Oscar Bravo? Don't Believe It For A Minute

Sean Johnston, 27, from Hollymount Park in Derry, has just been given three months suspended for disorderly behaviour and behaviour likely to cause a breach of the peace.

The court heard that on July 13 last, police on duty at the annual Orange march heard loud Wolfe Tones music from a car being driven by Mr. Johnston along Spencer Road towards a spot where 20 to 30 supporters of the march had gathered to welcome their brethren. The car was stopped and Mr. Johnston arrested.
Imposing sentence, District Judge Barney McElholm said that if there was such a thing as a good time and place to play the Wolfe Tones, it was not driving up Spencer Road during a Twelfth march.
Are these remarks not evidence of the continued sectarianism of the Northern State? Why should it only be Orangemen who are given legal protection from the Wolfe Tones? Are we going to have to go back onto the streets to win equality?
Would a movie presenting US soldiers in Iraq as heroes have triumphed at the Oscars back when Bush was president? I think not.
But it’s OK to celebrate our boys doing their explosive business now that nice Mr. Obama is commander-in-chief.
Hurt Locker director Kathryn Bigelow ended her Academy victory speech: “I’d like to dedicate this to the women and men in the military who risk their lives on a daily basis in Iraq and Afghanistan and around the world. And may they come home safe.” Cue tearful wild applause.
The ethos and attitude of the movie was summed up by actor Anthony Mackie when, in an interview with Melena Ryzik of the New York Times, he recalled filming on location in Jordan: “We were shooting in Palestinian refugee camps. We were shooting in some pretty hard places. It wasn’t like we were without enemies. There were people there looking at us, ‘cuz we were three guys in American military suits runnin’ around with guns.”
Mackie had high praise for the “technical advisers” who protected and coached the actors, having been hired on the basis of service in Iraq with the “private security” firm Blackwater – Dick Cheney’s old outfit. “If you are a trained killer, you are very precise,” explained Mackie.
Trained killer is right. Among other Iraq atrocities committed by Blackwater mercenaries was the massacre of 17 unarmed civilians in Nisour Square, Baghdad, on September 16th 2007. The youngest was Ali Kinali, 9. The killers were quickly spirited out of the country, protests from the Iraqi authorities bouncing off the hard shell of imperial arrogance. Back in the States, none is facing charges or disciplinary action.
I saw virtually no mention of any of this in the extensive post-Oscar coverage of how the movie came to be made and of the experience of making it. Would have been better under Bush.

Do the most recent dispatches from Germany mean that Benedict XVI, too, is up to his armpits in the child sex abuse scandal?
Let me put that question a different way: Is the Pope a Catholic?

Fifty-five MPs have signed a motion denouncing a report from the Commons’ Scientific and Technology Committee which found that homeopathy is a load of baloney. (Homeopathy is the scam whereby gullible people are charged ridiculous amounts of money for pills containing nothing of any possible medical value.)
One of the main men behind the Commons move was David Treddinick (Cons. Bosworth), who recently had to pay back £755 which he’d claimed for a computer programme which, he insists, helps users predict their health via the stars.
Among the daft 55 were seven of the nine DUP MPs, plus the normally half-sensible Sylvia Hermon. That’s eight of the 13 Northern MPs who take their Westminster seats.
Homeopathy is as insulting to human intelligence as astrology, Tony Quinn’s yoga, Our Lady of Medjugorje, the editor of the Sunday Independent or the fashion for angels. I am reminded of Mark Twain’s 1905 letter to a mail-order huckster for snake-oil.
“Dear Sir,
“The person who wrote the advertisements is without doubt the most ignorant person now alive on the planet; also without doubt he is an idiot, an idiot of the 33rd degree, and scion of an ancestral procession of idiots stretching back to the Missing Link... A few moments from now my resentment will have faded and passed; but while there is yet time I hasten to wish that you may take a dose of your own poison by mistake, and enter swiftly into the damnation which you and all other patent medicine assassins have so remorselessly earned and do so richly deserve.
“Adieu, adieu, adieu!”

The big Haiti gig in these parts featured 20 bands over four venues in one night, making it difficult, not to say delicate, to select the top tunesmiths of the evening. Anyway, how do you compare resurrected ‘80s superstars Bam Bam and the Calling with the exorbitant vocal grandeur of Joanna Fagan with the onset of the onslaught of We Are Resistance with the modulated mayhem of The magnificent Q with Deccy “I got a Bin-lid of songs to sing you” McLaughlin with Saddam Hussein’s solicitor Des “Revivor” Doherty chopping chords from an angry axe. Etcetera. So what can you do, except report that, on the strength of their Nerve Centre stormer, it’s confirmed that Future Chaser are definitely the business.