IT’S ALL A BIT FLUID

Let's Express Posted on by

Our betters really are short-sighted. Not too long ago a decent performing family saloon in this country came with an annual road tax of over €1,000. The Revenue were taking in short of a billion snots a year on this racket. Then two things happened.

The climate change lot convinced the weak-minded in power that car tax should be charged on the basis of emissions and not engine size. The 2.5 liter flyer that I had was costing me over €900 a year at the time just to be street legal. But no sooner had I got rid of it for an old and underpowered 1.4liter car than the system changed to taxing emissions. The current model of the 2.5 liter flyer costs less to tax than my ancient small engined car.

The second thing that happened was the people standing up to the political bullies and forcing them to abandon double-taxation for water. This left the expensively created Irish Water with no income source so 100% of all of the car tax collected goes to Irish Water to keep the door open. Just as this was decided a trend to lower emission cars rose sharply and an idiot could have told our short-sighted betters that Revenue had to fall as a result.

We hear this morning that, “Department of Finance officials are warning the move to more efficient cars could ‘could severely challenge the revenue’ generated for the exchequer,” to which you can only add, “What the fuck did you think would happen?” So the, ‘ahem,’ brains in Leinster House are considering the idea that “Drivers could be taxed on distance travelled.”

There are pros and cons to this of course but the self same duplicitous politicians are stuck with financing Irish Water and a falling road tax amount has to be addressed lest the whole sorry spectacle collapses and political appointees at the top find themselves out of a job. The powers that be have obviously got the bean counters on the case and they must be pretty sure that taxing on distance travelled will put up most peoples car tax. It is the core dishonesty I can’t stand because in reality your car tax should be gauged on the amount of water you use in your home. They wouldn’t touch that one with a barge poll though.

When this mess gets ‘sort of sorted,’ the next message from Revenue is bound to be about the rapidly falling tax take from tobacco. God knows what the tobacco taxes fund because it is in excess of a billion a year and non-smokers are going to have to somehow pay to fill the growing gap. The anti-drinks outfit want to kill the tax take on booze, typically a handy little earner, so as the drinkers turn to, I don’t know, illicit drugs for their kicks and because there’s no tax on cocaine, the tee-totalers may be expected to make up the shortfall in drink taxes.

It’s all a bit fluid.

THE ORIGINAL RUSSIAGATE

Let's Express Posted on by

In a week where President Chump is calling for an end to the investigation regarding some vague alleged help he received from Russia to secure election, I came across an odd piece in an old Forbes Magazine.

I am one of those people who believes that John Kennedy was the last great American President. After his murder, I came to think that Bobby could have been a great President too but then he was murdered also. That left Ted. The Kennedy’s were ardent Democrats but back in the 60’s, that party had values, integrity and good social policies. John Kennedy handled the Cuban missile crisis in a way that none who came after him could have. I was young in the sixties and while I loved the Kennedy’s, I knew little of the Democrats or the Republicans.

Fast forward to today and an utterly despicable Democratic Party in my view. I do not see the Republicans as being much better but the Democrats are refusing to believe that Hilary lost and are trying everything they can think of to impeach Trump and reverse the election result 18 months later. Among the many various allegations they are employing to do that is the accusation that Trump had the Russians interfere in the american presidential election for his benefit. By implication of course, this must be seen by all decent Americans as something the Democrats would never consider doing themselves, ever!

Then Forbes published this. “Picking his way through the Soviet archives that Boris Yeltsin had just thrown open, in 1991 Tim Sebastian, a reporter for the London Times, came across an arresting memorandum. Composed in 1983 by Victor Chebrikov, the top man at the KGB, the memorandum was addressed to Yuri Andropov, the top man in the entire USSR. The subject: Sen. Edward Kennedy.” It appears that Ted Kennedy proposed to lend Yuri Andropov, (Ex-head of the KGB and then Soviet President), a hand in dealing with President Reagan. In return, the Soviet leader would lend the Democratic Party a hand in challenging Reagan in the 1984 presidential election. Ted suggested that he would use his senior contacts in the media to get Andropov on American TV addressing the voters directly.

Reagan had publicly called the Soviet Union the Great Satan so if Andropov, coached by Teddy and his team, were to appear to be a friendly reasonable man in the eyes of the American public, the tide of that public’s opinion could be turned away from Ronnie Reagan and his Republicans in the 1984 elections. So it seems a former potential Democratic candidate for the American Presidency was the first of his ilk to ask the Russians to interfere in American politics, as reported in this scrutinized and verified memorandum from the time. This is actual proof rather than the flimsy unproven accusations thrown at Trump today. We hear that the US has ‘indicted” several Russians on this issue and at first glance, that sounds serious. But a quick check shows that the word “indictment” is legalize for ‘accusation’. So it is yet another possibly groundless accusation with a few Russian sounding names thrown in to try to make it sound plausible.

Of course, as I wrote earlier, this is all a storm in a tea cup because it is informal American policy to interfere in the politics of any county it chooses, including among its so-called Allies. They have even invaded countries they don’t like in contravention of the UN Charter. So crocodile tears about Putin and Trump are just so much hypocritical bullshit.

The true statesman that was John Kennedy must be turning in his grave.

POPE-ING IN FOR A CHAT WITH US.

Let's Express Posted on by

Pope John Paul II visited Ireland from Saturday, 29 September to Monday, 1 October 1979, the first ever trip to Catholic Ireland by any Pope. Over 2.5 million people, (out of a population of 3.5 million at the time), attended events in Dublin, Drogheda, Clonmacnoise, Galway, Knock, Limerick, and Maynooth. I went to see the lad Józef Wojtyła at the Limerick venue. There’s an article alone on that trip but I digress. Now, nearly forty years later, he’s coming back!

No not the Polish Pope but this new guy from South America called Francis. He’ll be dropping in for a chat with us for about 36 hours over the 25th & 26th of August and already the preliminaries are different. This mad country has changed beyond recognition since the last Papal visit. Back then it was all rosary beads, best bib and tucker, bend the knee, bow the head, beat the breast and kiss any ring within reach of you. The purity and piety on display in 1979 put the most devout in the Vatican to shame. It’s a wonder the weight of plenary indulgences prayed for at the time didn’t sink the whole island beneath the sea.

But they didn’t. We’re still afloat though much has changed it has to be said. Today everyone is riding everyone else without as much as an engagement ring to be seen. Worse again from a Papal perspective, there’s many Irish riding their own sex too without a care for eternal damnation. In the social and religious pop charts, the Father, the Son and the Holy Ghost have dropped off the top three slots to be replaced by money, power and influence. The fawning politicians of the 1979 Dublin airport tarmac fame are replaced now by a cabal of individuals who appear to believe they are actually God. I can’t see many genuflections from the Irish front bench when the Lord’s messenger on earth alights the aircraft staircase. If Francis wants to make an impression on that lot of heathens then he’d better strike them all down with plague as they smirk at him.

Then there’s the common people. Sure, the breast beaters are still around but they are a minority and in my age group and above. Hell, the churches are almost empty from one end of the month to the next. Most of the under thirties couldn’t give a flying fuck about the Catholic Church or any religion for that matter and apart from the worldwide celebrity status of our impending guest, they’ll have no interest in the lad. I can’t see him being any more than a handy excuse for a piss up for many people. Last week on Joe Duffy an atheist rang in to boast how he’d managed to get 600, (free), tickets for one of the Pope’s venues. With some pride in his voice he told the nation that it was his intention to destroy those tickets to ensure there’d be 600 less people seeing the man. What a prick!

On the commercial front, some enterprising ice cream outfit are producing a memorial product they call the “Ice Pope”. Apparently it is a traditional ice pop but sculpted as the Pope’s head and figure. Are you supposed to lick it I wonder? I doubt the makers could care less even if you shoved it up your hole as long as they get the money. It’s so tatty, isn’t it? There are over two billion catholics on earth, many who would starve to get to see this man in the flesh but I fear we’ve become so full of ourselves here that it will be the badge of ‘super-cool’ to say, “He was down the road but I couldn’t be arsed at the time.”

Oddly enough as I look at all of this I see a lost innocence and with it a lost feeling of happiness as well. Spiritual peace brings a comforting sense of well-being and it can be lasting. On the other hand we now have the twin pursuits of power and money and these are what we are supposed to aspire to to make us happy. Our leaders discuss the economy to the exclusion of any talk about a society. They presume upon our cohesiveness as a people and our blind stupidity as individuals as they dole out the mushroom treatment short term. Pope Francis, on the other hand, comes with the eternal message of God, handed down over two thousand years. It is a message of love and compassion, of forgiveness and empathy, of peace and (genuine) good will to your fellow man. It is depressing then that he may turn out to be some kind of weird freak show in our so-called modern Ireland.

I sincerely hope not!

THE BIG BAD WORLD IN NUMBERS

Let's Express Posted on by

We are fond of saying that the world is small and indeed, air travel has drastically shortened journey times. But when you’re blasting over any territory at 500 MPH while at 40,000 ft and you’re probably half asleep for most of it, then the full magnitude of what’s below is lost on you. There are the dimensions of the place, the amount of people living there and what their chosen place is in this rapidly changing world. I got thinking about that as I strolled near the river lately and it led me to wonder just how much I don’t know, so I went looking it up naturally.

At the time, I was watching four engined jet trails streaked across the sky from west to east and it made me feel how insignificant we Irish actually are. So the idea for this article began first as an insular effort to determine some facts in the (possible/unlikely), event of a United Ireland at some distant future point. What are the indisputable facts of the matter? From an Irish perspective, you can easily visualize our little landmass from outer space on a clear day but how many of us would be sharing the Emerald Isle together when and if? Well, in the Northern six counties there are 1,811,000 people, both Sammys and Taigs of course. Here in the Southern 26 counties there are 4,780,000 decent God-fearing souls, (wink, wink!), so together we will number over six million assorted Paddies of various hues and shapes. Sounds like a lot to me.

So far so good then! The land mass of the this Republic currently stands at 84,421 km² and if you add the North to that, we’ll become a massive continent of 98,551 km². The North’s GDP is about a fifth of ours and with one of them for every 2.6 of us, they’re going to have to improve on that performance. At this point, I could drift into comparative personal productivity versus average gross earnings in both parts and then I could even speculate how together our rising tide could lift all boats but I’ll leave serious shit like that to David McWilliams.

Because you see today, what has me riveted is the perilous state of the whole world, not our little windy rock in the Atlantic. From time to time I like to take out my atlas to gain a world perspective and when I do, I keep getting it wrong. This is because my atlas gives me a Mercator projection, which is a projection of a map of the world onto a cylinder in such a way that all the parallels of latitude have the same length as the equator, used especially for marine charts and certain climatological maps. Flattened out onto a page then you get this perspective distortion. As I look at it, Greenland is bigger than Australia but in reality, Greenland has a landmass of 2,166,086 km2 whereas Australia comes in at a whopping 7,692,000 million km².

So let’s look at the Middle East then, for no other reason than it always seems to be in the news for all of the wrong reasons. As a boy growing up, my first memory of a place called the Middle East was the mention of the ’67 war, (ironically the summer of love here). The victor in that war was Israel with a population now of 8.547 million coming from a country with a total area of 20,770 km². Ireland is far larger. In the years since that war, Iraq has been in the news, (437,072 km² and 37.2 million unfortunate souls). Years after ’67, Saddam Hussain had been persuaded by the Americans to start a war with Iran because the mad mullahs in Iran had taken over and were holding 57 American hostages to stick it to the Yanks. Eight years and eight million dead later there was a truce which pretty much put things back exactly as they were pre-war. You see, Iran is bigger than Iraq, (1.648 million km², nearly four times bigger), and has more people too, (80.28 million versus 37.2 million). You’d have to wonder what the lad Saddam was smoking back then?

But comparisons in the Middle East can be weird if you are a student of the Mercator projection. Is Egypt bigger than Saudi Arabia for example? Off hand, do you know? Well, this student always presumed that the cradle of civilization was far bigger than the hot sandcastle. However, the Saudi’s are sitting on 2.15 million km² of real estate while the Egyptians have half of that at 1.01 million km². But then there are only 32.28 million Saudis versus 95.69 million Egyptians and they have the Nile to fertilize their valleys. There’s a war in Syria even as I write, a country with a land mass of 185,180 km² and a ‘damned’ population of 18.43 million suffering souls. To my way of thinking, the mayhem in the Middle East in my lifetime and before it, is all down to the super powers of the day. The Arabs and others were unfortunate enough to be born on top the world’s greatest reservoir of oil and gas and they are getting cut to shreds for just that sin of birth, beginning after WWII. Islam is a side show to deflect interest from the main prize.

So in Super Power terms then you must begin with the good old U, S of A. There 350 million of them living in a nirvana of 9.8 million km² of God’s own country. Big isn’t it? But then I check to discover that Canada is even bigger, (at 10 million km² approx) and there’s only 36.29 million Canadians, so there’s more leg room up there so to speak. By comparison, China is slightly smaller than the US at 9.59 million km² but they manage to house 1.379 billion little people, more than the States by a cool billion, (and then some as the Yanks might say). God help the Russians and their lethargic reproductive organs because there’s only 144.3 million of them and they inhabit the single largest country on earth at 17.1 million km².

The EU is no slouch either. With an area larger than the USA, (10.18 million km²), we have a much larger population standing at over 500 million, currently including the UK. But can you envisage us going nose to nose with the Yanks on the battlefield? Can’t see it myself. But then I don’t see the Russians wanting a shamozzle with the Yanks either, though they do seem to finally be putting their foot down in some areas. The Americans view the Middle East as their sole playground to do with as they please. The Ruskies however have historical links with Syria and Iran and appear to be carefully drawing the line there. While the Americans have been stamping all over the world these last few years because, as they like to remind us, they can. They threaten all of us on this planet if they’re foolish in their dealings with the Russians and none of us will thank them for that!

Meanwhile the wily Chinese are camping out in, of all places, Africa. Have you any idea just how big that place is? You could fit the whole of the USA, Canada and the EU in Africa and still have room for Australia. Doesn’t look that way on my atlas but there you are anyway. With 30.3 million km² of land and a total population of 1.216 billion people, it is significant and the Chinese believe it is full of economic potential. Across the South Atlantic lies South America covering an area of 17.84 million km² and with a combined population of 422.5 million people, a damned big consideration in terms of Global Affairs methinks. And south of that continent lies Antartica, which comprises 14 million km² but with a tiny transient population of 1,000 to 4,000, depending on the season. If the ice cap ever does melt down there, you can expect a dirty rush to exploit whatever the place has. The vested interests will be all over the place like flies to shit.

Then there’s Asia. Wow! We’re talking 44.58 million km² with 4.463 billion assorted nationalities busy doing what they’re doing. The biggest Muslim populations are there in places like Indonesia and Pakistan. Pakistan as well as China and India are three of the select club of nuclear armed nations and I’m leaving out North Korea for now because we all live in hope, don’t we? Industrial powerhouses such as South Korea and Japan are in Asia and many see it as the emerging economic superpower of the new century. China has the largest standing army in the world, in case you didn’t know and the inscrutable oriental is no fool either. You have to wonder sometimes that on the eighth day when the Lord awoke, did he take a quick peep and say to himself, ‘Ooops”.

Think of the above mix of facts as the core ingredients of a boiling stew and then throw in human nature, politics, banking & high finance, Mother Nature, greed, avarice, jealousy, carelessness, stupidity, madness and mortality and then ask yourself, is a United Ireland all that important in the grand scheme of things?