The executive chairman of the Malta Council for Science and Technology continued to batter the reputation of the august institution he represents, yesterday, by presenting a formal petition in the Courts of Justice, demanding that the government and internet service providers keep his kitchen cool because he can’t stand the heat.
In a move that squares completely with his far-right sentiments, Jeffrey Pullicino Orlando is now requesting the government to shut down “blogs” which annoy him. He has also requested internet service providers to take those “blogs” down. You must understand that he is not asking to have blog-posts about him taken off line, but for entire websites – read mine – to be banned, blocked and shut down by the government and private ISPs on the grounds they bother him.
There has long been a question mark over the stability of the executive chairman’s temperament and judgement, but this is beyond embarrassing. It would be bad enough if he were simply an ordinary Member of Parliament, but that the man in charge of the state’s science and technology council, of all things, should do something like this puts him completely beyond the pale where his official position is concerned. The executive chairman of the science and technology council of a European Union member state, calling for the government of that member state to shut down websites on the grounds that they bother him? He should be asked to resign. But I can’t see the frightened Joseph Muscat asking for his resignation any time soon. He has seen how problematically vicious his collaborator can be, and he doesn’t want a taste of that. Well, more fool he – it is far better to deal with vicious reprisals from somebody who will be a complete nobody if asked to resign than to retain this particular sodden albatross round his neck, when he’s got so many of them burdening him already.
The executive chairman of the Malta Council for Science and Technology said in his judicial protest that he doesn’t want people to know when he is travelling or out at a restaurant, because he might be burgled. Of course, he failed to mention that he splatters his multiple Facebook pages with details of his personal life – some of them patently false, like the stock photograph he used last Christmas, with the caption that said those were the presents he and “Lara” had spent the entire morning wrapping together. He tells his thousands of Facebook friends what he had for breakfast, what tea he’s been drinking (Earl Grey, possibly out of a glass bottle), what weekend trips he’s been on, what holidays he’s taken with or without his children and girlfriend, and what lunches he’s had. Meanwhile, his girlfriend posts pictures of their plates at restaurants and says where they have been.
His latest episode and judicial protest were triggered by a photograph I uploaded on my website last Sunday morning, showing him and “Lara” – his state-paid ‘personal assistant’ at the Council – at the tourist trap that used to be Checkpoint Charlie, in Berlin. They are both looking ridiculous, saluting in military caps, he looking particularly foolish because he is in his 50s and behaving like a 16-year-old. But the essential point here is that this photograph was public already when I uploaded it, and not something I obtained by stealing his smartphone, cracking the password and ransacking his gallery. The executive chairman uploaded it on one of his several Facebook pages, and within minutes of his doing so, one of his many thousand Facebook friends downloaded it and sent it to me.
The executive chairman must have been sitting on my website, because within minutes he had sent me three abusive messages in violation of a police caution not to use the means of telecommunications to contact me. He had been summoned by the police and spoken to after sending me a stream of really crazy abusive messages on what must have been a particularly bad day for him. That, of course, was sufficient grounds for his resignation – the executive chairman of a state council cautioned by the police after sending abusive messages to a journalist – but this weird island tolerates any amount of weirdness and, it appears, is suspicious of normality.
Let’s leave the government aside for now. The fact that Pullicino Orlando is a problem for Muscat needn’t concern us unduly. But the fact that he is a massive liability to the important science and technology council which he controls is indisputable. He should be made to go – by the board of directors, if the Prime Minister won’t do it. And if they can’t even manage that in their weakness and malleability, then they should resign themselves. The current situation is beyond unprofessional.
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