11 September 1714

The meaning of this date around the world is one of dread and terror.  Whenever someone mentions this date as in "Oh, we meeting for a drink on the 11th of September?" we instantly think of that awful day in 2001.  It'll no longer be just another day.

In Barcelona it is a day that means something quite different.  The events of that day over 300 years ago are remembered by the Catalan people in a show of defiance.

It began with the Spanish War Of Succession, a major European Conflict spanning 1701-1714.  It started with the death of Charles II, the last Hapsburg King of Spain whose Empire spanned the globe.

Charles' choice of heir to his throne was Phillip V of Spain but it was not without facing resistance from other nations throughout Europe.

Philip was favoured by the Bourbon king of France, Louis the XIV, his Grandfather, who had his own aspirations for dominance.

Game of Thrones enough for you yet?

A number of other nations were against this alliance, among them were England and Scotland who from 1707 formed the United Kingdom, The Austrian Empire, The Netherlands, Portugal, the Spanish loyal to Charles and a little country to the North East of the Iberian peninsula called Catalonia.

With the city of Barcelona laying at it's heart, it enjoyed good Mediterranean trade to the East; the mountainous region with its rolling hillsides also saw the threat of a France/Spain alliance.

In 1701 these countries signed an alliance at The Hague in the Netherlands before declaring war on France and Spain

After 13 years of war the British and the Dutch made peace with Spain and France in the Treaty of Utrecht, leaving Catalonia to fight on alone.

With growing strength the Spanish armies moved further and further inwards of Catalonia until they were eventually surrounding the capital City of Barcelona.

14 months went by until the morning of 11th of September 1714 when the Spanish invaded the city and butchered all 10,000 Catalan troops inside.

Catalonia was no longer separate from Spain.

Catalan nationalism has been on the rise over recent years.

Since 2012 it's been seen as a popular day of protest in support of Catalonia becoming a separate state from Spain once more.  Hundreds of thousands of people have made their way on to the streets, carrying their Senyeras and Independence flags.

However, the most remarkable protest was in 2013 when a 300 mile human chain, known as the Catalan Way was created from the Catalan border with France at Le Perthus in the North, all the way to the southern tip of Catalonia, Alcanar.  It was said to involve 1.3million people.

What makes this year so special is that in just sixteen days Catalans go to the polls to decide their Independence.

I say special. This has happened before. In 2012, there was overwhelming support for independence with around 80% voting for, I believe that those who didn't vote 'yes' voted instead for Catalonia to become a recognised state within Spain.  This vote was not recognised by Spain.

There now appears to be a tug of war in the Catalan independence debate between the Catalan Parliament.  I think it'll happen eventually but only in baby steps.  Catalonia now seems to be saying they want to set up things like their own government department and even an Army.

If they're only talking about doing that now then who knows how far away independence is?  Someone I spoke to said that it could be as little as 18 months away.

Whilst I doubt that I really hope it happens.  Catalonia is not Spain. That's a popular message graffitied on walls.  They're an entirely different people.  Imagine if Germany and Poland were still a joint nation, same thing here.

Pep Guardiola, the former Barcelona player and treble-winning coach, is a vehement supporter of independence saying that he would have played for The Catalan national team if he had been given the chance.  Staying in the world of football, the whole debate heated up this week with Barca central defender Gerrard Pique said to have sent a mischievous tweet gloating over a Real Madrid playing friend at his team's treble success last season.

The tweet was blown out of proportion by the media and Pique called a press conference yesterday explaining his position.  The rivalry between Real Madrid and Barcelona is only intensified by the independence debate.  Barca are staunch supporters of Catalan Nationalism and events in support of Independence are held at the Camp Nou.

One thing that is offered up within the debate is what would happen to FC Barcelona?  Would they continue to play in Spain's La Liga?  

Personally I can't see any reason why not.  Barcelona is La Liga and vice versa.  It's this question that helps define the case for Independence.  FC Barcelona and La Liga are intwined within each other's cultures.  Catalonia and Spain are not.  Oh and Real Madrid are in town on Saturday playing away at Espanyol.  

The big question in all this of course is will Catalonia get it's independence before they finish the Segreda Familia?

The race is on....

OUTRAGE!! Read all about it!

We all saw it etc...

What do you reckon is worse? 

Scenario A) Katie Hopkins, in her article 'Rescue Boats, I'd use Gunships To Stop Migrants', on the 17th of April, perhaps prophetically, that she doesn't care about bodies floating in the water...

or

Scenario B) Using the image of a young child's body floating in the water to sell newspapers?

The Sun newspaper did both.

Disaster porn sells, we learnt this on September 11th 2001 and then remember Roaul Moat? 

 

I vividy remember that Friday evening.  Everyone was on Facebook, including me, commenting while glued to either Sky News or the BBC News 24.

When does the important task of news broadcasting become the less important task of collecting profit?

If you only got your news from the Sun then you'd think the war in Syria started last week, not three years ago.

It's a shame that it took the death of young Aylan Kurdi before the British press thought it was important to act.  

The Sun's headline on Thursday was "Mr Cameron, summer is over ...now deal with the biggest crisis facing Europe since WW2" and it was accompanied by two pictures.  The one on the left, a baby born in a Hungarian train station on Wednesday and on the right a picture of a police? officer carrying young Aylan's limp, lifeless body.

On Friday they ran a 'crisis campaign' with the headline "For Aylan", detailng 'YOU can aid kids like tragic tot'.

On Saturday, this was followed by self-congratulation of helping raise £350,000 for the 'Help the Children's' campaign along with a smiling picture of Aylan in happier times.  This was accompanied by the 'For Aylan' article.  I'm sure his suffering family are delighted that his picture is being used as a pawn in a propaganda war.

And you just know they thought "I wonder if he had a mobile...... Oh damn, we don't do that anymore!"

I was wondering what news they were trying to bury? 

Then, last night.....  News came out that David Cameron wants to have another vote to bomb Syria.

This is a joke, right?  

This will need to go through a vote in Parliament; the last time that happened was in 2013. Cameron was all for dropping bombs on Syria but it didn't make the cut.

So, I'm thinking to myself "Why the sudden outrage from the Tories right wing press?Where have they been for the last three years of the Syrian war? And why now?!"

Beautifully done.  

First you have to create a fear of migrants, make people reluctant to take "them" in.  "Swarm of migrants".  Then you get the press to tell every that we need to start taking "them" in.

But then there's going to be opposition for this from the far right and the questions are asked, "How many more will we have to take?"

It's a worry, I know.  Too many migrants, we're full up.  There's six inches of space on the Isle of Wight but that'll soon be gone.

We can't leave the migrants to die, not now that a three year old boy has died in such distressing circumstances. We didn't realise people were dying, we just thought they were playing kiss-chase around Europe.

So this is the problem; we can't leave them to die. We need to take in as many as we can but once we're full, we're full. But, we'll be full up and people will still be dying. 

 

What to do?

 

The only thing to do is to bomb Syria.

How long until someone suggests that ISIS are a few months away from getting their hands on WMD, I wonder?

And, that's not all.  The Guardian today is running a story that Cameron 'hinted at' (it's noncommittal so that Cameron doesn't need to confirm or deny anything) that he might abandon the vote to bomb Syria if Jeremy Corbyn wins the Labour leader race.  A last ditched attempt to prevent people from voting Corbyn.

Meanwhile, the Telegraph is running a story that Corbyn will block help going to Syria.

We can't have someone opposing government austerity measures, now can we?

Don't buy the press, read me instead.  I'll tell you what's REALLY going on.

The Ugly Subject Of Two People Wanting To Do Something Together That You Don't Like Despite It Not Affecting You In Any Way

So we've got this American, what is she, a clerk? Who is refusing to marry homosexual couples in her courthouse in the states.  I believe it's in the state of Kentucky, famous for fried chicken and the derby.

Usually this would be me having a rant about why the whole of the UK is showing double standards because it doesn't want to go to war with the states over their religious extremism but we do when Muslims do it.  It's the pork thing, isn't it?  Pork makes all the difference.

So yeah basically she's a devout Christian and because of that she feels she can't encourage the act of love between same sex couples.  Nothing wrong with that, it's an opinion and remember people just because someone's opinion offends someone else doesn't mean they're not entitled to that opinion.

I wasn't sure what was totally going on here, I mean I wasn't sure if she was employed by the American government, even at local level, or if she was somehow freelance.  I used to work for the Ministry of Justice in the UK. In that court I think we sometimes had judges who were in some way outsourced to us and sometimes judges could "pick and choose" which cases they heard, in fact I think even our permanent judges did that.

It was family law so I'd be interested to know if we ever had a judge that had a similar view to our little homophobic friend, Kim Davis (I think it's time to introduce her name in the article) and if that judge decided that they didn't want to rubber stamp the adoption of a child by a gay couple.  Judges never gave a reason why they wanted to not hear a case.

So yeah basically I wasn't sure what was happening so I decided to do a bit of research/ask someone on Facebook.  I got some good responses that gave me the details.

Basically she is an elected official, by refusing to do this she can be impeached.  If the equivalent of this were happening in the UK and the Tories weren't quick enough to cover it up with another comical story about Jeremy Clarkson helping disabled kids then she'd lose her job and they'd get her a seat in the House of Lords. Sadly there is no such house in the US, everyone has to be elected through some silly outdated system called "democracy".

This reminded me, as I'm sure it did you too, of two similar cases in the last few years in the UK.

One was a bed and breakfast and the other was a bakery.  In both cases they were small business owners and they refused to serve homosexual people due to their prehistoric religious beliefs.

The issue wasn't so much the fact that the customers were homosexual, more to do with the fact that, in the case of the B&B the couple wanted to stay in the same bed, (I mean, the shame) and by allowing them to do this under their roof the B&B owner would be betraying the word of God by endorsing the act of sodomy.

In a similar vein with the bakers, the homosexual couple, I believe wanted a cake showing and endorsing their love for each other.  Disgusting, two people who love each other wanting to share that love with others, what is the world coming to!?

I reckon if one person from each of the two couples went to the respective businesses to use their services and the businesses knew that each of them was gay I doubt they would have been refused service, their view was just that they didn't want to be seen endorsing that view.  Other people doing something with another person that doesn't effect you in anyway can be hard, I admit.

Someone on Facebook made an excellent point that this is exactly the same as if they didn't want to serve Irish or Chinese people and I agree, this is no different than saying you don't want to serve Chinese or Irish people but I really do believe if that's the person's stance, they don't want to serve Irish, Chinese or gay people in their own company then that's up to them, seriously.

They do not share my views, I love everyone, I want to travel everywhere and experience as many different cultures as I can.  I'd happily live six months to a couple of years with Berbers in Morocco, Buddhists monks in Tibet, a Muslim household in Iran and I'd live the way they live, got no issue with that.

By the same token if someone wanted to come to "my country" to live and didn't want to integrate with the culture of "my country" that's okay too.  I'm happy to let people just do what they want.

Let's let people be judged by their opinions.  The shit will sink to the bottom and the good will raise.  Those who endorse equal opportunities to everyone will become pillars of the community and those that hold secular opinions won't get anywhere and will begin to wonder if they're the ones in the wrong.

In the Kim Davis case she is required by law to carry out her orders to serve the public, community, society....  She doesn't have the right to say "but my opinion is this..." That's cute, now do your job. 

She should have to face legal proceedings if she continues with this stance and then she'll lose her job and unfortunately for her due to the publicity this story has received she'll find it difficult to get another one.  Sadly not impossible but difficult.

At the root of this is obviously religious beliefs.  The words of Gods, ie religious scriptures, were written thousands of years ago*.  It could have been that the words of God were misinterpreted?

*In the case of Jedi those words were written a long time ago in a galaxy far far way.  We're not sure how long nor how far but I think one can assume that they're even more to interpretation.

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Facebook, Twitter and Politics (Good news contained within)

As you'd know if you were my friend on Facebook, follow me on Twitter or have ever met me in person I'm very politically minded. I can't help this, nor should I feel the need to apologise.

I remember about ten years ago when I was first getting interested in politics.  I wanted to know who I should be voting for, nothing anyone was saying made much sense to me, I wanted to know who I should be voting for.  I spoke to a colleague about it and she recommended that I go and research the three main parties to find out what they stood for.

That research took a long time and over the course of ten years I found out that I am a socialist.  Obviously then I should be voting Labour, but no, wait! Jeremy Corbyn is a socialist and yet he is being attacked by fellow Labour people.

What I like about the Labour Leadership Election is that, for some reason, Tories are getting involved in "who they would like" as Labour Leader and why.  Err, you're not supposed to like it, it's Labour, not your party.

The way the Labour Party is currently undergoing conditioning reminds me of how Abraham Lincoln must be turning in his grave at the current state of his Republican Party.

I don't understand why we have to campaign to save or even help the week and the vulnerable.  The statistics of the people that have died after having their benefits cut are appalling, why aren't people on the streets rioting?

And people wonder why I'm depressed?

I'm starting to think this is a cycle, it makes me depressed so I share it and that makes me depressed.

On Monday I went on a bit of a sharing splurge, I shared loads of political stuff and I think this didn't help me.  What's more I know a load of people have stopped following me, not necessarily unfriended me, just stopped following the stuff I post.  While I don't need the vanity of having people agree and I'm certainly not going to post something because someone else doesn't like it although I am going to stop sharing the political stuff.

On an anti UKIP page I follow some girl is forever sharing stuff displaying, what she believes, to be racist posts.  I often look at that and I think "is this your life?"  Although she potentially has the moral high ground what's the point?  It's dedicating your entire life to the pointless task of always being right, what's the point of that, you're not winning any friends.

I get frustrated by social injustice, some people think I'm jealous, no, just frustrated.  If I were jealous of rich people wouldn't I be jealous of all rich people? What's more I follow a load of gambling pages on Facebook and Twitter, whenever I see a big win off like £5 I always offer my congratulations.  I believe in karma, be nice to the universe and it'll be nice to you.

People think they've worked me out and know what I think.  They make assumptions based on this and then form ill informed opinions.

I know some people feel opinionated about this, feel free to get in touch, privately or publicly.

But yes, the good news is I won't be sharing political news on Facebook anymore!  Yay...