Wednesday
03Feb2010
Where are the real victims?
Wednesday, February 3, 2010
Cutting Clare Short By William Bowles
What I can never escape from is the knowledge that in spite of all the hot air that gets expended and all the ‘breast-beating’ done by conscience-stricken politicians, the Iraqi people are nowhere to be seen in the ‘debate’. They figure not at all whilst the privileged members of the fourth richest country in world ‘debate’ the workings of the imperium.



My son begged me to switch the show off. “It’s too cruel,” he said. But that seemed to be the point of Fat Families. “You make me feel sick,” said the smug presenter as the obese couple looked forlornly at their takeaway supper. Later they were stripped naked — she weeping, he head bowed — while the camera boggled obscenely at their bodies. I hope they were well paid, this good-hearted pair, who clearly loved their kids and each other. What price to be paraded as an object of hatred and disgust.
A schoolgirl in Saudi Arabia was sentenced to 90 lashes and two months in prison for assaulting her headmistress after a confrontation over a cell phone, sparking an outcry from a government-sponsored rights group.
Everyone knows The Truth about obesity: we’re getting fatter each year. Our growing girth is termed everything from the ‘pandemic of the twenty-first century’ to an ‘obesity tsunami’. But the evidence is now flooding in from both America and England that obesity is the epidemic that never was.
As news of the deaths emerged the following day, the camp quickly went into lockdown. The authorities ordered nearly all the reporters at Guantánamo to leave and those en route to turn back. The commander at Guantánamo, Rear Admiral Harry Harris, then declared the deaths “suicides.” In an unusual move, he also used the announcement to attack the dead men. “I believe this was not an act of desperation,” he said, “but an act of asymmetrical warfare waged against us.”
Gordon Fleming and Shelly Cobb are your typical green California
couple. Gordon recycles, reuses, and bikes to work. Shelly raises
chickens in their backyard and worries if her sushi is local. They
might live in eco-harmony – except Fleming claims Cobb is in a high
priestess phase and Cobb counters that Fleming’s hot showers are too
long. According to an unrepentant Fleming, “I like to see the water
pouring down.”