1.0 the atom and the beatle

The atom and the beatle, a new corner on lame humour, on the tropic of Capricorn, on the American flag, on San Gorg Preca, on life, on ice-cream and nuts, on everything that does not fit in the other categories.

If the nonsense has to prevail on the good sense of today, then we need to face to next EP election with the same frame of mind that exists in knowing that the next egg roll might cause something terrible to our digestive system.

Shit may come down, atoms too, we’ll perish, that is for sure, but the beatle will survive.

George il – King

George Abela is to be the new president of Malta. Apart from a small segment of the population, composed of die-hards Nationalists and Labourites (of course for different reasons), everyone seems to be pleased with his nomination.

Abela returned from the political wilderness in 2008 to contest for that great place at Miles End, vacated by Alfred Sant on yet another defeat by the PL. He was supported by heavyweights Lino Spiteri, Dominic Fenech and Alfred Mifsud and by the conservative media.

He was pushed forward by Marlene Pullicino, one of the least looking forward politicians the PL has, who is quoted saying that she will vote against the introduction of divorce on Catholic grounds.

Lino, Alfred and Domnic arguments was that with George, the then MLP, would win the 2013 election hands down. I think they were genuine in their assessment, but had they rationalized more their choice, they would have come to the conclusion that ironically George is more a divisive element rather than an inclusive one within the PL clan.

There is a small segment but sufficiently enough to make 2013 just like 2008, who resent Abela for leaving the Labour when the Labour decided to stop playing around, cut the chase with the past once and for all, that is with Mintoff, and head for an early election.

The conservative media, which taunted with the labour just like a cat would taunt with the mouse, gave the impression that had George won the PL election; a mass immigration of nationalists to the Labour quarters would have happen. Anyone, who thinks that, might as well want to re-check his chest nut.

If George became the nationalist’s loved one, it is only because of the bad relationship that exists between him and Alfred Sant. Now, I know that nowadays to be taken seriously, to look unbiased, credible, or to make a political career, you need to spit and kick Fredu in the groins; but I hardly think that Alfred is the Beelzebub as the conservative media enjoy to portray him and how it went down in our collective memory.

To cut short, the Maltatoday on Sunday January 18, carried the front page headline ‘Abela’s Skeleton’. It assumes he only has one. Now, that was just a taste of how the conservative media would have conducted its electoral campaign.

blame it on the adults

If a university student, who tomorrow might end up in politics, does not know who is going to replace the great Eddie as President of Malta , who is Renzo Piano, where is Gaza; then the adults are to be blamed. Yes, that is right. In this surreal scenario, if a university student does not know simple general knowledge, it is the adults who are to blame.

Although this exercise was in no way representative of the student population, many students mentioned that they were not really interested in current affairs and some were apologetic for not knowing the answers, often blaming it on the fact that they were immersed in exams.

The head of the University’s Department of Youth and Community Studies, Marilyn Clark, also defended students’ apparent ignorance of what is going on around them.

Rather than blame this lack of general knowledge on students’ apathy or disinterest, she said this should raise the question: What are adults doing to encourage young people to participate?

She believes that if students are shown that their opinion matters and given opportunities to take part in activities, they will develop a better sense of efficacy and automatically become more interested.

“Citizenship education, the preparation of individuals to participate as active and responsible citizens in a democracy must be given more importance in the local curriculum,” Dr Clark said when contacted. READ

One would expect that a university student would be informed about current events and does not need the help of a grown up to point out things for him/her.

watch the shoe

No, we are not counting the hours but we are happy it is all over. That Bush, and his re-born Christian beliefs are out from the chair that matters the most. He leaves a hefty inherentance of wars, American cynicism and a looming recession. He will also be remembering for ducking to a shoe, threw by an Iraqi Journalist – perhaps, the best 28 seconds to wrap up the Bush years.

it was only soap after all

The Times reports:

Four men who imported soap which they thought was cannabis were this morning granted bail by Magistrate Miriam Hayman.

The men, Rupert Busuttil, 34, Carmelo Borg, 31, Marvin Debono, 22, and Paul Azzopardi, 39, were given bail against a deposit of €23,293 each and a personal guarantee of €46,586.

The magistrate said she was granting the men bail after taking into consideration that the majority of witnesses had been heard and that the haul had been soap.

The men stand charged with conspiring to import cannabis. They were caught after the police swooped on a yacht on December 28 after receiving information about the place where the “drugs” were meant be dropped off.

The accused had left the area with what they thought was cannabis.

Shame it was not  Soap for Steve; but then again he ‘tried to take advantage of Maltese hospitality.’ And that is worth, 25 years.

The political correctness of Entropa

(Entropa in pics)

David Cerny, already notorious for his provocative works which in the past have included a pink Soviet tank and a dismembered Jesus Christ in plastic foil, was asked by the Czech Presidency to produce a giant installation to be placed in the EU Council Building.

The Czech Republic, which holds the EU presidency, thought it had commissioned work from 27 European artists, the BBC said.

Instead, Cerny went ahead on his own; and with the help of two friends created a 16-square-metre map of Europe, with each country represented with a stereotype.

Cerny went as far as inventing the names of 26 other artists, including a Maltese artist, to the commission in charge of the project. Entropa was also accompanied with an official publication.

Alexander Caruana, the bogus Maltese artist, chose to depict Malta as a dwarf elephant saying that ‘for some people, its [Malta] size may be the cause of mirth. What, then, would they make of our most famous animal, which nobody had ever actually seen: the dwarf elephant, a creature almost too small to miss.’

Indeed, many found the work as offensive. Among them Bulgaria which, portrayed as a Turkish toilet, was clearly the most outraged by the work. In response, the Czech presidency apologized to Bulgaria offering to remove the image.

A clearly embarrassed Czech Deputy Prime Minister Alexandr said that ‘an agreement of the office of the government with the artist clearly stated that this will be a common work of artists from 27 EU states,’ adding that ‘the full responsibility for violating this assignment and this promise lies with David Cerny’ the BBC reported.

David Cerny has apologized for misleading the ministers and in his defence said ‘we wanted to find out if Europe is able to laugh at itself.’

And indeed, here is where the spanking of Cerny should stop. He was wrong in misleading but the work should be seen with the specs of satire. Let’s face it, we saw better, and Cerny can undoubtedly do better than that; nonetheless if the work is censored on the grounds that may or can offend a nation – then we ought to ask ourselves whether we created a bureaucratic monster that goes by the name of ‘political correctness’.

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i principi dell’economia

Ascanio Celestini, explaining the world of Economics.

I have the pleasure to own a personal signed book of Celestini – ‘Uno Scemo di Guerra’, a semi-fantasy tale of his father as a boy in WWII.

That was it, a nostalgic bracket of my year spent in the capital of Italy.

This is how they will get our jobs, in five easy steps

A. Briffa, on the commentary section of the Times of Malta, says:

It’s very simple how they [immigrants, that is] will get our jobs.

1. They get education from our money.
2. They live with our money
3. They study with our money
4. They qualify
5. They get the job

It doesn’t take much insight into the human psyche to figure out what makes the turbines of the ‘worn out tax payer’ turn.

Money (ours that is) +

Education +

Study (at least he concedes that education on its own does not turn the monkey into a Homosapiens. Alas, even this delicate process of self-fulfillment will come straight out from our pockets.)

= Job

To be fair; Briffa’s vision of the future immigrant – educated, qualified and presumably civilized enough to understand that the Island’s laws do not qualify the machete as a table knife – is rather noble when compared to the current situation where an immigrant is used as cheap labour in construction sites; giving bob the builder a good excuse to keep the wages low.

The prestigious place that band clubs and bars once held in the communities in bringing together the great minds of the villages; has now been electronically replaced by the Times of Malta. In which the immigrant, seems to occupy a pivotal role in the mundane thoughts of the ‘worn out taxpayer’.

Indeed, regardless of the subject matter, being it on a Christmas pudding or on a cigarette haul in Italy it is always the immigrant who inspires the ‘worn out tax payer’ to venture into the mystical world of the written-word.

Peter Briffa (28 minutes ago):

Shouldn’t the Maltese Intelligence services focus on one of the most pressing problems hitting Malta (illegal trafficking of human beings) rather than getting too bogged down with the problems of other countries?

It is good to help stop smuggling in cigarettes and alcohol in neighbouring countries, but we are having thousands of illegal immigrants smuggled into Maltese territories (at a great cost to worn out taxpayers) and as far as I know, there still hasn’t been a single arrest or anyone charged with smuggling human beings illegally into Maltese territory. Can we get our priorities right? Are the powers that be turning a blind eye? Surely, tracking down people smugglers does not involve rocket science?

Does the government sanction illegal immigrant smugglers?

And when the headline, Migration causing ‘extreme pressure’ on Malta’s social fabric’ – minister, appeared at 1128 CET on a grayish Thursday morning; Andrew Gatt was there, and promptly howled to the crew:

‘Skoprejna l-Amerika!’

Gaza

The drama unfolding in Gaza is bordering on mass genocide. So far, 1, 000 people have been reported dead, including children, journalists and medical staff.

The red cross, an international recognized NGO, has reported that its staff are not being allowed by Israeli soldiers to aid the injured.

The Case of Steve Marsden

Steve Marsden, a 48 year old Englishman, was sentenced to 25 years in prison and fined €60,000 for conspiracy to import 50, 000 pills of ecstasy in the summer of 2006.

At one point, his lawyer, Joe Brincat, had described the court proceedings to the BBC as a ‘juridical farce’.

It all began on the night of the World Cup final in 2006, when Mardsen acting as a LM 5,000  courier job was caught with 50, 000 pills well hidden in his car. It took the Police well 10 hours to find them.

He said he hid the pills for fear of being stolen from the car.

At the time, it was deemed as to be the biggest haul of ecstasy ever uncovered on the island. However, two months down the line, the drugs were found not to be ecstasy but MCPP, a psychoactive substance used as an alternative to ecstasy sold to clubbers, which at the time were not outlawed.

It only became so in 2007.

Subsequently, the charges from importing and pushing drugs were changed into conspiring to deal in ecstasy.

Which the on-line dictionary defines ‘conspiracy’ as:

Law: An agreement by two or more persons to commit a crime, fraud, or other wrongful act.

Or as, the Court of Criminal Appeal, presided over by Chief Justice Vincent Degaetano, Mr Justice David Scicluna and Mr Justice Joseph Micallef, puts it:

“A person may be found guilty of, say, conspiracy to import heroin into Malta even though the stuff he eventually brings into Malta turns out to be baking powder. It all depends on what was actually agreed upon between the conspirators and, more specifically, on the object of the conspiracy”.

Marsden’s argument was that since the drugs were not illegal the “charge as it stands is an invention of the Attorney General in his unfettered right to charge as he deems fit”.

Marsden insisted during the trial that he had done nothing illegal at the time.

It was then left to the jurors, whose hardest decision in life is the weekly grocery list, to decide whether the drugs were ‘fake’ or not.

However, from his arrest in 2006 to the jury’s decision, two years elapsed in which Marsden was left in the dark. To be fair, bail was granted in July 2006 only to be revoked on application by the Attorney General and repeatedly denied on the grounds that he might flee the country.

The case was then taken up by the Fair Trials International, an international NGO working for fair trials according to international standards of justice, and then carried out in the media by the BBC and later by the Maltatoday.

The Maltatoday carried out two articles, that I know about, one by James Debono and another, an opinion piece, by Raphael Vassallo.

Marsden lawyer, Joe Brincat, in a BBC interview had said, ‘I have been practising in the criminal courts for the last 38 years and Mr Marsden’s case is a parody of justice.’ In the meantime Marsden’s daughter, Emma Bartholomew, from Bristol, was campaigning for his release.

The trial only started on the 5th of January of 2009 and ended three days later, on the 8th, with 8 – 1 of the jurors finding his guilty of conspiracy of importing ecstasy; which was translated into 25 years in jail and a fine of €60,000 by the court.

The head of the Prosecution Unit at the Attorney General’s Office, lawyer Anthony Barbara said to the court, ‘these visitors are trying to take advantage of Maltese hospitality.’

I can already see Mr. Barbara’s uttering the words, with his eye fixed on some invisible horizon behind the jurors – to an imagine of a smiling young couple with two children, boy and girl, giving away to a picture of Mdina in Spring.

Marsden is appealing the judgment arguing ‘that no evidence which could support a conviction according to law had been presented.’

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