Jeremy Corbyn – Part of a Wave of Progressive Change sweeping Europe

Congrats to Jeremy for winning by a landslide the leadership of the Labour Party. Hopefully this will be a return to truthfulness, justice and radicalism fo a party that under Blair and others became pro-big media, pro-spin, pro-banks, pro-nuclear weapons, pro-military invasions, pro-austerity and pro-billionaires. 
Unlike Blair and co, Jeremy will not suck up to media barons such as Murdoch, oil-rich Arab totalitarian regimes and American war-mongering neo-conservatives. All over Europe new popular movements are shaking corrupt political systems that are too often in league with a tax-avoidance elite made rich at the expense of ordinary people’s rights.  As with the Scottish National Party and Syriza, Jeremy is part of this tidal wave demanding change.
It will not be easy to re-establish community grassroots democracy in England. The stakes are high to break the stranglehold of the few. But I firmly believe that ultimately 'people power' will win out.

Pacman's Revenge!

What promises to be Ireland’s biggest ever Retro Gaming event will take place from 7pm until 9.30pm on national Culture Night (Sept 18) in the Computer and Communications Museum of Ireland located in the Insight Centre for Data Analytics at NUI Galway.   

Attendees will enjoy the thrills of playing the great classic arcade and video games of the 1970s through to the 1990s such as Asteroids, Pacman, Space Invaders, Super Mario, Sonic, Crash Bandicoot and Pong on legendary vintage consoles and computers such as Atari, Amiga, Commodore Amiga, Sega Megadrive and Nintendo. 

Mentors from Insight and local digital maker clubs will introduce visitors to the coding behind their own creative projects and help visitors to create their own games.

So come along to an event that promises to be a wonderful technology experience full of creativity, nostalgia, fun and excitement.

The Boy on the Beach

In a week when parents in Ireland and elsewhere are happily bringing their children back to school after the summer holidays, it is soul-shattering to see the body of three year old Alan Kurdi washed up on the shores of Bodrum in Turkey.
He drowned, along with his five-year-old brother Galib, mother Rehan, and eight other refugees, yet more victims of money-worshipping traffickers many of whom come from the same countries of the people that they are treating as nothing more than commodities.
Galib should have been going to school this morning accompanied by his brother Alan and mom. 
Alan's family left their home in the city of Kobane as they, like millions of other Syrians and Iraqis, were forced to flee a new terrifying evil that has appeared in the Middle East, devouring and brutalising everything in its path. Islamic Caliphate (aks Daesh) and other religious fundamentalist groups such as Al Nusra are committing massacres and ethnic cleansing on a scale rarely seen for centuries.
Like apocalyptic scenes from the movie 'Mad Max', the world has been turned upside down as we daily see on our television screens, villages and towns across Syria and Iraq that only a few years ago were peaceful settlements, now witness the cancerous ISIS  crucify Christian children; gang rape and murder female lawyers and doctors; throw gays to their deaths from high rise buildings; establish slave markets populated by Yazidi girls and young women to be sold off as sex slaves; bomb schools and marketplaces; behead Shi’a soldiers, triumphantly hold aloft the heads of female Kurdish fighters; parade caged Kurdish Peshmerga through streets lined with jeering crowds and burn alive a caged Sunni Jordanian pilot.
This evil did not appear from nowhere. The US invasion of Iraq destroyed not only the state’s infrastructure, but destroyed also a tolerance between religious communities in many parts of the region providing the environment for a brutal fanaticism to flourish. Brainwashed by Imans promoting the intolerant strand of Islam known as Wahhabism that is prevalent in Saudi Arabia; funded and armed by wealthy religious fanatics amongst the Saudi and Gulf Arab elite; supported by the Israeli, American and Turkish regimes due to their common hatred of the secularist Assad state, the policy of ISIS and other similar groups is simple - eliminate the large indigenous Christian, Shia, Alawite, Druze, Bahai and Jewish populations of the Middle East many of which date their ancestry back thousands of years. In the process atheist, secularist and gay people have been butchered all in the name of a supposedly  all-merciful Supreme Being. Ancient pagan temples, Christian churches, Palmyra and Nineveh are being bulldozed and dynamited in the cradle of civilisation. The rich history and varied cultures of the peoples of the Middle East is disappearing before our eyes.
Millions of refugees have a right to return home. But that never happen whilst Turkey, Saudi Arabia, Gulf States are allowed to dismember Syria for short term political gain. They have let the Genie out of the bottle; the onus is on them to put it back.