7 May 2026

The main beneficiaries of the current Iranian debacle are Russia and the oil companies. The rest of the world pays the price for the policies of this malignant US regime. Putin smirks in the Kremlin.

Picture of the Week

The Met Gala eh, sponsored by Amazon slave-driver Jeff Bezos and his ludicrous confection of a wife. It inspired blanket coverage across the international media. Fiddling while the world burns and Israel continues its slaughter in Gaza, Lebanon and the West Bank. What a fucking obscenity. If only the carnage, that is continuing with the tacit support of the EU (you too Micheal Martin) and the USA, got as much coverage from our cowardly and complicit press. Moral outrage used to lead to concrete action but Israel continues with impunity - unimpeded. Anything seems permissible in this amoral new world. We have some elections coming up, the first and only question I’d ask any candidate is what are you going to do about Israel. Ban the fuckers from everything I say - not just the piddling Eurovision. And perhaps the Irish software companies doing business with them should examine their consciences rather than their balance sheets.

The Moronic InfernO

Another guided missile from Kornetzke’s Substack:

“The dehumanization of Palestinians isn’t an unfortunate byproduct of this project. It is the engine of it. And it always has been—because Zionism was never some divinely ordained mandate. It was a political project, birthed from the dominant ethnic nationalist logic of 19th century Europe and applied to the Jewish people, which means it carried from its very inception the same fatal flaw every ethnic nationalist project carries: it required someone else’s erasure. That engine doesn’t just destroy Palestinians. It manufactures the very hatred it then uses to justify itself—a self-feeding cycle of atrocity and blowback that grinds on and on, fueled by the corpses of people who had nothing to do with any of it, while monsters like Randy Fine sit safely somewhere and condescendingly explain to you why it’s all completely necessary.

What humanity is catastrophically failing to understand—what our media, our politicians, and our moral and spiritual frameworks are almost universally refusing to center or even honestly discuss—is something that should be bleeding obvious by now: settler colonialism is not an identity. It is not a religion or an ethnicity or a culture deserving of deference. It is a mechanism of empire—one with a consistent, documented playbook across every continent it has ever touched: displace, dehumanize, confine, starve, annihilate, justify. Active participation in that mechanism is a set of actions. And actions have consequences that rebound. That is not a political opinion. That is just how the real world works.

Gaza is not a battlefield in any honest sense of that word. It is an open-air death camp—and has been for decades, long before most of the world decided to pay attention. A death camp that was already being demolished slowly and deliberately: by starvation, by economic blockade,by the calculated restriction of food and water and medicine and movement, and by the meticulous, bureaucratic engineering of human desperation.”

Musical Interlude

What’s Going On, Marvin Gaye’s stone masterpiece, seems particularly apt for our troubled times. “Mother, mother / There’s too many of you crying”. It was written in 1970 at the height of the anti-Vietnam movement and continuing Civil Rights disturbances. Gaye himself had a troubled and drug-damaged life - culminating in his murder. He was shot by his father, after intervening in a fight between his parents - using a gun Gaye had given him as a present. The father bizarrely got away with a 6-year suspended sentence. What’s going on indeed.

What’s Going On by Marvin Gaye

Sporting Highlights

The May Chester meeting with its classic trials and tight sprint handicaps is one of my favourite meetings. The compact little course, with Chester’s viaduct looming in the background, is one of the most characterful in the country. Because of its tight bends and confined space, it tends to favour low-drawn horses and horses who have shown previous course form. The two classic trials last Tuesday for the Derby and the Oaks were both won in emphatic style by Aidan O’Brien. So look out for Amelia Earhart in the Oaks and Benvenuto Cellini in the Derby. You heard it here first.

A Morsel of Memoir

Watching Spinal Tap 2 on Netflix last night (which I thoroughly enjopyed) I was brought back to a spectacular event in San Francisco in 1997 in which I was involved. I was working with Dublin software pioneers IONA Technologies and was responsible for implementing its branding and identity policies. We had gone all rock-and-roll with a burgeoning art collection, a Richard Avedon style series of advertisements based on staff photographs, and hiring what was left of Canned Heat (Al Wilson long gone alas) for our annual party. But this SF gig was our biggest and most ambitious. Using local branding guru, Stan Slap (a Ted Danson look-alike with chutzpah to burn), we hooked up with the famous Bill Graham organisation. They organised the original Spinal Tap band to play at an event we put on to coincide with Javaone - a huge trade show at the Moscone Centre where the cream of software engineers from around the world congregated. Our products were designed for use by software engineers, so the idea was to invite a load of them to a memorable party, thereby inclining them to look with favour on our wares. I was involved in organising it so I got to visit the Bill Graham HQ where I was introduced to the legendary Bonnie Simmons. She was an all-purpose heroine of the SF rock scene, a popular DJ, manager of the Stones when on tour in the USA, director of the Rock and Role hall of fame, and curator of the memory of Bill Graham, who had died tragically in a helicopter accident. We got on very well and I spent an hour chatting to her in her office with her little dog curled up in its bed beside her. The original Spinal Tap film was very popular with the IT community so we had no problem getting an audience for the gig. Tickets were in huge demand and were distributed to attendees at Javaone through a process lost in the mists of time. Suffice to say hierarchies were observed. There was one fundamental snag, the IT industry was dominated by males in those days. Especially the engineering divisions - our target audience. One of my tasks was to circulate in some of the happening bars around SF and present likely looking ladies with tickets. There was no shortage of takers - I remember particularly a couple of comely Argentinian girls that I met at Specs in North Beach. A location that was a particularly fruitful source of interesting women. The gig itself was by no means a spoof - it was played for real like a standard heavy metal gig. We even had laminate hierarchies with backstage access to hangout with the group for the chosen few. There was plenty of room for dancing and general cavorting in the main hall, downstairs there were arrays of gaming machines, and upstairs we had some kind of burlesque show with scantily clad women entertaining us and sofas for the lingering voyeurs. At the end a few of us got to join the band on stage for its finale - I abused a tambourine out front. Apparently IONA spent a million plus on the gig - a huge amount of money at the time. It was however nothing compared to its disastrous acquisition of Bluefish, a Santa Clara company with a glamorous profile that turned out to have nothing behind it and ultimately caused our downfall. Due diligence was scandalously neglected. But fun times before the fall.

Poetry Corner

No Thomas Hardy yet, we must remedy that. This poem was written after the death of his cousin Tryphena Sparks in 1890. Hardy, who was susceptible to a well-turned ankle, was clearly in love with this lady sometime in the past. But their lives took them apart and it’s a poem of nostalgia and mild regret. But he provides himself with the consolation that perhaps he retains the best of her in his memory: “Yet haply the best of her fined in my brain”. My old English lecturer, the poet John Montague, was a big fan of Hardy and his love poems, especially those written after the death of Hardy’s first wife Emma. I remember encountering him sitting on the steps of D’Arcy’s bohemian B & B on Wellington Road in Cork, on a sunny afternoon, reading from Hardy’s Collected Poems to his newly acquired girlfriend (later 3rd wife) Elizabeth. Montague was another poet whose best work came in his love lyrics.

Thoughts of Phena at News of Her Death

Not a line of her writing have I
Not a thread of her hair,
No mark of her late time as dame in her dwelling, whereby
I may picture her there;
And in vain do I urge my unsight
To conceive my lost prize
At her close, whom I knew when her dreams were upbrimming with light
And with laughter her eyes.

What scenes spread around her last days,
Sad, shining, or dim?
Did her gifts and compassions enray and enarch her sweet ways
With an aureate nimb?
Or did life-light decline from her years,
And mischances control
Her full day-star; unease, or regret, or forebodings, or fears
Disennoble her soul?

Thus I do but the phantom retain
Of the maiden of yore
As my relic; yet haply the best of her—fined in my brain
It may be the more
That no line of her writing have I,
Nor a thread of her hair,
No mark of her late time as dame in her dwelling, whereby
I may picture her there.