SEEMS LIKE EVERY TIME YOU TURN AROUND THERE'S ANOTHER HARD LUCK STORY THAT YOU'RE GONNA HEAR.

Hard to keep up with foreign sorrow. Our thoughts and prayers, as good dwellers in the land of moral cliche, are infinitely elastic but I am temporarily suspending my thoughts  and prayers for the Ebola victims, their heroic British carers - that nurse bloke, isn't he just magic, Pope oughta make him a saint, if you ask me, if he's a catholic, even if he's not - and their political leaders and transferring them to the family, friends and team-mates of that cricketer, the one who surprisingly  had his head smashed-in by a cricket ball, Oh and at the same time I must remember to include in my thoughts and prayers the poor cunt who threw the ball at his head in the first place. Who'da thought it, eh, a speeding projectile hitting someone on the head and killing them|? 

 I mean, I was thinking about and praying my arse off for Ebola victims for just the longest time and I could still find some kneeling-time for world cricket but with those people killed and traumatised in the Cafe Lindt, down under,  I had to kinda reach for the newly imperative baton of  sanctimonious futility  which Prayer was passing me and start all over again, thinking and praying like a good 'un, only not, obviously, for the Raghead bastard who did it. And anyway, even if I was to have acted like a proper Christian and not just a smarmy fucking hypocrite, if I'd prayed for the deranged wog it wouldna worked because he was a fucking muslim, no point praying for those Godless, heathenbastard fuckpigs, is there, not with what they believe in, the God of Isaac and Abraham, I mean, what kinda Godshit is that, Abraham? 

Well, I say I was praying for the victims of Cafe Lindt, and I was, at  least I was  until those eight Aussie kids, was it eight, were killed the following day and then Fuck me, Jesus, I hadda re-prioritise my whole prayer schedule all over again. And that was before,  back here, in the land of the prayerful and thoughtful television news-watcher, that copper got topped in Liverpool and the Chief Scouse Constable asked for prayers not just for this dead bloke and his family and his mates but for the whole fucking police family.  Not sure if it was the Chief Constable or the head of the local police lodge,  the latter being the senior man it was probably him led the call for rozzer-prayer. It's like it says at the top, seems like every time you turn around there's another hard-luck story that you're gonna hear.

I was reading somewhere about news saturation, about it resulting in a condition described as Learned Helplessness.  There is  so much shit, yet there is none of it which we can influence in the slightest fashion; what is the point in knowing of it? As it comes in, from whoever deems it newsworthy, hundred grand a year newsreaders emote their empty heads off and  I would, too, for that money, Christ, I'd rend my clothers, tear my hair, weep and fucking wail and wear sackcloth and ashes for a couple of hours a day in return for two grand a week.  But I can't do it for nothing, acting.

And I don't actually care about the massacred, rich Pakistani children, probably, in the scheme of things, better the children of the rich get killed than the poor little fuckers crawling over the rubbish dumps.  I could say that I cared but I don't, I simply don't. Oh, I can think myself into others' horrors as well as the next man;  all those people being minced alive as the WTC towers collapsed in free fall, must've been fucking awful  for them; most of them, those that weren't shitting themselves and biting their own flesh, would have thought that somehow they'd be rescued, wouldn't have expected the fucking things just to collapse and that would have been a bit of a mercy, not knowing,  expecting Bruce Willis to fly in and helicoper them all to safety, yodelling WhoopeeKiYay Motherfuckers, but even so, as the floors started to fall away under them and the beams and concrete started smashing into them it would have been  a desperate, shit-spurting horrorshow. Aw, fuck, I dowanna die with my pants all fulla my own shit.  Doesn't matter son, yer getting minced-up so small nobody'll ever know. They just gonna give yer relations a box with some rubble and dust and bitsa mince.

 And the kids in Peshawar, they'd have been confused and terrified; the pain, the smell, the blood and shit; the noisy, angry men, shouting at them, shooting them, killing them;  the ghastly realisation that their own grown-ups could not save them from other grown-ups;  poor little bastards.  But I don't care about it. It was a world away. And if I did choose to feign caring then, tomorrow, tomorrow and tomorrow, Sorrow's emmisaries would visit other victims in other lands, demanding again my thoughts, my prayers. skymadeupnewsandfilth have us so filled now  with horror, mayhem and endless slaughter that, like Macbeth,  we are become, for our own trembling sanity,  innured to it all. And all our yesterdays have lighted fools 
the way to dusty death.

But even should we want it so, there's nothing special about this atrocity, no  matter what skymadeupnewsandfilth piously says. Uncle Sam does it all the time, for Freedom, y'unnerstand, gotta kill them nigger children, because God put our great republic here to do that very thing.  Never was a holier, righteouser, more freedom-lovin' nation of slave masters than the Yew-nited States;  shit, sonny, ain't you never hearda Merkan Exceptionalarityism?  All in a day's work for the US AirCorp, murdering some  nigger kids;  what, pray, Emily, Dermot and JonSox, is  different about the Talimen doing it?

And not just Uncle Sam; our last government and opposition are Macbeth-steeped in blood, not the blood of noble conflict, but the blood of atrocious warcrime, of civilian-targeted firebombings, of drive-by shooting;  they must hear the torture-shrieks of Abu Graib and Camp Guantanamo,  Miliband major and Jack Torture, the agonised cries  which they have tried so hard, on behalf of their American masters, to stifle; by comparison, the Taliban engage in child's play.

From the haughty, greedy whores, Tony and Imelda, to grubby spear carriers in the parliamentary ranks, there is no Tory or Labour member who can plead  innocence of atrocity far graver than those perpetrated by - whatever you want to call them - Mujahadein, Taliban, Baa'thist, Sunni or Shi'ite, the Ragheads, whom we must now obediently excoriate anew.

Former British minister, war criminal  and common  crook, Geoff Hoon, could speak to us of atrocity.

Hoon on being biombed to democracy. From wikipedia

Shortly after the US/UK led invasion of Iraq began in 2003, following an admission by the Ministry of Defence that Britain had dropped 50 airborne cluster bombs in the south of Iraq and left behind up to 800 unexploded bomblets, it was put to Hoon in a Radio 4 interview that an Iraqi mother of a child killed by these cluster bombs would not thank the British army. He replied "One day they might." Hoon continued "I accept that in the short term the consequences are terrible. No one minimises those and I'm not seeking to do so," he said. "But what I am saying is that this is a country that has been brutalised for decades by this appalling regime and that the restoration of that country to its own people, the possibility of their deciding for themselves their future ... and indeed the way in which they go about their lives, ultimately, yes, that will be a better place for people in Iraq."^[8]

  Hoon and Extraordinary Rendition

Hoon was condemned by an international delegation of European MPs for evading questions about Britain's co-operation with the CIA's so-called 'extraordinary rendition' programme.^[11] Hoon, then Minister for Europe, was being quizzed in the wake of Dick Marty's Council of Europe report which found extensive involvement of European countries, including Britain, in the US kidnapping and torture programme.

Hoon and C4 Dispatches lobbyist investigation

Main article: 2010 Cash for Influence Scandal

Hoon was one of the MPs named in the 2010 sting operation on political lobbying by the Channel 4 Dispatches programme. Hoon told an undercover reporter that he wanted to translate his knowledge and contacts into something that "frankly makes money".^[21] On 22 March 2010 it was announced he had been suspended from the Parliamentary Labour Party, alongside Patricia Hewitt and Stephen Byers.^[22]

For a war crimnal of Hoon's untroubled conscience and dark accomplishments,  being supended from a party he was anyway leaving does not even amount to a smack on the greedy wrist.

Hoon and most of his erstwhile colleagues  are responsible for  a global cataclysm of warcrimes, atrocities, human rights violations, for a massive bilking, by GlobaCorp, of trillions of tax dollars and pounds, for setting alight the Middle East and South East Asia, for making millions refugee and for the killing and maiming of  hundreds of thousand.  At the end of his crime spree, Hoon whined that, now, the right thing, the responsible thing for him to do was make some money. For his family.

 Filth like Geoff Hoon make the Taliban look like juvenile delinquents; worse, he is cause to their effect.

Lest we forget quite how rancid  was NewLabour, its every last  parliamentary, constituency and union member, here's Geoff,  setting the record straight.