Ireland, England, Scotland and Wales) that he’s so sure about. He starts off with the usual Britain is Best sentiments, which you’d expect to see on a piece like this:

Three hundred years since the creation of United Kingdom, the fact that our future is still a matter of periodic debate is a mark of its strength, not its weakness. The UK is a unique union. England, Wales, Scotland and Northern Ireland together have formed one of the most powerful and respected countries on earth, yet each has retained its own identity.

… forgetting only to mention how fluffy and pink and cuddly we all are, and how there’s never anything less than a smile on all our faces. Ahem.

I loved the little gems in his piece such as the following.

We share values and have learned to live in harmony without the imposition of one homogenised identity.

Absolutely! I think ‘harmony’ is a wonderful word to describe the situation in Northern Ireland for the last 40 years. Hell, we can’t get enough of each other over there! For 25 of those years, we couldn’t get enough of killing each other. But it was always harmonious, of course! It also explains rather well why Northern Ireland, Wales and Scotland haven’t bothered to seek devolution in the last decade. Except, of course, that they have!

But let’s not forget that the real point of this piece was for Alexander to lavish praise on the Labour party (obviously, he’s a big fan). I’m sure that he manages to achieve this under any guise really, and the Strength of the Union just happened to take his fancy today. To say that he’s niave about the UK and indeed the world around him is understating how misguided he is in his convictions that everything in these four places is AOK. It’s not. I can only speak confidentently about Northern Ireland because that’s where I’m from, but I can assure you and him that life is far from ‘harmonious’ there. The irony is that he wrote this for the Guardian, clearly without ever bothering to read what’s printed in the Guardian about Our Great Nation. Bless him.

But, to give one commenter (talksense) his/her dues, I really couldn’t have put it better myself. I’m not sure where s/he gets the idea about the Welsh, but perhaps s/he has some knowledge that I don’t.

“the lived British experience is a blueprint for the future not just here, but around the globe”

What a load of lofty rubbish. Especially when we know the real reason why Labour is so in love with the Union all of a sudden (which is traditionally a Tory nueroses). It’s simply because it enables them to stay in power.

“300 years ago, we realised what countries around the world are doing now – that we are stronger together and weaker apart”

I don’t think that too many Irish had a say in this.

The creation of the Union in Great Britian was enabled by elite scots who wanted a bigger slice of the power-pie. The greatest defenders of the union today are also those same elite scots who love the world stage that London provides. However, the scot on the street would be far prouder, happier and better of if the burden of subsidy could be shaken off and they could have their own nation state.

The other union, which was born 100 years later, was a complete disaster, for which people in Northern Ireland are still paying the price. Today, almost half of the people in Northern Ireland have little or no connection with Britian. Of the rest, the working classes have, over the years, been whipped up in a frenzy of perverse nationalism (in the guise of Unionism) by community leaders (the Orange Order, which must be one of the most bigoted organisations in the world) and protestant clergymen (many who believe the world began 4000 years ago). Hardly a “blueprint” for success “around the globe”.

Most English people on the street couldn’t care less about Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland and are more concerned with England winning the Ashes or World Cup. And good luck to them!

As for the Welsh. Everyone knows they would like to make on their own, but they probably can’t be bothered, especially as they consider themselves superior to everyone else, anyway.

The sooner the union is dissolved the better for all concerned. All except for the Labour party, that is.

Two (three) things I believe

I try not to be but I am something of a conspiracy theorist. I don’t subscribe to them seriously or fastidiously but I do like to read about them. Let’s face it; they’re often a more interesting read than the facts themselves. One of my favourite conspiracy theories is that of the royal family knocking off Princess Di. I want to believe this theory more than any of the others not just because I’m so anti-royalist, but also because I would like the truth to come out about something in a world where I don’t think the truth comes out about much. The recent report, of course, ‘cleared up’ any confusion over Diana’s death calling it a ‘tragic accident’, and it could well be right. However, of all the conspiracies that someone can think up, this one has to be one of the most plausible. Diana had become nothing short of the thorn in the royal family’s side with all her shenanigans (and the last thing that family tolerates is shenanigans unless they’re being conducted by one of their own), so she was a prime target for bumping off. And if anyone can bump someone off and get away with it, the royal family can. And things like this are certainly food for thought:

Lord Stevens is unlikely to be so lucky. His 900 pages are intended to be the end of the story but, for the community of the institutionally suspicious, they can never be so. Because their central allegation is that the princess was killed by the British establishment, refutation from a man who received a peerage for a lifetime of service to the police will be the equivalent of a press release from Texaco calling global warming a myth.

We’ll never, ever know, particularly not now, but thinking it was a possibility was fun; for me anyway.

(Oh, and I also like to believe that they didn’t land on the moon in 1969. That’s another favourite of mine.)

Another thing I like to believe is that the bible is a load of nonsense (blame my Catholic upbringing): for example, that Mary was no virgin.

One may wonder whether her astonishment resulted from the knowledge that, not having reached the age of puberty, she was not yet ready for motherhood, for virgin in Jewish parlance could designate a girl too physically immature to conceive. The angel, in his answer, seems to argue that God could allow the pre-pubertal Mary to conceive just as he had caused the post-menopausal Elizabeth to become pregnant. Again in Jewish parlance, a married woman past child-bearing age was a virgin for a second time.

The article cited here is explaining it by identifying anomalies in the four gospels (and there were enough of them, let’s face it), but I’m rather more of the opinion that this – the virgin birth – is just one more lie told to us by a Church which thrives on pulling the wool over its followers’ eyes. I’ve tried many times to change my mind about this – largely by talking to people who believe the bible is the Word of God and the Whole Truth – but I remain unconvinced. I’m assuming that after almost 20 years of this line of questioning (I started young), I’m likely to stay unconvinced for a while longer. No, it’s not for me.

It hasn’t been the best day in my world, truth be told, but I don’t really want to get into that here.