Hello again. Been away in Cyprus then had to deal with all the shit you get when you leave an 18 year old in charge of things.

Avoided the interwebnet while away and kept newspaper reading to a minimum. You know how it is, nonchalantly scanning the headlines of the red tops as you walk past the shop, wondering whether to buy one and then thinking fuck it, I'm on holiday, I don't want to know.

Well, what can you say? As someone who agonised long and hard about this war and despaired over who to support when there were no good guys, it saddens and sickens me to find some of my worst fears over the outcome being realised.

One of the weirder things to come out of this was Sully's take on Nick Berg's gruesome murder:

Let's start an internet campaign to insist that the major media - including the New Yorker, the networks, the major newsweeklies, and every major paper - run a picture of Zarqawi holding up Nick Berg's severed head. It's time to release the Pearl video and stills too. Enough with the double standards. The media were absolutely right to show the abuse photos. But they are only part of the story. It's about time the media gave us all of it, however harrowing it is.

I may have missed something, but the pictures I've seen of Abu Ghraib, degrading and shocking as they are, stop short of such hideousness. So, in Sully's mind there must be a different level of barbarity he wants my ten year old daughter (for instance) to see, depending on who is the perpetrator. And why stop at the severed head held up, Andrew? Why not a loving, lingering shot of the moment the jugular was severed, alongside, for balance, an Iraqi child's head hit by a sniper's bullet? Oh, yes, sorry, the balance thing, a bit of a misteak. It's not what this is about at all. Besides, doesn't happen. They murder , hideously, in cold blood, we just cause a bit of collateral damage.