The last 48 hours have been depressing.

Despite huge disaffection with the government, the disgrace that is NAMA, the bankers riding roughshod over the rules now that they’ve got their bailout, the public and private sector workers being set against each other, strikes and a nasty budget on the horizon, politicians that continue to steal our money with their expenses and get away with, a rotten economy, high unemployment, lack of opportunity in the jobs market, a property market still on the slide, sweeping corruption throughout state bodies with more revelations about FÁS, increases in crime levels, a public health service being destroyed slowly but surely by Mary Harney to bring about a two-tier system to make money for her friends in high places, a pathetic Green party helping to prop up FF to maintain their little bit of power and the basic fact that everyone in this country is going to suffer for years of a small minority swilling at the trough, the only thing that has sparked widespread public reaction of anger and outrage is a fucking football match.

How sad.

Ireland went out of the World Cup last night when Thierry Henry cheated and France scored. Of course emotions run high and it’s easy to point the finger of blame at one man when that misses the big picture entirely.

But it goes deeper than that. According to Bock the Robber, Thierry Henry knew before the game France would qualify. He says:

He knows this because he has been told it before the game kicked off. Thierry Henry knew his team would be going to South Africa before they played one second of the first leg in Dublin.

Why?

Because we now know clearly that soccer has no credibility whatever. We can see now that soccer is a profoundly corrupt activity, with no purpose except to make money for people like Thierry Henry and his masters.

Frankly that is beyond stupid as anyone who knows anything about the game of football will tell you. A game was played over 120 minutes, there was no pre-determined outcome. Yet Bock uses words like ’scam’ and ‘fix’, when clearly it was nothing of the sort. It was unfortunate for Ireland but it wasn’t a fix.

I mean, did FIFA fix it for Kevin Doyle to miss a great chance with a header? Did FIFA fix it for John O’Shea to be found free at the back post only to hoof the ball over the bar like a GAA player? Did FIFA fix it for Damien Duff to be clean through on goal only to miss a great chance? And did FIFA fix it for Robbie Keane to be one on one with the keeper only to fuck it up by trying to be too clever?

If they did that’s impressive work, isn’t it? And on top of that, did FIFA fix it so that Paul McShane, instead of doing what any Sunday League defender would have done and actually defended, fucked up so badly he allowed the ball to get through to Henry to handle it? A proper footballer would have cleared that ball, we wouldn’t even be talking about a handball now, we’d probably be moaning about the injustice of penalties or something similar.

While everyone goes on about Henry handling it did anyone count how many times Robbie Keane controlled the ball with his arm last night? Lots. And once late on in their box too. If he’d gotten away with it and scored how many people would be moaning about cheats today? The only difference is the referee saw Keane, he didn’t see Henry, and you can see why he didn’t see it. It was on the far side of the player, he didn’t put his hand too far out, he got away with it. If the ref had seen it he would have given a free kick, end of story. It’s a shame for Ireland that he didn’t, but shit happens.

Bock goes on:

In an office somewhere, or perhaps on a laptop, if you knew where to look, you’d find details of next year’s World Cup winners, and probably the final score.

Tonight, soccer lost whatever little credibility it had left. It’s over. It’s dead.

It’s bullshit.

No, your post is a load of bullshit, Bock. Thierry Henry might be a ‘cheating fuck’ but he’s not a stupid fuck who doesn’t know what he’s talking about.

The handball was a factor in Ireland not qualifying for the World Cup but don’t lose sight of the fact that Ireland could, and probably should, have had the game sewn up by then. Our failure to score another goal and our failure to defend a bog-standard free kick is just as much to blame as Thierry Henry.

And the authorities had nothing to do with any of it.

The report of the Commission on Taxation is launched today. New measures introduced will be a property tax which everyone must pay if they so much as look at a property. Those who actually own one and have been taxed to the fucking hilt already with stamp duty will be pleased to know that their hilt is going to take another pounding. They’re not just going to ‘put the tip in’, a wise man often said, it’s going all the way. And it’ll be sore.

Water tax. As we live on an island where it rains all the time water is a scarce commodity. There’ll be a 20c increase in bottles of water that you get in shops that are just tap water run through an industrial sized Brita filter while all showers in Ireland are to become coin slot operated costing €1 a minute.

A new rate of income tax will be introduced. This rate, to keep things simple, will be called ‘ALL’.

A carbon tax will mean that the Greens can look back in years to come and say ‘Well, people accused us of being soft. Of being Fianna Fail’s puppets. Of going back 0n every principle we ever had just to hang on to that little bit of power which we so greedily suckled on, like it were some magic teat. Yet in the end did we not do our bit for the environment? Did we not care for ozones and stratospheres and mesospheres and invisible stuff at the expense of people who did not give the slightest shit about them? Yes, we did. We made life even more expensive on the back of a foolish belief that it was everyone’s duty to care for the planet. That ‘Gaia’ needed us to care for it, thus making the outrageous, self-indulgent assumption that we weren’t the first of many bacteria to have dwelt on this vast rock and that we couldn’t just be wiped out in a second for everything to start again in another form. At least we did that”.

Use of the sun to see, grow crops or to not plunge into another ice-age will be regulated and taxed appropriately.

Car owners will be subjected to a new ‘wheel levy’ of €200 per wheel per annum while the ‘tyre tarrif’ is expected to raise enough money to bail out 15 property developers per annum.

Air Duty is to be discussed with a proposal that impositions are paid on the basis of lung capacity.

Anyone wishing to emigrate must pay a €3,999.99 departure tax.

Someone wake me up when I’m poor enough to be lying in an alley drinking paint stripper with no idea what’s going on apart from the fact this bottle of paint stripper is a fine vintage.

I have recently been watching the Historical and not at all fictional show Rome. It is set in Rome and there are lots of Romans in it. There are also some  Jews but that’s not important right now.

Anyway, the thing is when Romans were displeased they tended to get all stabby. A quick evisceration here, a stealthy transpiercing there. No messing about, stab, stab, stab, you’re dead, away we go. And anyone who has seen the news cannot have failed to notice the rise in knife crime.

Coincidence or is Ireland becoming Roman? Are more people wearing sandals, for instance? Is there a healthy slave trade? Are we punishing criminals by having them eaten by lions for our own amusement? If not at the moment then the emergence of these things should be all the proof we need. And if it does happen what should we do? I for one say we should embrace it.

For a start the problem of overcrowding in prisons could be solved by large felines consuming convicts. Would anyone have any great objection if bankers and those who got us into this financial crisis were crucified in the Phoenix Park? I don’t think so and by Caesar it would act as a deterrent to those who manage our financial institutions now.

And let us not forget the Roman Empire was powerful and spread far and wide across Europe. As unemployment rises conscription provides a wage and a job for those who would do little else but sit around and drink cans of Dutch Gold. Our armies can march forth and it would be a brave man who would take on the gougers and sly-fighting bollixes that would face them. Soon the Irelandium empire would be all powerful, we’d be out of recession, the distribution of punto denarii would be like a million SSIAs and all would be well again (apart from all the stabbing but nothing’s perfect).

Sometimes, just sometimes, you need to take a few steps backwards before you can move forwards again.

Can you believe this shit?

A NEW crime of blasphemous libel is to be proposed by the Minister for Justice in an amendment to the Defamation Bill, which will be discussed by the Oireachtas committee on justice today.

Minister for Justice Dermot Ahern proposes to insert a new section into the Defamation Bill, stating: “A person who publishes or utters blasphemous matter shall be guilty of an offence and shall be liable upon conviction on indictment to a fine not exceeding €100,000.”

Fuck right off. While I’m quite happy to accept the fact that some people need the crutch that is religion to get through life, and I’m quite happy to let people believe in whatever they want, this is absurd.

Ireland is a secular state, I really thought we were making progress in that regard. The Catholic Church bum-fucked this country for years. We’ve been witness to a litany of abuse, corruption, crime and very little punishment. They’ve made millions from the people of Ireland down the years. And now we could go to jail and get a fine of up to €100,000 for ‘blasphemy’? Give me strength.

And let’s look at it this way – how can you blaspheme something which does not exist? There is not the slightest shred of evidence that such a being as ‘God’ exists. There are holy books and sacred scrolls but none of them prove the existence of God.

So until such time that there is irrefutable proof that God is real then you cannot blaspheme. Belief and faith in God are no substantiation, or transubstantiation. The fact that millions of people believe in God, or Allah or whatever flavour of the one idea, is no proof that God exists.

This is possibly the stupidest thing I’ve ever heard. It’s like saying you can be fined for libelling Santa Claus or the fucking Tooth Fairy.

Here’s what I think, if there is a God then he’s a fucking cunt. Possibly the biggest cunt that the world has ever seen. Bigger than Gerry Ryan, worse than Cristiano Ronaldo, he makes Hitler look positively fun-loving. How many have died in the name of God? How many have been tortured, raped, mutilated, oppressed? I’d say you could live to 500 and you wouldn’t be able to count that high.

And the number of people whose lives have been made better by this most outrageous of human fictions is far, far less I’d wager.

It is unbelievable to me in this day and age that people with education and learning still believe in God. It’s nonsense. It’s a fairy-tale but the grimmest, bloodiest fairy-tale of them all. I do not believe in God. That is my right. And until somebody gives me proof positive that God exists then you cannot libel or blaspheme him/her/it.

So what if something is offensive to someone’s religion? Don’t read it. Don’t listen to it. Don’t watch it. I find the whole concept of religion offensive. That we in the 21st century still tolerate religions which make women cover themselves from head to toe, that make homosexuality a crime punishable by death, that spread fear and set man against man simply because they choose to believe something different, that shortcircuits people’s brains so they fly planes into buildings for fucking fucks sake, is offensive to me. It’s a shocking sad indictment of the human race. How advanced we are.

We deny people medical treatment on the basis of religion, we deny them the chance to have their diseases cured because working with stem cells goes against their precious sensibilities, it’s madness.

The most uncaring, closed-minded, ignorant people are, in my experience, those who try and live by the teachings of a book written thousands of years ago. Their behaviour totally at odds with what their faith allegedy preaches. Religious fundamentalists are the most dangerous people on this planet.

God is a cunt. In all his guises. ‘His’ word has caused so much pain and misery and suffering in the world, and for what? Seriously, for what? Someone tell me.

So stick your fucking blasphemy clause up your hole, Dermot Ahern and anyone else who tries to make it part of our consitution.

I’ll blaspheme whoever the fuck I want.

Update: And one thing I forgot to mention – doesn’t this government have better fucking things to be doing at the moment?

Unemployment rising, the ESRI report saying that “Ireland was set to experience the sharpest fall in economic growth experienced by an industrialised country since the Great Depression”, banks insolvent, deflation, health cuts, education cuts, and everything else that’s wrong, and they’re wasting time on this?!

The perfect illustration of why FF must be obliterated in the local/european elections, and then in the next general election.

So you can get penalty points for not having an up to date NCT now? What a load of old cunt.

Here’s how the NCT works. You go in, they put your car through the whatsit, some fucker from Eastern Europe or Kenya tells you that your car ‘kaput, no worky!’ and then you have to go, get the kaput thing fixed, pay again and then you car is all right.

And when you get your NCT it’s supposed to be for two years, yet I had my car NCTd last January and it’s up for renewal at the end of this month.

The whole thing is just a load of rip-off bollocks.

They should give penalty points to the cunts who keep thinking up new ways to give us penalty fucking points.