I don’t usually promote commercial products on this website, but I’ll make an exception for this T-Shirt, which is available in a choice of colours from Zazzle.

The saga of the BBC’s amazing journalistic precognition on 9-11 is discussed on A Tale of Three Broadcasters, written in December 2007 but still relevant today.

Yeah right!

In early August I blogged The Ingenuity of the Markets – featuring a skit by the brilliant British satirists John Bird and John Fortune.

This is in similar vein about the famous South Sea Bubble (circa 1720).

It was not the Bubble to End All Bubbles as advertised. They never are…

I live in a very pleasant location on the north east coast of Queensland, an hour’s drive from Cairns. I’m fortunate. It’s a beautiful part of the world.

There’s only one place close to city-size around here (that’s Cairns), but there’s plenty of reef and rainforest, great beaches and lots of nice things to do.

Not surprisingly, plenty of visitors come every year to Cairns and the surrounding region. Tourism is big business – and while it’s going through a relatively depressed period at present Cairns is always busy.

Pacific Islands Forum

This week – starting from today (Tuesday 4th August 2009) – Cairns will be busier than usual. It’s the venue for this year’s Pacific Islands Forum. As well as politicians, their entourages, NGOs and media, there will doubtless be lots of security, police and ’secret police’. The Pacific Islands Forum is not quite the G-20, but it’s the closest Cairns is likely to get for a while.

I shall NOT be visiting Cairns during the week, unless under duress or in dire emergency. Meeting up with some of the social justice and environmental NGOs – which include Friends of the Earth, Oxfam and Greenpeace – would be interesting. I strongly support what these fine people are trying to achieve at this Forum. Good luck to them! But I’d rather not push my own luck. I think I’ll leave a respectable distance between myself and the melee in Cairns.

British political satirists John Bird and John Fortune discussed the so-called credit crunch back in October 2007.

This skit isn’t dated in the least. The biggest joke of all – failed gambler-bankers walking away with massive bonuses at the taxpayer’s expense – is still breaking news.

Here’s an extract from the report in yesterday’s Daily Mail: How bailed-out U.S. banks kept on dishing out bonuses

Nine Wall Street banks received a combined £75billion in taxpayer cash last October to help them survive the financial meltdown.

But according to a shocking report by New York Attorney General Andrew Cuomo, bonuses paid by several of the biggest institutions were ’substantially greater’ than the banks’ earnings.

• Goldman Sachs’s net income was £1.4billion, yet it paid out nearly £2.8billion in bonuses. It received £6 billion in bail-out funds.
• Morgan Stanley earned £1billion and paid nearly £2.7billion in bonuses. It also received £6billion from the taxpayer.
• JPMorgan Chase earned £3.3billion, paid £5.2billion in bonuses and received £15 billion from the government.

Citigroup, Bank of America and Merrill Lynch, which all needed government funds, also paid billions to hundreds of executives despite posting massive losses.

The report claimed that America’s biggest banks awarded a total of nearly 4,800 bosses with bonuses of a million dollars or more each last year.

Only a joke Mom…

Note:  This hilarious Prank Call has already been deleted from Jokeroo.com

On past form, the ADL may axe it from YouTube before too long.

Last November I blogged about a jaw-dropping image of the Milky Way by the American photographer Wally Pacholka – see Amazing. He’s developed a stunning way of photographing the night sky that gives a sense of three dimensionality.

According to his website, NASA has now published 34 of Mr Pacholka’s photographs in its Astronomy Picture of the Day series – more than any other photographer.

Today’s APOD – The Milky Way Over Devil’s Tower – is the latest. Devil’s Tower in Wyoming will be familiar to movie goers; it was the scenic backdrop for Stephen Speilberg’s Close Encounters of the Third Kind.

The Milky Way Over Devil's Tower by Wally Pacholka

I dedicate this hateful poem to all who read this blog out of dubious motives

The Mostly-Unlamented Crabbaloon

Whose Rotten Attitude left him vulnerable to the flapping of a butterfly’s wings

Moral: Don’t be crabby!

Blue Meanie*

A Crabbaloon sat on a log near the coast
Grumpy and greedy and quite prone to boast
He wished all his ‘enemies’ soon become toast
That crabby old crabbaloon!

The Crabbaloon thought it was time to have fun
He tired of the peace and the sea and the sun
He wished he’d remembered to pack a shotgun
That vicious old crabbaloon!

Then Crabbaloon noticed a butterfy flutter
In front of his face and before he could utter
A cry or a sneer or a tut or a mutter
The flutterbye flittered away

The Crabbaloon lunged at the slender blue fly
But he tripped on a rock and the shock made him cry
Then he rolled on his back and he swore at the sky
In a terrible, violent rage

The Crabbaloon cursed, then he swore once again
Only vaguely aware of the cause of his pain
(Another free spirit had escaped him again!)
It made him most horribly crabby…

The Crabbaloon managed to curse all day through
He cursed and he swore ’til his whole face went blue
Then he cussed once again and collapsed on the dew
And expired that very same night

I’ve been following the career of Mark Regev with interest for some time now.

Actually, I have little choice – unless I completely stop watching English-language TV News.

A week rarely passes when Regev’s rugged good-looks aren’t featured on my box, as he earnestly provides ever more implausible rationales for Israeli war crimes. When Israeli violence hots up, on religious holidays or prior to elections, Regev appears on my screen daily.

Mark Freiberg: did this Aboriginal activist from Victoria think a name change could mask his real identity?

It doesn’t seem that a change of government makes any difference. A year ago, Regev was spinning for Mr Olmert. Now he spins for the government led by Mr Netanyahu (known to his mates as Ben Yahoo).

Does anyone else find this a tad suspicious?

My personal theory is that Mark Regev (born Mark Freiberg) is a deep-cover Australian agent.

He may seem like an Israeli these days, but it’s just a front. This rude boy from Melbourne is deep down a fair-dinkum Aussie. He’s even joked about it on occasion – a tactic often used by spooks to deflect criticism while they continue to operate in plain sight.

Mr Freiberg has probably been tasked by his controllers with eroding the Zionist Entity from within, by coming up with such absurd excuses for the Shitty Apartheid State’s recurrent crimes against humanity that even the world’s most foolish people see through them with ease.

If you haven’t heard the Corrigan Brothers‘ excellent ‘No-one as Irish as Barak Obama‘ by now, you may be deaf or live in a Trappist monastery.

The Corrigan Brothers: three cheeky black boys from North Tipperary

Now the incorrigible Corrigans have come up with a gem about the British MPs expenses rorts scandal.

Outrageous revelations of absurd expenses claims have been crashing, like a giant steel wrecking-ball through the collective credibility of Britain’s political establishment for several months.

There’s more to the MPs’ expenses  scandal than meets the eye. Lots more.

The ‘rorts’ that scandalized the nation are ridiculous in many cases and perfect fodder for the press. But they amount to chicken-feed compared with the billions spent on Britain’s bloated military expenditure and massive investment in the machinery of an Orwellian police state.

It would be an interesting exercise to scrutinize the expenses claims of 600+ executives in any large modern corporate for comparison. How about the expenses claims of News Corp executives, for example? Can we see them? How about expenses claims by members of the so-called ‘Intelligence Services’? Who’s watching out for rorts there? (Answer: that’s an ‘Official Secret’)

Whistle-blower Craig Murray: His campaign in the forthcoming Norwich North by-election has been invisible to BBC viewers

Of course, people expect higher standards from elected politicians, who are paid taxpayers’ money and expected to act in the public interest. On the same basis, how about a trawl through the BBC’s executives expenses claims? After all, they’re paid taxpayers’ money too – and expected to act in the public interest.

July 2009: record death toll for invading troops in an eight year war... who's counting Afghan casualties?

And the end of the fight is a tombstone white
With the name of the late deceased,
And the epitaph drear:
“A fool lies here
Who tried to hustle the East”

- Excerpt from ‘Songs from Books‘
Joseph Rudyard Kipling (1865-1936)