Are you really surprised that he's mad ? (or sane)

So most of the Western leaders are now condemning Colonel Gaddafi as a madman? They must be must be confused as to what's gone wrong with him, because up until a month ago they obviously all thought he was perfectly sane and well-balanced.Well they must have otherwise they wouldn't have sold him all that military hardware..

They must wonder if the stress of being a dictator has got to him, and if he'd had a fortnight off and started yoga all this trouble could have been avoided.

So maybe the best way to intervene is to send him a good Psychiatrist. Then they could make a report for the UN that went: "His desire to refer to his fellow Libyans as 'Cockroaches' who must be killed suggests the patient is experiencing the trauma of feeling he's a woman trapped in a Colonel's body. And the need to make speeches while under an umbrella is a classic symptom of Obsessive Compulsive Disorder, so maybe we shouldn't send him any tanks for at least three weeks, until he's better.

They should have all know this event was coming, because they all said he was mad 30 years ago, then suddenly decided he was sane about 10 years ago.
This was coincidentally about the time he announced he'd back the West in the war on terror. To be fair, some of those who embraced him at this time are impressively unrepentant. For example, Peter Mandelson insists when Gaddafi renounced his desire for weapons of mass destruction we had to "bring him into the fold" with deals for oil and arms.

Because as we all know,when a dictator tells you he no longer wants destructive weapons, what else can you do but welcome his change of heart, by selling him a desertful of destructive weapons? It's like wandering up to someone at Alcoholics Anonymous and saying: "Congratulations on finally renouncing the drink. Now to celebrate let's go and get pissed."

Blair told us in 2007 "the commercial relationship between Britain and Libya is going from strength to strength". So everything was ok then. We could let a dictator sell us oil and buy our arms because he'd backed our war against a dictator, who used to sell us oil and buy our arms.

If Saddam had said in 2001 he was willing to back our war against Gaddafi we'd have got so confused we'd have declared war on ourselves!

The people who defend the befriending of Gaddafi, such as Douglas Alexander, the shadow foreign secretary, insist he promised he wouldn't use weapons such as tear gas "against his own people", which seems a liberal attitude towards someone you've derided as a madman for 30 years. Presumably Blair said to him: "Now I'm trusting you here, so if you DO open fire on thousands of protesters demanding a minimum wage, you'll not just be letting me down, you'll be letting yourself down."

In any case, who did we imagine Gaddafi might use this tear gas against? Perhaps he said: "Ah Mister Blair, I fear at any moment we might be invaded by a nation of badgers."

So now we expect the rebels to be grateful if we offer them our services, because when Britain wants to help by sending an army into an Arab country, what could possibly go wrong? It's like the builder who burned your house down ringing to say: "I hear you need your house rebuilt. We can offer very reasonable rates."

So the rebels seem to be aware that while the West can offer expert advice on the weaponry they're up against, seeing as it was the West that made it, on the other hand being supported by the British and American army won't help their aim of winning mass popularity amongst the Libyan people.

Because British and American leaders spent weekends with Gaddafi and arranged trade deals and hugged him for the press, and yet at no time did anyone spot he was in any way the sort of character you shouldn't send weapons to. And, in fact, even if he'd announced he had a split personality and then started talking in a high pitched voice insisting he was Sandra from Wolverhampton, Blair would have thought: "This is excellent news. We can sell tanks to both of them.

Can we have celebrities worth having please?

I've just heard that mega celeb Katie Price on the radio banging on yet again about she's sick and tired of the media hounding her and generally not leaving her alone.I don't know what I can stomach less.Her or the fawning sycophancy of her interviewer,Steve Wright.

Now if the same thing was happening to me,the last thing I would do is invite my critics into the sanctuary of my home.Not Jordan (or Katie or whatever she's calling herself these days).She actually invited them into her house to make them dinner....

I've often wondered what on earth makes her and other 'celebrities' think that we want to know every minutiae thing about them, and what valid point they imagine that they have to impress upon us.

Here's a thing that I reckon we should all try and do.Think of someone who's achieved something worthwhile and meaningful and make THEM a celebrity with the same media coverage.

A Celebrity for doing something other than being rich,beautiful,having large breasts or eating something unrecognisable in a far flung location.Someone that doesn't whore themselves out to who ever will pay the most for their tawdry life stories that nobody really cares about except themselves and their overpaid and delusional clique.

Here's a revolutionary thought: Let's start having celebrities that people can aspire to.Celebrities that are role models to be proud of.

In years to come,I dread to think what future generations will make of the society that we currently live,compared the those that have come before us.Previous people of standing in society were those such as Isaac Newton,Nelson,Churchill,Charles Dickens etc.What do we have now?

Try and think of a celeb(I'm really starting to hate that phrase)that isn't made into a media product.It's not that easy believe me.

Professor Brian Cox OBE is a Royal Society research fellow and a holder of the Institute of Physics Kelvin Prize.He works at European Organisation for Nuclear Research (CERN) on the largest physics projects even seen on our planet (the Large Hadron Collider).He achieved all of this despite leaving school with a Grade D in Mathematics.He now presents and co writes the BBCTV series Wonders Of The Solar System.

Pretty impressive eh?

But the one thing that the media has chosen to publicise about him is that he played keyboards in D:ream.The Labour party chose to use their one and only hit,Things Can Only Get Better,in their 1997 General Election campaign.

I rest my case....

Don't tell them everything...

I see that Ladbrokes are offering 4/1 that more than 400,000 people will state their religion as “Jedi” in next month’s census.

For crying out loud why?


My opposition has nothing to do with US arms firm Lockheed Martin being paid £150million to organise the census, although that is offensive on just so many levels.

My point is simply what IS the point? In pre-internet, pre-hard-sell days when we didn’t have to submit every intimate fact about ourselves to buy a toaster, there was a point to us divulging 32 pages of personal details, every decade.

But today when computer databases hold so much information it would take a six-year-old two minutes to find out the precise nature of a personal injury that happened on a wet Thursday afternoon between Maths and Geography back in 1983, why bother?

How hard would it be to put together an accurate snapshot of modern Britain by scouring our NHS and NI records and adding that to all the information we’ve divulged to company questionaires? (my dead cat still gets offers of a pen from insurance firms after I filled in a pet food survey 5 years ago).

Why is this government wasting £480million on an out-dated paper exercise when they’re telling councils to sack thousands of staff because they’re skint? Especially when only law-abiding people will fill the census in, whereas those who have something to hide (illegal immigrants, benefits cheats, serial tax-avoiders) will use it to light-up a joint or some bootleg cigarettes,whilst drinking an alcopop.

Cuts aside, the timing is a joke because we’ve never felt less trust or apathy towards the faceless people who run our lives.

How much of the information we’ve given to civil servants in recent years, such as tax returns, child benefit records and health test results, have they mis-used or left in the back of cabs or even sold to identity theft criminals to supplement their supposed meagre wages?

Bungling MI5 officials cut photos of bomb suspects in half before sending them to US intelligence.

We don’t know how many people live here illegally and we’ve no confidence putting an elderly relative in NHS hospitals because we know the accountants would prefer to see them die.

Lib-Dems rule us despite ripping up every pledge they made to voters. We were kept in the dark about MPs screwing their expenses and we were taken into an illegal war against our will.

Yet they expect our trust when asking us every private fact about ourselves, down to who we sleep with.

They tell us to trust them to build an accurate picture of our country, to spend £480m wisely, and to not have our personal details stolen by Wikileaks or passed on to private companies.I don't know about you,but I'm just a little bit sceptical

But never mind, it’s only half-a-billion quid. And my dead cat could do with another pen.