Anyone who thought the British Empire was consigned to the pages of history was mistaken, apparently; Britannia is alive and well and still ruling the waves, all the way to Argentina. As if one meaningless war (the Falklands) wasn’t enough, a new conflict is now arising over those same islands. Islands, which, in any sane world, would legitimately belong to Argentina, but which we seem hell-bent on holding on to – especially now that there’s OIL to be extracted. Whilst armed conflict seems unlikely this time around, Argentine leaders have been soliciting UN intervention against British Imperial interests, and the whole thing is looking suspiciously like an international ‘incident’ in the making. The question is – whose face will have the egg dripping off it?

Good money would be on Britain crushing all resistance and holding on to its asset. Argentina, however, will then exact revenge in South Africa by knocking England out of the World Cup in the quarter finals. The last laugh will be with Maradona as he gives John Terry and co the finger.

Between John Terry, Ashley Cole, and Tiger Woods, 2010 is shaping up to be a big year for sports stars being unfaithful to their significant others. Of course, EVERY year is probably a big year for sports stars being unfaithful to their significant others; the only difference is Woods and Terry have been caught. Why does anyone actually care? Why has Ashley and Cheryl Cole’s split made front page headlines all over the country (even the Guardian went with it)? Why was Tiger Woods coaxed into making a public apology? What business is it of ours?

And does John Terry’s extra-marital hobbies have ANY bearing on his ability to captain the England team in the World Cup? In any case, Terry should consider himself lucky he was only getting jiggy with Wayne Bridge’s lady and not Didier Drogba’s; one can only imagine what the deadly Drogba would’ve DONE to him…

The BRIT awards came and went, with nothing much happening, as usual. While Lady Gaga and Jay-Z managed to bring some degree of class to the whole tedious affair, the rest of it was a mind-numbing account of another dull and soulless year in the British music industry…

RATM are the greatest rap/rock combo in the world and one of the greatest bands, full-stop, of the past twenty years. Joe Bloggs is a karaoke singer from a TV talent show. If RATM make Christmas No.1 with ‘Killing in the Name Of’ (one of the most unchristmasy songs of all time), it will represent a glorious coup for the dying world of real music and a timely black-eye for Emperor Cowell and his empire of brainwashing tedium. It will also be the second most faith-affirming demonstration of the power of the Internet since Obama’s presidential victory.

And yet, even now, we have Cowell and Cheryl Cole coming out and objecting to the Facebook campaign, like disgruntled royalty complaining about the peasants. The pot’s got nothing over the kettle when Simon Cowell has the nerve to come out and compare the RATM Vs Joe Karaoke contest to ‘David and Goliath’ – and actually suggesting that ‘The X-Factor’ is DAVID in the analogy!

Right – so the billionaire mass media mogul and corporate dictator is complaining that his TV-manufactured product is being treated ‘unfairly’ because thousands of people are supporting a hard-working band of proper musicians who’ve worked their trade for sixteen years and built up a proper fanbase? Sounds about right. Seriously, if there was a Nobel Prize for Hypocrisy, then Simon Cowell would be a dead cert. He practically OWNS the music industry in this country; and THAT’S why he’s upset – no dictator is happy when the people mobilise and try to take back some power.

As for Cheryl Cole – a woman who makes Danni Minogue seem prodigiously talented – what business does she have publicly criticising the Facebook campaign? If  I were a talentless piece of eye-candy who’d somehow become filthy rich despite having no merits, I would be a bit more humble about it and just keep quiet, rather than whining about the competition. I’m sorry, but when mega-rich celebrities complain about the actions of real musicians and real music-lovers, I want to reach for the sick bucket.

At a time when musicians and musicianship are being crowded out of the marketplace by this vast corporation of television karaoke, there’s something very satisfying about the prospect of a band as great as Rage Against the Machine scoring a victory for the art over the mass media manipulation and hype. The days seem to be long gone of artists making meteoric impacts, shaking the industry or inciting musical and cultural revolutions (the Bob Dylans, Sex Pistols’, Public Enemy’s and Nirvana’s, etc); and if the X-Factor style of chart dictatorship continues, then such revelatory moments or recordings will be wholly consigned to history. But if ‘Killing in the Name Of’ outsells Mighty Joe Young, then the signs are good that hope is not lost. Rage Against the Machine are the very antithesis of anything the X-Factor might roll off its factory line, and so the choice of both artist and track are entirely fitting.

The dull, dead-eyed automatons churned out by the X-Factor have claimed the Christmas No.1 spot for the passed four years in a row. Let’s all do a favour for music and make Rage Against the Machine this year’s chart-toppers – and it’ll be a Christmas to remember. It’ll also make Jesus very happy. He was well into RATM. He’d also appreciate the somewhat Messianic nature of RATM’s potential sabotage of the corporate machine at this time of year, as Christ was all for revolt.

Merry Christmas, everyone.

If we think about it for just a moment, we might find that Michael Jackson has all the classic prophet-like archetypes. He was followed by multitudes, some of that following being fanatically zealous. He entirely consciously preached a series of moral and social messages extremely passionately (things like Heal the World, We Are The World, and Earth Song, representing the most uninhibited examples). He passionately preached ‘love’. He was (perceived to have been) persecuted by the mainstream for his strangeness, and even abused and put on trial for crimes that were (perceived to have been) never committed. He had a slightly inflated sense of himself, a degree of self-aggrandizement, and some messianic tendencies (giant statues of himself on album covers or in videos, turning into a god-like figure in the movie ‘Moonwalker’, etc). And his death was met with a global wave of mass mourning and grief.

Whether Liz Taylor was speaking in metaphor or not (it isn’t clear from her statement), it couldn’t have escaped everyone’s attention that there’d probably be a fair amount of people who’d have elevated him to a prophet-like status already. (even his memorial service was punctuated by motifs along those lines; such as the choice of gospel music that opened the ceremony – “Hallelujah, we’re going to see the King…”).

If Michael Jackson had been a prophet-like figure in a more direct sense – as in undisguised preaching and sermonising – he would’ve been the most powerful such figure of all time. He was already the most famous man in the world (a thousand times more famous than figures such as Jesus and Mohammad or Moses were in their own lifetimes), and would’ve had a platform and an audience on a kind of scale that a guru or preacher would’ve killed for. Whether that’s a wistful thought or scary one will be a matter of opinion; but it’s worth bearing in mind, for example, that Jesus of Nazareth had only a tiny following in his own lifetime, and in fact Christianity didn’t even begin to hold any sway until at least three centuries after his death.

Further indicators of Michael’s Jackson’s prophet potentials (no, wait – I mean profit potentials) will be demonstrated this week with the release of the documentary movie, ‘This Is It’, expected to be the highest grossing cinema release of all time. A film that is likely to be a mixture of strange and bittersweet…

That long-reigning superstar dictator (and certainly not a prophet, though he might aspire to be), Colonel Gadaffi sparks not the first controversial debate of his career by suggesting that Israel should be disarmed of its nuclear arsenal; or else the Palestinians, as well as nuclear-aspiring Iran, should be allowed to have nuclear weapons too. While the statement is no doubt intended to be antagonistic, there is undeniably a certain logic to his sentiment. Not that anyone in their right minds would want a government as questionable as Iran having such an arsenal, or indeed think it would be a good idea for a culture as angry, resentful and zealous as the Palestinians to have that kind of firepower either; but there is surely a case to be made that Israel’s leadership doesn’t have a solid track record of restraint either. The Israeli government, and its military, could be cited as being almost as zealous as the Palestinians.

This also opens up the wider question of exactly who should be ‘allowed’ to develop nuclear power and/or weapons. After all, Pakistan and India have nuclear arsenals, and Pakistan, like Israel, can hardly be called a stable country by any measure. North Korea has defied international opposition to its nuclear programmes and continued unabated. Who is it that should have the ultimate and objective right to dictate which nations should be trusted with nuclear technology and which nations shouldn’t? After all, it is all surely a matter of perspective. We, in the secular West, can easily cite a dozen reasons why Iran, for example, should not be permitted to develop those capabilities; but that’s from a specific point of view. Iranians might not agree. In fact, if Gadaffi’s comments are something to go by, there may be a number of other countries who’d have no opposition to Iran developing such capacities and might have plenty of objection to America or Britain such powers. Many, in numerous countries, for that matter, would call America ‘zealous’ and ‘extreme’. They might be incorrect in saying that; but, again, that’s a matter of perspective.

Ideally, of course, NO ONE would have nuclear weapons. An all-encompassing global disarmament would come into effect, with every nuclear plant or nuclear weapons component being disabled and dismantled. It won’t happen, however; because there’d always be a suspicion that someone might be cheating, in order to gain the upper hand over the rest of the world…

Official statistics gleened from extensive surveys and censuses (is that a word?) reveals that 1/4 of the world’s population is now practising Islam in some form or another. There are 1.57 billion Muslims spread across 232 countries, Islam being the second largest religious umbrella on earth, after Christianity, which has – again in various forms – 2.2 billion adherents. Some of the results have proven to be interesting, with large numbers of Muslims living in non-Muslim countries, in some cases even more so than in traditionally Islamic nations. For example, there are said to be more Muslims in Germany now than in Lebanon and some other Islamic societies.

Islam, of course, despite common misconceptions, is divided into various sects, just like Christianity, and the majority do not suscribe to extremist idealogies. Wahabism could be cited as the main culprit; but the majority denominations of Sunni and Shia Islam, despite having some extremist elements, generally practise a relatively easygoing, good-spirited tradition. Extremists in, for example, Pakistan, are a minority, and in places like Jordan are practically non-existent.

But Nick Griffin and the BNP needn’t worry anyway – only a miniscule percentage of those 1.57 billion live in the UK. With the Muslim communities of the UK consisting of only 2 percent of the total UK population, one imagines much of the BNP’s xenophobic scaremongering antics would fall flat; all the talk of a ‘Muslim takeover’ and the alleged minoritisation of the indigenous white population is revealed for the contrived and cynical propaganda that it is…

Incidentally, the only religion outnumbering both Islam and Christianity is the Jedi spiritual faith, which now numbers 2.7 billion worldwide, and follows the spiritual teachings of Master Yoda.

No, okay, that’s not true. But wouldn’t it be nice if it was? I personally can’t WAIT for the BNP and fascist propaganda of the future, in which we hear endless tirades about how ‘the Jedi are taking over, taking all our jobs, subverting our society, etc’.

We are, in fact, steadily growing in number; to the point that we now quite seriously have practising Jedi in the police force, in journalism, and even publicly abusing people on the London Underground. We are biding our time, as our numbers swell, waiting for the right moment. Mark my words – our time will come…

The great Martin Luther King might well look down from Heaven (where he’s presently in the middle of a chess game with Mahatma Gandhi, whilst Louis Armstrong and Kurt Cobain perform a jazz-punk duet on a stage a little to their right) and smile at the election of Barak Obama to the White House, but he might well be frowning when he looks to his own heirs and finds them feuding over the corporate rights to his legacy. There is something a little bit disenchanting about his children spending their time in legal wrangling over corporate interests; Bernice King and Martin Luther King III have apparently settled their conflict, however, with their brother Dexter, who has been guilty of trying to exclude them from profiting from their father’s estate.

Another feud of a dramatic nature has recently been raging between the Louvre and Egypt’s preeminent archaelogist, Mr Zahi Hawass, over ancient painted wall fragments, which the bosses of the French museum have been refusing to hand back to Egypt. The 3, 200 year-old tomb fragments are from the ancient temple city of Luxor. It’s not the only feud of its kind that I’ve heard of; which surely begs the question of why some universal law isn’t place to guarantee ownership of archaelogical relics to their country of origin? Except, perhaps, for countries where the insitutions and resources aren’t in place to ensure the preservation of such finds. But it’d be only fair, wouldn’t it? After all, no one would argue that the Egyptian archaelogists would have any rightful claim to relics found in France – so why vice-versa?

And, finally, with the likes of Cheyl Cole, Alexandra Burke, and Robbie Williams, dominating the charts, I think the final proof has come that the music industry as a platform for music as an art-form in any meaningful sense is entirely dead and buried, the industry now being purely a mass commercial enterprise…

Peter Andre is all set to climb the ‘celebrity ladder’ yet again! The man formerly known as ‘Jordan’s husband’ is seemingly coming into his own these days and now the news has broken that he is to join ITV’s flagship daytime programme ‘This Morning’ in September as a show business reporter. It’s somewhat amazing…we all thought he would fade into oblivion once he and Jordan announced their split, but from the way things are looking, he is going to be the ‘last man standing’. While we have seen Jordan walk the path of scandal and shame Peter has held a firm and mature composure. I really hope things do work out for him although I do think it is time for him to accept that ‘Mysterious Girl’ was a one off and his music era has passed. SOURCE

I’m not sure whether I should be jumping for joy or downing tequila shots over the news that Big Brother is on its way out. I know that there are many out there that enjoy indulging in watching people sit around and become celebrities by doing nothing, but I personally always thought the show was pointless. At first it seemed like an interesting experiment, but I never imagined that it would last so long! So now that Chanel 4 is losing one of their prime fixtures one has to wonder if they will head in the direction of ITV and slowly fade away. I do hope not, but I do wish they would develop some more meaningful programs! SOURCE

So Kerry spent the night in the slammer. I wonder if she learned anything beneficial from her short time behind bars (except the best spots in London to score a hit). I’ve been rooting for Kerry for some time. I remember the Atomic Kitten days and secretly always hoped that she would reconnect with her past career in a sustainable way. I have to wonder who her friends are…surely there must be someone close enough to her that can shake some sense into her. Really now, how many times do you hit a brick wall before you realise that it’s there! First Bankruptcy, then Losing a decent contract over drugs, now being locked up for assault! Damn, I’ve had enough…Kerry please let me know when you’re ready to take a seat on my couch! At 28 you’re too young for all this drama! SOURCE

Will Girls Aloud stay together? I’m seriously starting to wonder this now. Cheryl is becoming such a big star on her own now that I’m starting to think their next album will be titled ‘Cheryl and the Loud Girls’. I can’t hate on her though, we all know the spotlight can be dimmed in a heartbeat so milk it while you can. It seems Cheryl has now picked up a new £500K contract as the face of L’Oreal Paris. For any celebrity a cosmetic contract is like gold and by the way things are going Cheryl will soon own the mine! One has to wonder how Ashley feels these days…an independent woman is a powerful one! SOURCE

The next time you want to play dress-up, you may wanna make sure you know your audience! American tribute performer Trina Johnson-Finn learnt that the hard way when she Suriname to perform as Toni Braxton in March. Much to her surprise, was booed off stage and pelted with rubbish when the huge crowd realised that they had been scammed and that she was not the award-winning artist. She is now in custody awaiting her fraud trial which begins on 26 May. I can just see all those Spice Girl look-alikes shaking in their platform boots! Source

I’m guessing we won’t be seeing a picture of Lilly Allen, Cheryl Cole and Victoria Beckham together out and about in the city anytime soon! Allen was sure to make her feelings known recently, saying that Cheryl “represents everything I(Allen) hate – she is stupid, superficial, as ugly outside as inside.” The Posh one was next up with Allen saying that “everyone knows she is a monster”. I’m interested to see how this one will play out but something tells me that if things get physical, Allen may end up with a stiletto up the …Source

Daniel Radcliffe is really trying to break free of the ‘squeaky clean’ image. First he took to the stage and showed off his ‘manly bits’ and now he’s hanging out with drag queens! The ‘Harry Potter’ star has been seen enjoying several dinners with Our Lady J, a transvestite Dolly Parton impersonator he met in New York last year. Apparently the young lad has become fascinated by the drag culture and has even attended a few shows. I’m wondering now if he has considered taking a role in the new West End production ‘Priscilla: Queen of the Desert’. I’m gonna have to give Jeremy Klye a call and tell him to keep a space on the show handy! Source

Susan Boyle has seemingly been plucked from obscurity and catapulted into world-wide fame! This ‘Britain’s Got Talent’ hopeful has not only won the admiration of her countrymen, but has also etched her name in the minds of celebrities! Apparently she has the likes of American power couple Demi Moore and husband Ashton Kutcher, both of whom have informed their Twitter followers that they are in camp Susan! I really hope she does well! She has certainly redeemed the old adage ‘don’t judge a book by its cover’! Read News Story

You know there must be something wrong when you have to admit to the media that you haven’t had any further surgical procedures.  Or again your name could just be Katie Price!  I must admit though, that since divorcing herself from the ‘Jordan’ brand, she has made great waves towards changing her image.  I guess when you really think about it, being a ’serious’ equestrian and having a little work done at the same time would be a bit difficult! Could you just imagine it…one rough jump and things just may never look the same again!  Now lets just wait and see her pull off the London Marathon! Read News Story

Amy Winehouse has decided to get lyrical about her feeling about her Blake.  I would call him her Blake Incarcerated but would ya know it, the little bugga isn’t exactly on lock-down these days.  In fact Blake gave ‘little Blake’ some playtime and now he’s expecting a child with another woman.  So what does Amy do? Luckily she doesn’t hit the bottle or hitch a ride on the white horse, instead she sets about to pen a song about her upset and betrayal.  This may just be a good thing! Some of the best songs come from a place of pain (Just ask Lauryn Hill) and judging by the luck Amy has been having with her label, this might just be what she needs!  I wonder if he will sue for rights to the song when its done! Read News Story

Ashley may be giving wife Cheryl Cole stress from time to time but I’m sure when she gets down she just pulls out the bank statements and goes to a happy place!  It seems the rising Mega-star has amassed a fortune of about £10 Million so far.  It would be interesting to see how things will go if she is able to break the American market as she plans!  Girl power at its finest! Read News Story

It seems Amy may just be hooked on the Caribbean! The songstress has left Britain once again for the Tropical country of St. Lucia where she hopes to put the finishing touches on her new album. After her label didn’t bite into the new Island sound she was going for, it is somewhat surprising that she would choose to return there to complete the album, but on the other hand that seems to be the best place to keep her sane! Rap Star Jay-Z has also expressed his interest in working with the troubled star again! I actually like the Rehab remix they did together and would like to hear them together again on a joint! In any event Amy needs to get with it, when you stay out of the spotlight too long, the light may just go out completely! Read News Story

I did not expect this one but I am excited just thinking about it. Leona Lewis is slated to work with Mega-Producer Timbaland on her upcoming album. I will admit that Leona has done well in the industry so far but I always found her a bit too dull for my likings. I’m reminded of the Late songstress Aaliyah and Nelly Furtado, the way Timbaland and crew elevated her from great to outstanding. I can only imagine the direction he has in mind for Leona… Her voice, his sound…Magic! Read News Story

I did not really expect this victory. In fact I’m rather surprised. But he won so the court must have seen some merit in this claim. Apparently after the case George stated that he hoped the jury’s decision would mean work would start coming his way again and “people won’t be afraid to cast me now”. I still say that if you’re good at what you do people are willing to see past your imperfections! As with anyone else, I wish him the best of luck and I do hope some of that money is going into a fund for his child! Read News Story

If anyone has been riding the highs of their career lately it would have to be Cheryl Cole. She has managed to go from ordinary singer to household name and now Super Style Icon! The British beauty has beaten the likes of US First Lady Michelle Obama and French President’s wife Carla Bruni to win the poll held by The Style Network. Hopefully this will remind Ashley of what he has at home! Read News Story