Someone's telling the Truth on the TV - I've lived too long........

I don't suppose that I'm alone in noticing that global warming (or shall we be PC and call it "climate change"?) has suddenly become all the rage again? Today, I was warned by a particularly smug geologist-type guy that we'd already used up "two thirds of the World's resources", and that we are "living beyong our means". I can remember (and I'm only 38, hardly Methusalah) when Global Warming was right up there with Close Encounters and Crop Circles on the "Crazy of the Week" chart; only beardie open-toe-sandalled Green Party activists and Fortean Times readers gave it a second thought. Now it comes just behind the Royal Wedding and Michael Jackson on the BBC, so I suppose the Governement (not the idiots we elected 4 years ago, but the civil-service heirocracy behind them that makes the real decisions in the UK) , have finally decided that, since even parts of England (Cornwall hasn't got long, I reckon) are falling into the sea, they'll have to come clean.

Hence the smug geologist or climatologist or whatever. They've been saying this as a profession (except those who get paid to contradict them of course) for years and years, and finally, finally someone listens! And of course they're going to say "I told you so!" Wouldn't you, if you'd been telling "society" the same thing for 20 years, and it suddenly collectively woke up and said "Wait a minute, what happened to my planet?" The temptation to pull out one's beard and scream "You Ate It!!!!" (because that's what it boils down to - humans eat, societies consume, and a heap of shit is the net result) must be almost unbearable - well done all you climatologists etc., who haven't ended up on the soft-wall-ward, and who currently aren't doing 20-30 for strangling a complete stranger in an elevator who just happened to say "Is it just me, or are we getting more hurric - aaargh!!" The temptation must be severe. Morituri te salutatem.

Here's a good one, too. "The Government yesterday downplayed warnings by climatologists that....". Oh yes? And that helps, does it? Pretending something isn't happening as a coping-strategy; let's just examine that one, shall we? I have a 4-year-old who tries it, but even she, faced with the undeniable evidence of an unauthorisedly-empty ice-cream tub, generally puts her paws up and gives in. In fact, she's just recently giving up entirely on that as a strategy; she's got "it wasn't me" in R&D at the moment. So we have Governments who are at about the stage of development, collectively, of a 4-year-old. A very bright 4 year-old, no denying that, but surely we should be expecting a bit more from our elected representatives? What happens when Bangladesh disappears below sea-level then? Will that be our global Empty Ice-cream Tub, the one we can't possibly explain away? And species-wise we're going to encounter the very same problem my daughter is having with "It wasn't Me!". Nobody except she and I live in this apartment; if it wasn't her, then it must have been......er, no, that's not going to work, it it? But just in case, let me be the first to take up the cry: "It wasn't the Dolphins!"

There is something profoundly wasteful, I think, about a race capable of building Mont St. Michel, or composing vast and beautiful music for gods or for pleasure, dreaming all the dreams the human race has conjured up in poetry and song, drowning in it's own shit, but there you go. The water that covers Bangladesh ("Who ate the ice-cream? George? Tony? Did you eat the ice-cream?") will be full of condoms and raw sewage, mutant fish like we find in the "Hospital Zones" of the North Sea nowadays, old fridges and car tyres, plastic which will continue to exist as the framework of a six-pack of beer forever. Scary that, really; long after I'm dead, the plastic that held together every six-pack or four-pack I've ever drunk will still be existing somewhere, flopping listlessly in the heart of a conglomeration of algae and scum that have used it's handy cellular shape to carve out an ecological niche in the suffocating seas. And somewhere, clinging on to the heights of some Andean or Himalayan non-toxic zone, or deep in a bunker somewhere, a Government will be "downplaying" reports of roving gangs of mutant cannibal lobster-men..........

I'm writing this a week before the General Election in the UK. We've had the deeply unedifying spectacle of our politicians competing to hump the country dry - I mean, form a Government for the next 4 years. Like most people of my age, I've given up actually voting for people, I just vote against the real Loony Toons (BNP, UKIP, The Conservatives). Scum will always float to the top, and that's what we get in British politics too, one shouldn't kid oneself otherwise. But for the first time, Labour, the actual party in Government and Party most likely to form the next Govt, according to the polls, have included "Climate Change" in their manifesto (or at least speeches), referring to it as the single most important issue confronting mankind. Wehey for the Earth! then, you might think. At last someone (someone political, I mean, not us sad old hippies who've been banging on about it for decades) is taking things seriously!

However, this doesn't change the fact that the ice-cream has been eaten. Maybe I should change this metaphor; maybe the ice-cream was in fact devoured by a man-made virus originally designed to - yeah, ride it, jojo, this is a good one - break down fat molecules on the insides of your fridge and make cleaning that much easier (for your Phillipino maid), which unexpectedly, I mean literally a 1 in 5 billion chance, has spread to the ice-cream and is now threatening the entire dairy-product section of the refrigerator. "The Government is downplaying scientists' fears that the virus has jumped or will jump the "species barrier" to the Parma ham......", whilst "Christian leaders are reminding the faithful that a "kosher kitchen" comes from the Old Testament in the first place". Meanwhile, "The manufacturers of "FatBuster(TM)" were unavailable for comment, but a source close to the DA's office has hinted that the company has filed for bankruptcy and the directors are now in hiding on or near Mount Annapurna." The metaphor may change, the script never.

Back in the '80s, I was very involved with the Green Party. This wasn't because I was utterly stupid; even then, I didn't actually expect all the Evil Plutocrats to listen to what I had to say and acheive Ecological Enlightenment overnight. I was just more prepared to put my scrawny back to the Immovable Object and shove. I think I imagined, just because we were right, and the earth really was going down the drain (in the middle of the Pacific Ocean, where do you think?), pointing this out to people would be enough to change attitudes and behaviour. I didn't understand then, as I do now, that the "World", as we call it, is actually owned by about 1000 or so really rich people, who are mostly very old, and who don't give a shit about the rest of us because they're going to be dead soon anyway. Incidentally, I bet Bill Gates pisses them all off a treat. These really rich people live in the shadows normally; Bill Gates openly being rich (and philanthropical to boot) all over the place has probably cost them a couple of heart-transplants each. It must be a bit like the Lord High Mandrake or whatever they call the boss Mason "coming out" on TV, apron, trouser-leg and all.

So, as an end-time phenomenon, someone telling the truth on the TV beats any number of 2-headed goats for me. What were those Horsemen again? War, Famine, Pestilence and Death, right? And they're supposed to "ride forth", I believe, at the end of the world. Maybe someone should let them know the party has started without them, that it's turned out to be a secular do after all. Or should that be ecumenical?

Appealing Ideas #3 - possibly

This is only a possibility, appealing though it is, because I'm not sure if it's an Idea or a Corporate Marketing Strategy for California(TM). This is how it goes.

Somewhere far across the Western Ocean, Beyond the Setting Sun as the bards used to say, lie (variously) Avalon, the Blessed Isles, Lyonnesse, The Isles of the Young, Valinor for my hobbit friends, or, to cut a long saga short, some form of Heaven-on-Earth often involving scantily-clad maidens (some of whom would eat you). I personally think that the persistence of this Idea of lands beyond the sunset is due to the folk memory of the rare, long interspersed but definite pre-Columbian visits to the Americas. We know the Vikings went there, the Polynesisans, the Pheonicians almost certainly, the Irish in the Dark Ages; as civilisations rose and fell (along with levels of technical development) here in Europe and Africa, so these expeditions of trade or colonisation were mounted.

There are enough "unexplained" human remains (peoples or races which shouldn't have been there at that specific time but inexplicably are, to the annoyance of antroplogists and the glee of Erich von Daniken supporters) to make it a fair working hypothesis (for me, at any rate); the problems would have been, I suppose, that it's is such a very very long way to the Americas, and once you got there, in your reed-boat with your Pheonician equivalent of metal key-rings of the Eiffel Tower and I-went-to-Athens-and-saw the-Acropolis T-Shirts, there wasn't anyone on a similar civilisational or technological level to trade with. The journey was too long and dangerous to make settlement a real possibility, until technology combined with population pressure and land-hunger here in Europe made it economical. So people came, had a look, thought "Nice people, nice country, but what can you get here you can't get cheaper in Massilia?" and forgot about the Americas again. But not quite; the memory of the Lands beyond the Setting Sun, the Blessed Realms, persisted in folk tales and folk memory.

So we're psychologically and culturally set up to believe in some kind of Paradise over the Western Ocean. This is why, I reckon, against all sense of reason and logic, we actually accept and even watch shows like "The O.C." I'm not singling this show out for any particular ingnominity, it's just a bloody good example of the genre and provides a handy title for this imaginary land - The Orange County. County, because this is obviously a small and exclusive Land, reserved for the Blessed; what kind of Paradise would it be if the hoi polloi were allowed to trample around throwing gum-wrappers and wearing Wal-Mart shoes? Orange because oranges need warm, lush, fertile land to ripen and grow, and that's what days are like in Paradise; lush and warm, with only the gentlest, softest sprinkling of summer rain (rainbow included) at convenient moments. And in this Blessed Land, The Orange County, live beautiful people, transcendent versions of ourselves, transfigured; yes, they have their moments of pain and confusion, but there's generally nothing that can't be worked out by "honesty" and "communication". We watch these beautiful avatars of ourselves grope through some moral dilemma or other, often hampered by their own touching naievety and inner shyness, until at last, in a blaze of glorious enlightenment the likes of which we can only dream of in our miserable lives, the simple Truth hangs limpid and transparent for all to see. There's always a moral, there has to be, for this is The Orange County, and even through suffering we gain access to our inner selves and our true emotions. There are "bad" people (although they're still beautiful, or at least very rich), but ultimately they only exist to point out the truth of the Moral and to set up the Dilemma in the first place.

I like this Idea because it gives me some kind of esoteric rationale for why so many people watch this kind of crap. I know why I do; I lost the remote for my bedroom TV, and if I'm Zenning mellowly on a Sunday morning I tend to just glide through those shows on autopilot until something I like comes on. Ultimately, I watch them because I'm too lazy to get out of bed and change channels manually, which says a lot about how sad my life has become of late. But the idea that millions (yes, that's millions) of otherwise normal intelligent people actually watch this godawful deadhead rubbish every week, that's quite scary. I just watched a brief snippet this morning of some show or other, and there was a woman at work wearing a bikini!! Please, introduce me to any woman on the face of this planet with the confidence to spend a day walking, sitting, standing, eating and going to the bathroom, in front of her colleagues, dressed in less fabric than it takes to make a decent napkin! If she exists, I want to meet her so that I can gawk. Who can she be, this Goddess who can sit on an office-chair without unattractively flattened thighs? Has she so throrougly waxed and depilated and coiffed that she's not worried about one single bodily or cranial hair? Is she, in short, made of plastic?

I've never been to California, which seems to be packaging itself as the New Improved Blessed Land, but I'm sure it's much like any other part of the Western world with, okay, better weather. Not everyone who lives in The Orange County is beautiful and inexplicably rich and has perfect teeth. What we're being granted is a brief glimpse into the supposed lifestyles of the planet's richest and most fortunate beings, the Princes of America, with the gentle subtext that they too suffer the slings and arrows etc., only with better haircuts. Here am I, lying in my bed with a joint and a coffee, having the only real downtime I get all week as a single mum; Sunday morning, when it's an understood convention for my daughter and I that Mama is going to be lazy and go back to bed after breakfast. Daughter watches a DVD in the living room of our tiny flat, I watch Friends and Hollyoaks on Channel 4 in the bedroom; we don't have a lot of money, my daughter and I, but already the electricity, the implied running water, the computer and the DVD put us in the top billion of this planets 6 billion inhabitants. I'm actually pretty grateful to be who I am, when I am and where I am, which is good, because otherwise when Friends morphed into Tales of The Orange County in whichever format it was being transmitted in (ugly strange oddbals are allowed in New York and Boston, but not in any of The Blessed Land incarnations I've seen yet), I'd probably get very depressed about not having a swimming pool or a therapist or (gods help me) and orthodontis.

I liked the Red Hot Chilli Peppers' "Californication" a lot; that's an Appealing Idea all in itself and Californication is a concept-encapsulating word I'd really like to have come up with myself. Oh well, we can't all be Oscar Wilde all the time. Still, it describes so well the brand image of the New Improved Blessed Land which is being packaged so successfully to us other citizens of the planet. It's pretty insidious really, when you put it together with the current Bush administration's Mission to democratise people back into the Stone Age. It would be so lovely, wouldn't it, to live in a house that outshone a Sultan's palace, drive a sleek car which only needed gas when you had a scene in a gas station, to be so beautiful and self-confident that even clothes are just gilding the lily. And we too could have that; The Orange County gives us something to aspire to, as all good Paradises should. I hate to think of how many women (and men) across the world are starving themselves and mutilating their faces and bodies in a doomed attempt to enter The Orange County; how many people are selling their souls and their bodies every hour of every day to live in that impossible, unsustainable Land. We all know, deep down, that it's a fantasy that has as much chance of actual existence as Fairyland, that in any case we'll never be rich enough or beautiful enough; a lot of us spend our lives (and lose them) trying, though. We even go to war for it.

I think the problem with The Orange County as a Paradise is simply this: money. It's a Capitalist Paradise; you can't get in just by being good or having faith or resculpting your face and your body, you have to be rich too. Obviously being white helps, if you don't want to spend your time in Paradise as the Butler, but even that isn't as important as being rich and having a swimming pool. A decent Paradise, the one which most religions get by on in one form or another, is open to all, providing you follow a certain ethical code - many of which, interestingly enough, actively encourage poverty in some form or other. Most of the really popular Paradises have no such thing as money, and are essentially pretty solipsistic; you, your soul, go to Paradise (who really believes they're going to the Other Place, after all?), and then good things happen to you according to your particular belief-system for all eternity. What you don't have to do, ever again, is wonder where your daily bread is coming from. In The Orange County, unfortunately, money (the lack of it and the love of it) is often both the plot and the moral; even when you've reached Transcendence, the ultimate expression of Incarnate Man, some shyster will still be trying to take it all away from you.

And then there's the above mentioned Other Place. Where do all the other 6.999 billion souls who never even make it to Central Casting go? It's the unfortunate flipside of having a Paradise; it has to be exclusive, if everyone went there anyway whatever they did, what would be the point of sticking to the rules? What would a Captialist Hell be like, I wonder? An eternity of working at Starbucks, paying off the interest on the interest of a loan you took out 6 years ago on a car that got stolen two weeks later because you left the keys in the ignition. So quite a bit like life then, but without the rare and precious good bits; except on Sunday mornings, maybe, when we could all watch The O.C.

Appealing Ideas #2, The Sequel: Is It Just Me?

I'm in two minds whether this is a perceptual or an actual phenomenon, and maybe I'll find that out as I write this. As I said in Appealing Ideas #2, over a period of some months I've received three of these scam-mails, and just to make the point, another plopped into my Junk-Mail Inbox today. This is coincidence of course, but it reminds me of when someone close to me died of cancer. Whenever I turned on the TV, it seemed, or opened a newspaper, there it was; cancer. At the time it almost most felt like some vast conspiracy; in retrospect, it was obviously perceptual. Cancer was and is and probably will be for a while always in the news, some breakthrough or setback or miracle cure. During the months I was grieving, I just noticed it more. But I'm just an observer of the phenomenon of e-bribery, I was commenting on its evolution because I received three, and the appearance of another so soon can hardly be perceptual. I've been "noticing" them, deliberately, for months now; the appearance of two in three days does suggest the scam is getting wider, or more popular.

I think I can discount targeting; after all, I've pointedly ignored two, and once offered to pass the details of the Innocent Widow's predicament to Amnesty International, or any one of a number of legitimate legal organisations who'd help her with an honest claim. Strangely enough, the Widow didn't reply; clearly she wasn't looking for legal advice. Since then, as previously described, they're growing more and more blantant.

Today's example is from a Mr. Taylor Smith, a PA to the Head of African Banking in the World Bank. That ought to be fairly easy to verify, surely, which suggests that Mr. Smith doesn't exist. However, he goes on to say that "Through the sale of World Bank allocated oil quota from OPEC and other activities which I cannot reveal for now (my italics), I have been able to make US $10.2 million, which is currently deposited in a Finanace and Security company". He goes on to explain that the deposit wasn't made by himself, and that he can't claim it personally because it's (and who would have guessed it?) against the "code of conduct" for civil servants in his country (not specified) to "acquire such an amount of money".

My stake in this virtuous enterprise has now increased to 30%, Mr. Smith colunteering to have deposit records altered to "reflect" that I was the "depositor and beneficiary", and all necessary paperwork supplied. Mr. Smith even goes on to mention the laws we'll be breaking, and the new post 9/11 International Monitoring of large international transactions. Nobody could possibly take up this offer and claim they weren't aware that it was illegal, and maybe that's the scam in itself. In the three months or so that I've been "observing" this Idea, it's changed from the Widow in Distress (which might fool some people, but not many) to a simple open invitation to break international law. An International Law which was, incidentally, specifically instituted post 9/11 to combat international terrorism.

I have to admit here that I'm a shameful conspiracy buff; I'm not saying, for incident, that Princess Di really was bopped by MI5 (although I do think that if she hadn't played Twister with the Pont D'Alma they'd have done it eventually), but it would certainly be more interesting if they had......Ahem. I'm just as interested in the "folklore" that's growing up about it. Each to his own, as the old maid said when she kissed the cow; recently, a few of my fellow conspirophiliacs have been getting twitchy and muttering into their metaphorical beer that you get "pinged" by the CIA if you visit certain sites, of which Al Jazeera is one. Also that there are certain "trigger words" that activate "internet surveillance", whatever that might mean; 9/11 is allegedly one of them, which is a damn shame for me because that happens to be my birthday.

This may be linked to my reading too many books by Stephen King and Dean R. Koontz, coupled with a more than average interest in and knowledge of subjects like the Iran/Contra fiasco and Watergate, but for some reason the CIA and the FBI have always seemed to me to be two-dimensional entities with one-dimensional ethics and null-dimensional intelligence. As I said in Appealing Ideas #2, I can't believe this is an serious attempt at international money-laundering, it's too random and stupid. Maybe I'm grossly maligning the creative departments of both these excellent, God-fearing agencies, but given their unparallelled innovation in the art of bidet-poisoning, it's fairly easy to imagine this Idea as a particularly stupid (even insultingly stupid) honey trap for anyone "guilty" of having Al Jazeera on their favourites list.

I'm not quite far gone enough to believe that this is directed at me personally; sadly my blog has a readership of 1 (me), so I'm not getting any feedback as to how diverse or wide-reaching this particular scam is. I could trawl the blogoshpere and come up with some info, I expect, but at the moment this is 1) my pet project and 2) a Clue, if I happen to be accidentally shot in the head (memo to self: keep away from libraries) and if Jessica Fletcher happens to be staying in the same hotel.

I'd very much like to have some kind of overall picture of who's been getting these particular scams; I'd really like to compare browser notes with them. There definitely seems to be a "progression" here, the Idea is evolving (though not in the direction of extra links, as I at first naively speculated) but towards an open invitation to commit a crime. That does seem a bit odd if the scam is really to get hold of your bank details; I think, on balance, I'd be less rather than more inclined to trust an avowed thief, at least not without some recognisable security. I can conceive of circumstances, maybe, perhaps, where I'd break the law for a stranger; I've broken it for a fox before, what the hell, a really good sob story might just possibly work on me if I was in a philosophical mood. I certainly wouldn't trust some crooked public servant; for US$300,000, I'd be more likely to get a discreet and succesful "suicide".

I wonder if I can get any information on this? What if, for instance, I typed in Taylor Smith, African Bank, Personal Assistant" - I think there'd be a fair chance of a "Did you mean....?" followed by a lot of legitimate organisations which sound vaguely similar but in fact have no connection with the alleged Mr. Smith. I'm half-tempted to go to stage one with this one, just to see what happens; at the moment I'm being asked to submit my "private telephone and fax numbers for easier communication" to smith1@coolkiwi.com, and I'd so like to follow this along and find out the real heart of the scam. The first thing they're asking for is a phone number, and you can get a lot of info from area codes etc. Then again, you can't tell where scammers (or others) are buying their information, or how extensive that is; asking my phone number may just be confirming they've got the right person/address.

I think Appealing Ideas may already be spawning a spin-off, something along the lines of Loony Conspiracy Watch; I think I may actually go to first base with the next one, just for research purposes, and keep Appealing Ideas as an "ongoing project" (unless I come across a really good one). This could be my Pulitzer Prize, man; I've read "All The President's Men", I could be on the point of exposing either 1) the stupidest attempt at international money-laundering ever carried out or 2) one of those gloriously insane "plots" that the US Security Agencies (both internal and external) seem to enjoy so much. You have to admit it, they really do. Who poisoned who's bidet again? And who among us doesn't have a private snigger when a politico or a high-ranking "moral authority" comes a cropper? Bishops in the bedsheets, Princes in tampons, Chief-Super-Intendents caught in brothels wearing lizardskin thongs, that's what we (at least in the UK) have come to expect of our elected and non-elected leaders.

And remember, when you read about suspected CIA involvement in the dramatic suicide/ murder/alien abduction of an obscure European woman who scrawled the message "Oh bugger, I was wrong all along, it was......." in her own blood as she was spirited away, you'll know you could have read it here first, if you'd bothered.

holojojo

Appealing Ideas #2

This Idea is appealing for totally different reasons than #1, and it has to do with an an altogether darker and dingier side of human nature. This Idea can be found lurking in many an Inbox or Junk-Mail folder, especially if you're like me and visit a lot of dodgy sites (all in the name of research, of course) - I've got Al Jazeera and the Ku Klux Klan on the same browser, I keep expecting my hard-drive to declare civil war. I get a lot of Junk, and because my main address is set to Contacts Only I have to trudge through it from time to time in case I've missed something personal. This morning, there were 118 (I'm lazy) and I came across yet another example of the Idea.

I think I've probably had three different versions of this, but the basic premise is always this: a person I've never heard of has been "searching the Net" for a discreet European and has settled on me for the obvious reasons - good vibes, nice aura, God told him/her to - to help them with a terrible financial catastrophe/opportunity which only a European bank account can avert/take advantage of. The amounts are usually in the mid $20 million U.S. For instance, my first was the widow of a recently disgraced (to death) Foreign Minister in an African country whose name I can't mention - because she didn't. Anyway, this honest and honourably-deceased Patriot just happened to have salted away as a large amount of readies in a Swiss Bank-Account (as you do) and his grieving widow, unjustly suspected by her husband's muderers of knowing where it is, can't get her hands on it personally. All I have to do is send my account details to (obviously-made-up Yahoo-address) and she'll cut me in for 10%.

Today's example was much the same in basic principles, but this time there was a verifiable plane-crash involved. Just in case I was cynical enough to doubt the existence of the horrifying disaster in which the Honest Patriot, his children, parents, grandchildren, spinster aunts and livestock perished, there was a handy link to a CNN News report. The Patriot was a Lebanese importer-exporter of Textiles and Automobiles (sic) in Benin, and his only surviving friend and lawyer, Humphrey Menssa (honest, I kid you not), International Barrister, needs a next-of-kin (with a bank account, obviously) to receive the US $27.4 million the Patriot handily deposited in a (you've guessed it) Swiss Bank Account. This is a good example of Ideas leading to other ideas; I'm now going to have to satisfy my curiosity about how likely it is that a Textile and Automobile entepreneur (?) in Benin could legitimately earn $27.4 million, which will mean finding out where Benin actually is. I'm digressing again, aren't I?

There's one distinguishing characteristic in all the e-mails I've received so far, as well as the Idea itself, and that's that they're all written in absolutely laughable English. I've seen DVD instruction manuals better than this. What I haven't decided yet is if that's a deliberate part of the scam - "you can trust me, I'm just a poor ignorant (fill in blank)" - designed to lull me into a false sense of superiority, or if they're genuinely as crap and disorganised as all that. If I wanted to pull off a scam in say, Estonian, I'd find myself someone with no scruples who could actually speak and write it properly for me - it surely can't be that hard to find unscrupulous people who can speak English, I know plenty myself. Or do they think that if I'm stupid enough to fall for such a lame scam then I won't notice the spelling?

Actually, they'd have a point there, and this is a bit of a flaw in the Idea for me; fair enough, I suppose, there probably is one born every minute but they tend not to have computers (or not for very long). If I was enough of a nutter to send my bank account details to bigfatcon.com I'd probably keep my savings in a biscuit barrel in the shed in any case. And a wicked little part of my mind, the little lawless chaotic part of me that lurks in the reptile-part of my brain, thinks "But I could do this so much better! You're targeting the wrong people! This is feeble!"

Because this Idea is a heat-seeking-missile set to greedy and stupid people, who really do believe you can get a free lunch; most of those people live on the peripherary of the rich and powerful, eating free lunches. People who are already rich or have power, political or otherwise, are generally a bit more intelligent (or cunning, or ruthless) than the hangers-on, that's why they're rich and powerful. This Idea should be touted around politicos, celebs and minor royalty, that's where you find the real bottom-feeders. If Humphrey Menssa put on a nice suit, hired someone with a title, and invited the right parasite for lunch at the Ritz, then the idea might be a goer.

The scam usually finishes with some reason why the money has to be claimed within a short period of time; in the case of my fictional Lebanese relation it was 14 days, or the money would revert to the State of Benin. As I said, I'll have to do a bit of research on Benin before I can swear to it, but I bet they're pretty poor. Or if not, then the people who live there are. I expect $27.4 million would come in very handy indeed; so, not only do you have to be greedy and stupid, you have to be pretty ruthless too. I can't bring myself to be sorry for anyone who's been taken in by this one, which is partly why I wanted to investigate the Idea further; this is not hassling fragile pensioners to change their gas company, or stealing charity boxes from shops to feed a habit. This is a sheer naked appeal to avarice and lack of scruples; Humphrey Menssa (Barrister and International Legal Practitioner) doesn't exactly say it's illegal in so many words, but he does ask me to "Please do not circumvent this information, handle it discretely " (sic again). So tough luck, suckers.

I can't bring myself to believe this is a serious attempt at international money-laundering, it's just too stupid and random. It certainly does speak volumes about our opinion of each other as a species, though. You get so much more access to cons and scams like this on the Net, and so many of them seem to rely on precisely the same Idea as this one; that enough people are going to be stupid and greedy enough that, no matter how poor they may be individually, it's at least worth trying in the aggregate. Any fool can set up an e-mail address and buy himself a list of addresses, as proved by the fact that so many do; write a sad letter (or rather, in this case, pay someone else to do it) and press Send. However, if I discount all forms of advertsising, which are legalised scams with better graphics, I'm definitely getting more obvious scams based on greed than on compassion at the moment.

Fake charity appeals had a brief moment of glory and, because I do contribute to a charity and unwisely got my name on everyone's mailing list, I did get one of those. It must have been clocked pretty quickly, though, because I knew about it beforehand; a lot more effort was put into it than into Humphrey Menssa's, even with the informative plane-crash link, and it did fool some people I believe. But scammers who do that kind of thing get very unpopular very quickly, and they don't tend to last long. Not to mention having dog-crap through the letter-box every day for the rest of their lives if caught. If I'd been ripped off while donating £50 to a dodgy disaster relief fund, I'd make a big fuss and complain to absolutely anyone who'd listen; if I got cleaned out plotting to defraud the State of Benin, I think I'd be inclined to slink off with my tail between my legs and never tell a soul.

So maybe the Idea is cleverer than at first take; it might snare less people overall, but it'll probably last a lot longer and if I've received three different ones then it's clearly evolving. The link to a real-world event is a new touch, and surely they'll get the language sorted eventually unless it is a deliberate ploy; American/English will probably hobble on as the Net lingua franca for a bit longer. And this Idea, this stupid and transparent scam, is about as close as it gets to a victimless crime as far as I'm concerned. Costs won't be passed on to taxpayers or the shareholders of insurance companies, no-one gets hurt anywhere but the pocket, and the scammers make no pretence of legitimacy. In fact, they offer an outright bribe for doing something that must be illegal; I really can't believe anyone who knows how to turn on a computer and navigate to their inbox could possibly believe it's legal to pretend you're the next-of-kin of a complete stranger and skim $200,000 dollars from a foreign government. Surely not. So the only people to suffer will be stupid unscrupulous people who don't see anything wrong with defrauding third-world countries (ahem! Mark Thatcher), and even they won't dare to complain.

I wonder if I followed the link and offfered my services, they'd cut me in on this Idea? I could write a seriously tempting letter with the right motivation, and I've got a suit.........

Newsflash - Human Being "Still not interested" In Jacko's Sex Life

Yeah, I know, what kind of a freak does that make me? Since I'm not currently otherwise occupied (in the middle of a war, for instance, or starving to death, or fighting a losing battle against Aids) who the hell do I think I am not to have an opinion on this? Popes die (or don't die), cities fall, whole countries battle hopelessly against rising sea-levels, Bird Flu threatens to swoop out of Asia and decimate us all, but Michael Jackson's trial still gets number one slot on the evening news. He's on page 1 of the newspapers (even the big serious ones), psychiatrists and pundits sit on TV studio sofas and discuss the ifs and the buts, political organisations and even churches are taking sides. So why can't I bring myself to care?

Certainly, the charges against him are serious ones, and deserve to be taken seriously. If they turn out to be true, then who could argue against packing him off to jail with the rest of the paedophiles? Having been (or not been) a victim himself doesn't excuse victimising others (if he did). In most cases, we could all sit back and let the court decide - a person is innocent until proven guilty, right? However, as OJ Simpson proved to all of us who bothered to take notice, in the US, justice is a saleable commodity. No offence, OJ, but plenty of people have been hanged, fried or injected on far less evidence, and in fact continue to be offed in States like Texas every month. A casual flick through the pages of Amnesty International Magazine will provide you with the names of plenty of people on Death Row who were convicted on far more tenuous grounds; Ryan Matthews, for instance, who was sentenced to death at age 17 for a murder which, 5 long years later, DNA evidence proved he didn't commit. Ryan is, in fact, the third juvenile offender in Louisiana to be sentenced to death for a crime of which he was later proved innocent; these three were lucky enough to be retried before the sentence was carried out. Anyone care to make a guess how many innocent people weren't so lucky?

So back to Jacko. It seems to me that the man (?) has no possibility of a fair trial, and that part of the blame for this lies with his own publicity machine. I don't like him, and if you put a gun to my head and demanded an opinion, I'd probably have to say I think he's as guilty as sin, but with so much money and publicity being thrown around I doubt very much we'll ever know the truth. If the boy in question really was abused, then shame on his family for allowing it; would you let your child spend nights alone with a man with such a dubious reputation? After the Jordy Chandler case (and exactly who in this world pays $X,000,000 hush-money if they're innocent, anyway?) surely no parent, however dim or Jackson-obsessed, would knowingly put their child in such a potentially dangerous position - unless they intended to make money out of it, of course, which is yet another thing I expect we'll never know.

So on one side, we have a person who, by most people's standards, is a loony-tune. I'd weep tears of blood if my daughter were so deeply unhappy with herself that she had to have her face sliced and diced the way Jackson has, if she were so emotionally dysfunctional that she couldn't have a relationship with a human being, if she inflicted her own misery on the children she had to pay someone else to have. Sad as it is, though, there's no law against being a danger to yourself, apparently; what the jury is being asked to decide is, in fact, whether Jackson's obvious mental problems are now making him a danger to others. On the other side, we have a family so stupid (Oops! I mean "trusting" of course) or so avaricious that they put their son in the care of a man with such a soiled reputation. I'm of the opinion that, if Jackson is guilty, then so are they, and in all fairness they shouldn't get a cent.

This morning, on BBC News 24 (who should know better), I watched Jackson turn up for the first day of his trial dressed up (apparently) as Lee Van Cleef in a Spaghetti Western. It makes me wonder if, in his strange and dissociated world, this is just another role he's playing. I'd love to take a peek into his mind; like millions, maybe billions, of others, I watched the 1 minute video-clip he made to protest his innocence, and it made me feel somehow dirty, as though I were visitng Bedlam to laugh at the inmates. I don't doubt that he at least believes what he's saying, but when you look at that mad, ravaged face, you have to wonder if what he believes has any connection with "reality" at all.

Another source of wonder to me is that black civil rights organisations are so willing to support him, given that he's spent so much time and effort on being as un-black as possible. This is not a race issue, so why are so many legitimate campaigners for social justice ready to pick up the race card he had the nerve to play? Nothing about this trial, as far as I can see, is about Jackson's ethnic background; he's not being prosecuted because he's black(ish), but because he's accused of child abuse. He certainly isn't poor, oppressed or in need of funding. No-one has the right to pre-judge him, for or against. As it is, Jackson seems to be deliberately confusing support with proof; "Look how many people believe in me, I must be innocent". If that were true, then we'd all be apologising to the ghost of Adolf Hitler. As for the "fans" who travel across half the world to "support" him, what exactly do they think they can acheive? None of us have access to the facts, and whatever the outcome of the trial there'll still be people who believe he was either unjustly condemned or that he got off scot free.

Even though I'm not interested in Jackson as a person, I am interested in this trial; what's really on the stand here is the American justice system, and how far that system can be manipulated by money and fame. Jury selection must have been a bitch; even people who really aren't interested or prejudiced for or against would have to have lived in a cave for the last year in order to avoid the publicity. Child abuse is the bete noire of Western Society, something we all have strong opinions about. There's no middle ground here; on one side we have the people who do it, and on the other side - well, the rest of the world, I most sincerely hope. Virtually every other crime, up to and including murder, can have some mitigating factors; child abuse doesn't, can't, and should never have.

I'm also interested in what will happen to Jackson if he does go down. We all know what usually happens to "nonces" in prison, and I know that, personally, in my heart of hearts, I don't really care. I know I should, I know that the human rights of paedophiles ought to be as important to me as the human rights of any other section of society, but they just aren't. Far too often, in my opinion, abusers get off with ridiculously light sentences, so why should I care what happens to them on the inside? It won't be as bad as the physical and emotional damage suffered by their child-victims, after all. But somehow I don't see Jackson, however the trial goes, ever being subjected to the ordeals that paedophiles usually face when they're sentenced to jail. That, he will certainly be able to buy his way out of.