exit uncle Roman?

Russia's dictator democratically elected Prime Minister Vladimir Putin is not a man to be trifled with. Oil tycoon Mikhail Khodorkovsky dared to challenge the authority of Putin, who was President at the time. Result? Banged up in jail in 2003 on charges of embezzlement. Former security officer Alexander Litvinenko, a fierce critic of Russia's Government? Famously poisoned in London. Andrei Lugovoi, the man wanted by British police in connection with Litvinenko's murder? He will never be handed over, David Cameron was told last year by current Russian puppet President Dmitry Medvedev. Badri Patarkatsishvili, the Georgian tycoon and friend of Putin critic Boris Berezovsky? Died in mysterious circumstances in his Surrey home shortly after worrying aloud about the threat of assassination. A film about Khodorkovsky scheduled to be shown in Moscow cinemas last year? The screenings were cancelled, apparently following calls from the Moscow Cultural Affairs Committee. Russian journalists? Murdered in alarming numbers, with resulting prosecutions virtually unknown.

To put it mildly, then, anyone with big money tied up in Russia would not want to incur the wrath of the gangsters men running the country. Alarm bells, therefore, may be ringing for some of the national asset thieves businessmen currently enjoying the fruits of their plundering labour by spending lavishly on expensively acquired sports teams around the world. A recent pronouncement by Putin might give them cause to worry.

Was it AS Monaco F.C. owner Dmitry Rybolovlev that Putin had in mind when saying that the reputation of Russian private enterprise suffers "when people see that after that unfair privatisation millions and billions are being spent on sports clubs overseas instead of investing this money into Russian sports"? Or perhaps the remark was aimed at Mikhail Prokhorov, owner of the NBA's New Jersey Nets franchise. Prokhorov, after all, has had the temerity to announce that he will oppose Putin in the upcoming Presidential election. Or, just maybe, the godfather of SW London football is among the intended targets of Putin's barbed comment.

Were that the case, which would Roman Abramovich care about more? Continuing to subsidise his pet football team? Or ensuring that he stays on the right side of a man whose enemies, even the very rich and powerful ones, have a funny way of ending up dead or in jail?

pussies who didn't love their children enough

It is axiomatic that becoming separated from reality is a fate suffered by many of those who become rich and famous for singing songs, playing games or pretending to be somebody else. You do something essentially quite simple, albeit fairly well, perhaps. People tell you that you're wonderful. Over and over again. You don't have to choose your own clothes, do your own shopping, pay your own bills or wipe your own backside. You get paid to wear a watch. You get paid to drive a car smaller and less ostentatious than anything you'd actually keep in your own garage. So you morph into a creature made up of hubris and delusions of meaningful importance.

All of this is well understood. So when a 'celebrity' says something crass, insensitive and remarkably stupid, little surprise is felt.

Every now and then, however, one of the beautiful people really goes the extra mile when it comes to producing an arrogant remark of truly depressing idiocy.

Step forward, Mr. Mark Wahlberg. Known for awful topless rapping, modelling pants, playing the part of a deluded thicko in a fairly good movie, and carrying out racially aggravated assaults on Vietnamese men when he was in his teens, Wahlberg has now decided to berate victims of the 9-11 attacks for lacking his own brand of heroism.

Interviewed in the February issue of the preeners' style guide Men's Health, the pretend movie hard man, who was apparently scheduled to be aboard one of the planes that hit the World Trade Center in September 2001, says:

"If I was on that plane with my kids, it wouldn't have went down like it did. There would have been a lot of blood in that first-class cabin and then me saying, 'OK, we're going to land somewhere safely, don’t worry.'" 

The poor sods on those flights had no idea that the planes were going to be smashed into tall buildings at high speed. Anyone with the average layman's background knowledge of previous aircraft hijackings was doubtless expecting to end up enduring a few tense hours or days on the runway of some airport somewhere, perhaps with a minority of passengers getting injured or killed. It's understandable, then, that no resistance was offered. Contrast this response to that of some of the passengers of United flight 93, which crashed near Shanksville, Pennsylvania. Via mobile phones, some passengers learned of the earlier incidents in New York City, reasoned that they were facing the same fate and decided to fight back.

Former underwear model and teenage tearaway Wahlberg, however, would have been the only man swinging fists and raising hell on one of the New York flights.

For him, the people who died as their planes smashed into the twin towers were weak little pussies who did not love their kids enough to put up a fight. The folks on Flight 93? Incompetent fools lacking the badass skills of a trained movie actor.

What a fucking tool.

scruples about Scruples

Do you remember the game Scruples? For a while, back in the 1980s, the board game based around ethical dilemmas was pretty popular and heavily advertised. Even if you never played the game, you may recall the TV commercials. This is the US version, but the UK one (which does not seem to be available on YouTube) was pretty similar:



By the late 1980s, a short-lived BBC1 Scruples TV game show was on the air, hosted by Simon Mayo, then at the peak of his popularity as the presenter of Radio 1's Breakfast Show. The game had also been adapted for the hot home computer formats of the time:

What you may not know about this once-popular game is that it was invented by a strange and unpleasant person by the name of Henry Makow.

Makow, a Swiss-born Canadian, is an avowed opponent of feminism. So much so that in 2002 he alleged that Gloria Steinem was recruited by the CIA in the late 1950s and employed as part of a plot to use feminism to destabilise society. For Makow, the CIA is just one tool of an international cabal seeking to weaken America and integrate it into a global state directed by the United Nations. Makow puts the banking and oil dynasties of Rothschild, Rockefeller and Morgan at the heart of this conspiracy and contends that feminism was not the only great social movement directed by the CIA. He asserts that "the 60s drug counter culture, the civil rights movement, and the anti-war movement" were all catalysed by the US Government intelligence agency.

By the age of forty-eight, Makow had decided that marriage to a woman from his home country would not work due to his female compatriots having been, in his view, brainwashed by feminism, thereby destroying the viability of the kind of relationship he wanted. So, in an adventure recounted in his slim 2001 work A Long Way to Go for a Date, Makow set off on what the book's jacket blurb describes as "a quest for masculine identity". This quest took him to the Philippines, in search of the kind of compliant creature unavailable to him in North America. She was thirty years his junior - a teenage Filipina named Cecilia. It didn't work out. 

Makow is still a very active writer. He has published two books on the idea that a "depraved satanic cult called the Illuminati is waging a covert war against humanity", following a plan outlined in The Protocols of the Elders of Zion. Unless Makow intends his works on the Illuminati to be read as fiction, it says something about his research methods that he cites an anti-Semitic document which had already been exposed as fraudulent by the time Germany's Nazis were distributing it in schools and having its contents taught as fact. When you drive your Focus, your Galaxy or your Fiesta, you may prefer not to reflect on the fact that a certain Henry Ford funded the printing of half a million copies in the USA in the 1920s.

Still blogging prolifically, Makow wrote only only yesterday to complain about occasions when white Christians have been assaulted in America and this has not been dealt with a hate crime. The term hate crime, asserts Makow, pertains only "to crimes against Illuminati-sponsored minorities. They are used to advance the Illuminati's satanic, homosexual and "multicultural" agenda."

Should you be in any doubt about Henry Makow's world-view, consider the titles of some of the articles written by others to which his blog provides links: "Obama's Gay Bathhouse", "Mossad and 9-11", "Marilyn Munroe (sic) and Jewish Hollywood". A man shall be known by the company he keeps...

Turn all that over the next time you feel like a nostalgic game of Scruples... 

extractor

back to the old routine

a thick finger

a bright morning, so nippy
that to read the Overground timetable
or to navigate the Underground map,
a thick finger is needed
to swipe clear the frost
from each
plastic
surface

being Józek

of the three hilarious witches of Kraków,
she was the wildest
and the smallest,
dwarfed
by her taller
and supposedly hotter friends,
tottering the cobbles
of Stare Miasto
on their long, long legs
and vertiginous black heels,
sly smiling,
pigeon kicking,
private laughing,
endless lying,
under low cloud,
among fallen leaves
and in the shouty, smoky fug
of hard-drinking cellars.


come back to my place, Józek,
she said.
it's empty and my heart gets cold.
I'm frightened of the ghost
of my uncle.
he was in the fucking
Służba Bezpieczeństwa.
you know what that is, Józek?
he was a spy, Józek,
a torturer.
the neighbours all hated him.
so they hate me.
cooking their fucking cabbage,
reading their fucking bibles,
smelling of cabbage,
smelling of bibles.
he hanged himself
in there
where I'm living,
supposedly with my brother,
but he's never home, he's
fucking some stupid girl,
some villager.
I loathe her, Józek.


so you want me to come back with you?
yes.
to stay the night?
yes.
in your room?
yes, in my room,
and tomorrow
we'll go the cinema,
we'll walk somewhere,
we'll get drunk again.
and tonight, in your room? tonight, in your bed?
tonight, Józek, we'll see. we will see.

the ends of some eras

While clearly struggling of late, QPR are in the Premier League and playing their home matches in the familiar surroundings of a ground that the club has called home for all but three of the last ninety-five football seasons. Flux has been the norm for the Rangers over the years, as demonstrated in the last few hours by the departure of manager Neil Warnock after just twenty-two eventful months in charge. But, for now at least, the players run around on the same scrap of land used by their predecessors for generations. A man well into his retirement can park his backside on a blue or white plastic seat in pretty much the same spot where he stood or sat to watch the heroes of his youth lumbering about in thick cotton jerseys and kicking a pudding-like ball across a sea of mud.

None of this can be said of the opponents QPR faced for Saturday's third round FA Cup tie. The trip made by over 5000 of the Rangers travelling faithful was to England's strangest town, now home to the football club stolen from its original supporters in the London Borough of Merton, almost sixty miles away.

It seems fitting that a club created in such unusual circumstances should offer such a strange match day experience. Given the grandness of the vision first outlined more than  a decade ago by Milton Keynes Dons supremo Pete Winkelman, visiting supporters might expect a slick, professionally presented football product, albeit one whose newness and strangeness might not be to everyone's taste. But that isn't the case. Instead, it's about traipsing through a supermarket car park to get to a ground that looks as though it was abandoned by the builders when still under construction. It's about catering that's every bit as woeful as what's on offer at lower league grounds up and down the country.

At the start of the twenty-first century, Winkelman was Managing Director of a property consortium supported by retail giants Asda and IKEA. The consortium was looking to launch a large development in the Denbigh area of Milton Keynes, including a retail park, a hotel and conference centre and, the crowing glory, a 30,000-seater football stadium. The version of events described by an independent group of Wimbledon supporters contends that although the consortium described an Asda superstore as an enabling development to finance the building of the stadium, the opposite was in fact the case. The Wimbledon fans' contention was that planning permission for the retail stores could not go ahead without the stadium and that the stadium could not be justified if were to be home to any of the town's lowly non-league teams. So, rather than build from the ground up by guiding an existing outfit up through the non-league pyramid, Winkelman and co. decided to prey on a Football League club with a parlous financial situation. All of this to get a big branch of Asda built? That's how the Wimbledon supporters' group would have it - their venerable and remarkable little club taken from them so that Milton Keynes could have another supermarket.

The Milton Keynes consortium were not choosy. Wimbledon F.C. were the eventual victims of the Winkelman-Asda-IKEA plot, but along the way several other clubs were targeted - Luton Town, Barnet, Crystal Palace and QPR.

Yes, QPR fans. Perhaps not all of you who made it up to Buckinghamshire this weekend realise that it could have been our club torn from its roots and replanted in the strange suburban landscape of Milton Keynes. Perhaps we would have had to build a new club from nothing. Perhaps we'd all be following a reborn AFC QPR and muttering with disgust about the hated Milton Keynes Rangers. Perhaps if this was more widely understood, more QPR fans would have racked their brains to construct hostile songs for Saturday's game. Instead, elements of the largely subdued Rangers contingent chose to sing "Premiership, we're having a laugh" when the frustrating and difficult tie took a turn for the worse and the home side got the first of two goals in what turned out to be a stalemate.

A little more impressive in its own way, was the fact that some supporters of the fledgling Milton Keynes club have adopted a philosophical and defiant stance in response to the low esteem in which their outfit is held by fans of other clubs. The Millwallesque "no one likes us, we don't care" could be heard at times.

Probably not very many QPR fans ever had much affection for Wimbledon F.C. Memories of their muscular and direct style of play and the fairly unsavoury characters on whom they often relied to grind out much-needed victories. But no one deserves to have their club taken away just so that Asda can build another store in a particularly soulless location.

Soulless, too, is the stadium whose construction could only be justified by the theft of an established but vulnerable club. Perhaps some redeeming elements of this sorry tale could be found if the new Milton Keynes ground was a state-of-the-art palace of sport. But it isn't. Sure, the seats are fairly comfortable and the views of the pitch appear to be good from all angles. But from the outside, the stadium presents a bizarre and somewhat shabby appearance. Apparently, if the need ever arises, it would be possible to boost the ground's capacity all the way up to 45,000 seats. Perhaps then the currently exposed girders would be covered. In the meantime, the stadium looks unfinished. 

This theme continues inside. An upper tier is devoid of seating. The large screen used as a scoreboard is connected to the mains by wiring that trails untidily across bare concrete and which rests on makeshift scaffolding. There are also signs of wear and tear. Although the stadium is barely four years old, large cracks can be seen on the concourse.

None of this should really detract from the matchday experience, though. Football supporters are used to less than imposing surroundings. What did matter, though, was the surprising discovery that such a new stadium had highly inadequate catering arrangements. Getting a bite to eat at half-time involved waiting for the duration of the break and missing almost ten minutes of the second half of the match. Yes, MK Dons recorded their highest-ever attendance figure on Saturday, but the size of the expected crowd had been known for days. The catering outlets just did not cope. 

The match? Pretty awful. The sight of midfield stalwart Alejandro Faurlin being stretchered off with a season-ending injury? A real sickener. Getting away from the industrial estate on which a number of fellow QPR fans had parked? A slow and frustrating business. 

So it was, then, that the short Neil Warnock era sputtered to a disappointing finish - in a half-built stadium in an Asda car park on the fringes of an unlovely town made up of shopping malls and oddly un-English housing developments. 

What next? Mark Hughes is the name being touted. Has something happened since we walked away from our neighbours Fulham, claiming that club was not ambitious enough for his liking. Is that an exciting prospect?  Let's see.

U RRRRRRRRRRRRssssss

with friends like these...

No article at this blog has ever generated as many comments as the latest in a short series of reflections on the case of Emma West, the Croydon woman now set to stand trial for criminal offences she is alleged to have committed during an aggressive outburst caught on camera, shared on YouTube in November and then subsequently seen by over eleven million people worldwide. The altercation occurred on a south London tram. The nature of the remarks Ms. West made as part of what quickly became known at the My Tram Experience incident have led to her being charged with a racially aggravated public order offence. According to a BBC report, it now seems that a further charge to be levelled at Ms. West is one of "intent to cause fear or provocation of violence".

It was noted here in mid-December that the plight of Ms. West had been adopted as a cause célèbre by a varied collection of avowed racists, 'racialists', 'nationalists' and 'patriots' all seeking to position the south London woman as a spokesperson for a coherent ideology built around opposition to immigration and ethnic diversity. Some scepticism about the validity of representing her in this way was expressed, given that nothing in the public domain seems to suggest that any of the people seeking to claim Ms. West as an ideological fellow traveller have actually ever spoken with her. This might be only moderately problematic were she not facing criminal charges. As it stands, however, some of those purporting to be concerned about the welfare of Emma West and her family might pause to consider whether her case will be helped or harmed by associating her, apparently without her consent, with what many might see as highly unpalatable views and causes. Of course, if their concern is not genuine and the case of Ms. West is simply being used in some ongoing ideological struggle, then some of her putative supporters might actually stand to gain more from a successful conviction than an acquittal. Consider, for example, the possible attitude of anyone keen to allege that Ms. West is the victim of a political elite that seeks to intimidate into silence anyone who opposes a notional 'genocide by assimilation' supposedly deliberately planned as part of a drive to destroy current national identities and white European homogeneity. Anyone passionately committed to such a position might conceivably welcome Ms. West's conviction as proof of their argument.

Although it will continue to be the position of this blog that, in this fundamentally decent and civilised country, public outbursts like Ms. West's are mercifully rare, the only thing that makes her case at all remarkable is that online social media raised its profile with such speed. That aside, this is otherwise just a case of a rowdy person behaving unpleasantly and intimidating bystanders to the degree that the police and courts have become involved. So surely it is pure conjecture to imagine a queue of people keen to portray the incident and its consequences as part of some sinister 'white genocide' plot.

Such people do exist, though, and the numerous comments made here all came from people who adopt broadly that position. 

Take Julian Curtis Lee, for example. Lee, the US-based creator of a "white identity web portal for all white European people", has created a very odd set of tributes to Ms. West. On his website, Lee has also created a collage of screen captures from the notorious YouTube clip and added the captions "mother of England" and "mother of Britain" to her name. Sure, she's a mother. Yes, she's from England/Britain. But Lee seems to be positioning Ms. West as some kind of figurehead of British motherhood. One wonders how many British mothers would be inspired by a figurehead whose parenting skills include swearing and shouting aggressively in the company of her young child. Lee has also created a rather strange video of his own, in which he mixed My Tram Incident footage with shots of himself looking at a statue, shots of people boarding a tram in his home town of Portland, Oregon and photographs of children.

Lee's website gives ample evidence of his various beliefs. It is also instructive to notice the URLs he adds to some of the videos he makes. In addition the well-known British National Party and English Defence League, Lee promotes an organisation called the British People's Party, which describes one Colin Jordan  as its "spiritual leader". Jordan, a leading figure in British post-war neo-Nazism until his death in 2009, was one of the authors of the 1962 Cotswold Declaration, an agreement between far right movements from a number of countries. One of the stated principals of the declaration is that "Adolf Hitler was the gift of an inscrutable Providence to a world on the brink of the Zionist-Bolshevik catastrophe, and that only the blazing spirit of this heroic man can give... the strength and inspiration to rise, like the early Christians, from the depths of persecution and hatred, to bring the world a new birth of radiant idealism, realistic peace, international order, and social justice for all men."

Julian Lee, apparently an admirer of Hitler, would appear to part company with some of the others leaving comments on this blog's several Emma West articles when it comes to some of his other sources of inspiration. That he promotes the websites of the BNP and the EDL would not meet with the approval of CanSpeccy (Canadian Spectator), for example. One of CanSpeccy's numerous comments here includes the the assertion that the BNP and EDL are quite possibly "agents of the state (not necessarily the British state), serving to discredit anyone who opposes mass immigration". CanSpeccy, then, must presumably be quite suspicious about the BNP's vocal 'support' of Ms. West and quite pleased about the fact that she and her family apparently asked the fringe political party led by Nick Griffin not to hold a demonstration outside the court where she recently had to appear. While the BNP has agreed, with some reluctance it seems, "to take into account the wishes of Emma and her family", the party believes that the request not to stage a demo is  "wrong both for Emma and for the wider Cause".  No need to worry then, folks. Should you become caught up in a legal case that the BNP decides to exploit for its own ends, you can rest assured that any requests for them to back off will be respected, even if your family's wishes are then described as "wrong" when the party conflates your difficulties with their "Cause". Comforting, huh?

So it seems that Emma West's family have sensed that her own cause may not be best served by appearing to be aligned with nice folks like the BNP who at least conceal their admiration of Hitler, much less with fellows like Julian Lee whose veneration of old Adolf is open and unabashed. Let's see if the family's further wishes  in this area are respected or dismissed by the likes of Julian Lee, CanSpeccy and others.

warhol in my heart

new year:
back to life,
back to reality,
back to an empty space
where the dayglo sticker
used to offer you some CA$H