Olmert welcomed in Chicago

So the rain falls on Chicago, too.

Phantom Limb

P' Limb are in a way typical of Bristol, in that this band doesn't sound remotely anything like the English West Country. When I first saw them, at the Fleece, Bristol, I felt I was getting a second shot at enjoying Tina Turner before she got famous; although Yolanda Quartey is her own woman, and the sound, a mix of dark, deep soul with the sunshine of Nashville, is a feast of special ingredients. I wrote, a couple of years back, that they conjured up wide-screen lonely tumbleweed road visions- and sho' nuff, when you invest in their debut CD, as I strongly advise, that's what you get.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GzHq4uTJFEs

Dealing in stolen property, Palestine

Zionist analyst shoots himself in foot

Will Palestinian refugees ever be able to return home? Unlikely, as it would be too painful for many, most homes have been destroyed and the few left standing are being requisitioned by the Zionist state, whose laws are constantly being retrospectively altered to cover each encroachment on human rights.

This hot-blooded session on Al-Jazeera, a three-way discussion among Haifa attorney Sudah Adalah, decribing her struggle to assert the rights of many of the dispossed Palestinians, Michel Abdel-Massih QC (London) with a dispassionate but determined invocation of legal precedents and Raanan Gissen in Tel Aviv, exploding angily from the starting block as he insists that this is not a legal situation but a war situation, and that Jews have lost homes, too. He did not go into specifics about these homes.
The background to this is Binyamin Netanyahu's recent speech in which he declared that the 'refugee issue' must be resolved outside Israel (aka Occupied Palestine) to avoid any threat to the existence of the exclusively Jewish state.

Chomsky on Obama

Following the award to the Boy-King Twotank Obama, the barely-installed US President, of a Nobel Peace Prize, I present Noam Chomsky's views on Israel and its self-appointed 'True Friend'. As Mr Chomsky points out, the Zionist regime is at pains to paint itself as being a democracy. The benefits of that democracy, of course, only extend to the members of its chosen tribe. And the regularly invoked 'right of defence' hardly covers the extermination of all extended relatives of any resistance fighters who may or may not be in the country. Back in the Seventies, when Anwar Sadat of Egypt offered Israel a peace treaty, proposing the Zionist withdrawal from occupied Sinai but leaving out the Palestinians, he was turned down. The Zionists' response to the more recent offer by Hamas was the same: continued occupation and expansion with unlimited support from the US, over the offered security. Again, as Noam Chomsky says, the Nazis could have protected themselves against the Poles by withdrawing; so could the Zionists protect themselves by returning to their mothership, the US. An unavoidable irony here is that, despite that previous winner of a politically-motivated Peace Prize being the All-American Henry Kissinger, I feel that in many ways America is my spiritual home.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5bAUJF5uUuw

Review: Le Donk and Scor-Zay-Zee

My radio review of this excellent category-busting film before its special preview in Bristol, October 2009:

Shopping for CCTV

All Britain's city centres, main streets and public spaces are now full of CCTV cameras, which we are told are to cut crime, but increasing evidence shows that they are ineffective in halting crime and even when they do pick up criminal activity the police 'see no ships' unless it is at best, convenient. All this spying has only one practical use, which is as a tool of an authoritarian, perhaps totalitarian, state.
In London you can now be harassed, assaulted or arrested by the police just for taking photos in the street. A trio of brave but determinedly peaceful activist-pranksters tried going a little further, by turning their own cameras on the watchers. Guess what...

CCTV does not work: new evidence

A local story that illustrates that CCTV is not a silver bullet that fixes everything. Some of the comments are interesting too.
CCTV not enough to protect Bristol family - Thisisbristol 1/10/09 http://www.thisisbristol.co.uk/news/CCTV-protect-Bristol-family/article-1383410-detail/article.html
"A Bristol mother of two thought she had finally stopped the man she believes is terrorising her family, when he was caught on CCTV Bristol vandalising her husband's car.So she was stunned when the police told her that despite paying hundreds of pounds for the security system, there wasn't have enough evidence to charge him."

In this case, police claimed that CCTV evidence was not enough and that old-fashioned witnesses were required. Of course if it is in the interests of the police and/or their paymasters (government/local councils or 'businessmen') then CCTV recordings will miraculously be awarded credibility otherwise denied them.
Some officers, if it suits, will even go so far as to say that if there was only human witness and no CCTV, then all bets are off.

On the other hand, as I happily told a police acquaintance, I once witnessed one near miraculous example of the technology and The Force together doing a good job; I had joined the long-established Bristol anti-war vigil (above) for five minutes one afternoon when a couple of really determined troublemakers jumped up on the kerb, and I could tell they hadn't just come to talk about the weather. But they were followed, practically instantaneously, by two coppers who quietly saw them off. Our uniformed saviours popped up from nowhere and vanished again just as smoothly.

I have to qualify this, though: on 22nd April 2011 the Vigil again came under attack while I attended; this time  a sustained visit, leaving your correspondent reclining in the bushes and his Gaza placard ripped up, but this time the cavalry did not speed to the rescue. All the Queen's horses and all the Queen's men missed out because one monitor watcher was off having a cup of tea. ( The police have since told me that the cameras were doing their job but pointing somewhere else). So the jury remains out on this one.