Bubblehammerblog

Bluebell Wood

2011-09-09T13:21:00.001+01:00

Yesterday afternoon I was in a large charity shop, called Bluebell Wood. It was quietly busy, but above the usual hubub a single voice could be heard clearly; it was a tubby, scrub-bearded youth of about eighteen, he looked rather like a younger version of Comic Book Guy, who was talking to the ear of a disinterested older man busy making marks on a clipboard. It was action films he was talking about.

“A love it, me. A've seen em all. A count em, me, tick em off in this book. Name any film, an a'll tell yer ow many...”

He began naming various current action blockbusters, commending each for the number and glory of its explosions, woundings and fatalities. No one in the shop could escape the voice, but when I took a mildly interesting book from a shelf and started reading the volume seemed to decrease to a murmur. A few seconds later the voice intruded again. He'd turned up the volume and was now declaiming to the assembled listeners:

“Of course, the numbers were grossly exaggerated. Grossly exaggerated.”

Now he was talking about the Shoah. He clearly enjoyed the phrase 'grossly exaggerated' because he said it again. He then went on to explain that had so many really died at Auschwitz it would have taken 68 years to kill them all. This number had not just been plucked out of the air, but was the result of extensive scientific research conducted into the capabilities of cyanide gas and furnaces in the annihilation of human persons.

I found myself standing before this young man, the owner of the voice. He blinked, I tried to smile.

“Who told you the numbers are grossly exaggerated?”
“A red it. A study it.”

The other customers had turned and were listening now.

“You like to watch people being killed. Is that why you study it, so you can imagine yourself counting off the naked bodies as they go into the gas chambers?”
“It's history.”

I invite readers to send in their own suggestions as to how this conversation might have ended. I simply walked out of Bluebell Wood into the bright afternoon sun and headed for the fish market.

Shameless

2011-08-22T13:09:00.002+01:00

I'm not going to add to the torrent of media babble about last week's shopping and torching disturbances. Any enjoyment I might have got from the sight of politicians and opinion makers elbowing their way up towards the moral high ground to condemn all rioting as 'unexcusable', and trying to outdo one another coming up with the most brutal, vile, spiteful or bizzarre punishment for the perpetrators, was spoiled for me when about Tuesday I watched this video clip.

NATO KILLS 85 CIVILIANS IN LIBYA

Watch it, it's heartbreaking.

The village, called Majer, 150km east of Tripoli, to which NATO brought this massacre has no military significance, no troops, bases nor installations. All the people killed were civilians, including 33 children. Unfortunately for this village it is on the invasion route to Tripoli from the east, and some NATO arsehole decided it needed to be 'neutralized'. To say this represents a serious war crime doesn't begin to describe it.

So when I heard the word 'moral collapse'' coming out of the mouth on Cameron's smooth face I felt like punching it..

Is it not Camron's direct responsibility, this casual massacre of civilians? Not the responsibility of Sarkozy? They're protecting the skins of hardworking Libyans, you might say, from the depredations of the cruel tyrant. Killing children is an unfortunate collateral consequence of this essentially humanitarian endeavor.

The political leaders of the Atlantic Alliance, who diverted the object and purpose of Resolution 1973 to engage in a war of aggression against a sovereign state, are personally responsible before international justice. Indeed, according to the jurisprudence established by the Tokyo Court following the Second World War, crimes cannot be ascribed to either States or organizations, but to individuals. - http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article28882.htm

And it also struck me, watching these agitated mouths and chins, that our governing elites have form when it comes to trashing and torching cities: Belgrade, Tripoli, Baghdad, are just a few that come to mind. And as for looting, our disappointing children who lay hands on the odd telly, a pair of jeans or box of crisps, are no match for the US Special Forces, who, in a single night in Baghdad in 2003, ransacked most of the material heritage of an entire civilisation. But we should take the realistic view, nation states do not have morals, they have interests.

Should it matter which side, the winners or the losers, committed the war crimes?

Here's an interesting piece about what's happening in Libya:

Who Will Save Libya From Its Western Saviours?

Imagining

2011-04-21T11:30:00.007+01:00

The contradictions thrown up by capitalism have become so glaringly obvious that they can blot out the horizon, fog the landscape, occlude the moon.

What we need now is a plain, ergonomic tool that can be used by anyone to understand the workings of histories and societies. A simple use for such a tool would be the production of slogans. Au pouvoir l'imagination*, seems an apt example. But it would have many other uses and become the Swiss army knife of revolutionaries.

Engineering such a device might start by drawing up various schemata. I came across a recent example of one these at UbuWeb Written by Henry Flynt, it can be found at: http://goo.gl/2geRv

* The original as I recall it was au pouvoir l'imaginaire. My Petit Larousse has under imaginaire : Qui n'existe que dans l'imagination: chimérique. Someone might explain this to me.

The Last of England

2011-04-19T15:54:00.003+01:00

I read today that the odious twat Martin Amis intends to leave England for good, citing family reasons but also bemoaning the 'moral decrepitude' of the country. He intends to write a novel, to be called 'The State of England', in which he will deliver a clip round the lughole to his disappointing homeland. He doesn't want to be English anymore.

I met Amis once, many years ago. I was limping through Hyde Park, having just had my foot run over by a motorbike. I was almost penniless due to the drink and needed tube fare to get me home. It's never bothered me asking strangers for money; if I'm approached myself I invariably cough up respectfully, recalling a saying of the Besht about not turning your back on an outstretched hand.

It was only when I was halfway through my politely delivered request for a pound coin that I realised I was speaking to a famous son of a famous writer, though I didn't mention it to him.

I think he was alarmed by my Northern accent, which can sound barbarous to his kind, though we speak a more authentic German dialect. He wouldn't look at me, refused me the coin, and concluded the exchange with the words 'Now move on.'

It wasn't his refusal of the coin but those final words, with their intimation of a police order, that caused my knuckles to tingle. I considerd punching him in the face, but thought better of it since the park was busy and my lame foot might impede flight. Now when I glimpse him on TV or see his face in the paper I feel a small pang of regret over that missed opportunity. He has eminently punchable features. If he doesn't deserve a fat lip for refusing me a quid all those years ago he deserves it for the ignorant remarks he made in Manchester about Muslims.

I agree with much of what Amis said about England – but has he only just noticed that the monarchy are philistines and the culture superficial? He clearly despises working people, (the leading character of his new novel is a lottery winning violent criminal called 'Lionel Asbo'), imagining that they are responsible for the superficiality of the tabloid press and the loathsome 'celebrity culture' that fills it..

He can't help feeling nostagic for the Empire though, and like others of his class links it's passing to the continuing decline we're experiencing now. He says that were he to be offered a knighthood he'd refuse it. That's how jolly well fed up he is. You can hear guff like this at the bar of any boozer in the Home Counties.

And where's Amis going to escape English philistinism and superficiality? You guessed it – America.

Values

2011-04-14T10:33:00.001+01:00

From today’s Ha’aretz, under the headline, Israel's plan for next year's school curriculum: Reinforcing Jewish and Zionist values

A survey released two weeks ago found that 60% of Jewish youths aged 15-18 believe "strong" leaders are more important than the rule of law, and 70% believe that when the state's security needs and democratic values conflict, security should win out. In addition, 46% said Arabs should not be allowed to serve in the Knesset, and 50% said they opposed having Arabs live in their neighborhood. The main trend is that Jewish nationalist values were growing stronger, and respect for democratic-liberal values were weakening, concluded the survey-makers.

So Jewish values and Zionist values are the same thing?

I know this is too easy a trick to pull but let’s turn the clock back to, say, 1935, and run that paragraph again:

A survey released two weeks ago found that 60% of German youths aged 15-18 believe "strong" leaders are more important than the rule of law, and 70% believe that when the state's security needs and democratic values conflict, security should win out. In addition, 46% said Jews should not be allowed to serve in the Reichstag, and 50% said they opposed having Jews live in their neighborhood. The main trend is that German nationalist values were growing stronger, and respect for democratic-liberal values were weakening, concluded the survey-makers.

Far too easy.

Violent disorder

2010-11-19T14:21:00.002Z

When I hear the phrase ‘I’m not a violent person...’, I often fail to restrain myself from saying, ‘Yes you are, you fucking deluded fool, you’re as violent as me and everyone else’. It’s almost universal among the English middle classes to fraudulently disavow their own human propensity to violence. This explains why their ritual displays of niceness grate so much on the rest of us.

The ethics of personal violence are not straightforward. A few days ago one of Snorri’s teachers took me aside to tell me that he’d received a red card for punching another boy in the tummy. Snorri was at our feet, arranging some coloured wooden blocks on a shelf. The teacher was expecting me to say something to Snorri to make him feel ashamed, but I was reluctant since she hadn’t elaborated on the details of the incident. I mumbled something that sounded disapproving, while Snorri looked up at me, struggling to dissemble the appropriately solemn look on his face.

On our way out of the classroom I asked him why he’d punched the lad. ‘He snatched a book off me’, he said.

‘You can’t go brawling in the classroom, Snorri’, I told him sternly, 'getting yourself into trouble for no good reason. Upsetting everybody.’

You see how morality is often cobbled together on the hoof? Later I told him a partly true anecdote from my own boyhood.

I came home from school bawling because a lad called Cooky had beat me up for nothing, punched me in the face and bust my lip. Blood all over the place. My Old Feller said, ‘Stop blubbering, turn round and go back and find that Cooky and give him what he’s given you. And
don’t come back till you’ve done it.’

It was easy enought to find Cooky (David Cook), he lived just up our street. I saw through the window that he was sitting at the table having his tea with his three older brothers when I knocked at Cooky’s kitchen door. When he opened it I took a swing and it landed right on his lughole. Douf.

Then Cooky and his brothers punched and kicked me up and down their passageway for twenty minutes. When I got home I sneaked past the Old Feller and straight upstairs to my room.

A bit later he shouted up the stairs, ‘Turn out alright then, lad?’

‘Oh aye’, I shouted back, whincing from the pain in my ribs, ‘Smashin.’

Speaking of violence, formerly boys were expected to carry knives. Lads in the various youth militias, like the royalist Boy Scouts, carried 8 inch bladed sheath knives openly on their belts. Our local butcher’s lad, an amiable giant and simpleton, always had a two foot jungle machete hanging from his belt, even when making meat deliveries on his bike. I had a First World War British Army issue jack knife, with a thick 4 inch blade and a big spike for taking stones out of horse’s hooves.

The blades that the Glasgow razor gangs used to slash people’s faces could be bought at the better class of barbers, and the flick knives Teddy Boys stabbed each other with were sold as souvenirs of Bridlington.

Stabbings were rare because it was considered cowardly to fight with a knife. At the pictures it was always the one with the black stubble who pulled the knife, got booed, and lost. Fists, swords, and guns were suitable means to dispatch an enemy, but not stabbing with a knife. Knives were associated with foreigners, usually from southern or eastern Europe, and particularly with Arabs, who after lying to you and robbing you were liable to sneak up behind you and stab you in the back.

In a fair fight situation, if a combatant brings out a knife his adversary can without loss of face put up his hands, turn away, and refuse to continue the fight. Any spectators are expected to boo, or in some other way express their disapproval of the knife puller; and if the latter subsequently attempts a lunge at his opponent’s back, restrain and disarm him. All this would bring great dishonour to the one who pulled the knife.

Some months after the David Cook incident I waited for him as he made his way home from school, concealed, at the end of a gennel. When he turned the corner into the gennel I smashed a housebrick into the side of his face.

I don’t usually have much to say about Christopher Hitchens, other than that I used to flog Worker’s Fist outside Belsize Park tube station with his brother, but this is worth reading HERE

Royal Visit

2010-11-18T13:37:00.001Z

I took my 6 year old grandson Snorri to school this morning, and discovered that his class was being taken into the city centre this afternoon to see Lizzie Windsor. I’d overheard groups of mothers twittering about something like this, but had no idea that it was about to happen. So far as I know the school hasn’t asked permission of his family, which I certainly would have refused. Snorri has no interest in such things, and it’s saddening to picture him standing in a row among his classmates, looking bewildered and waving a little paper Butcher’s Apron. If he brings such a thing home as a souvenir I intend to amuse him by urinating on it.

As I was leaving the school one of the fathers remarked to me cheerily, ‘They’re off to see the queen this afternoon, eh?’ I replied as pleasantly as I could, ‘I don’t hold with such things myself. I’m a republican.’ He marched off without comment. Now I’m marked out as a weirdo, but I don’t care.

How times have changed. I recall when Snorri’s mother was about the same age being asked permission by her school for her to join an outing to see Lizzie’s appalling son, Charlie. When I refused on the grounds of republicanism, her teacher gave the distinct impression of being genuinely pleased by my display of principles. Thus encouraged, I went on to express my objection to my daughter waving a Union Jack while British troops were oppressing our Irish family, which broadened the teacher’s smile even further.

Again, it was my grandfather who introduced me to the loathing of royalty. Whenever a Jew or a royal would appear on television, he’d struggle out of his chair and furiously berate the set with his walking stick, smoke and sparks flying from the Woodbine he always had in his mouth. ‘Bloody gannets’, he called the royals. This of course made a strong impression on a young mind.

Anecdote

2010-11-05T13:00:00.001Z

Almost everyone has heard the story, probably an urban myth, about the feller on an aeroplane who finds himself sitting beside the Dalai Lama. To his astonishment the traveller notices that His Holiness is enthusiastically devouring an enormous fried bacon banjo...You know the rest.

When I come across anecdotes of this sort, ones that briefly illuminate some unexpected biographical aspect of the far-famed, hopefully amusing or intriguing, I copy them into a dedicated notebook. I prefer the stories to be verifiable, or at the very least plausible. Perhaps one day I'll tidy it up a little and post it on the net.

I came upon one a couple of days ago, in David Cesarani's biography of Arthur Koestler,(London 1998). I'm no great admirer of the latter, but in the late 1950s, just before I became a teenager, Koestler, Malcolm Muggeridge, Doctor Bronowski, and Bertrand Russel used to appear on the telly. I liked them immediately because they didn't sing or dance, or appear on what they then called 'variety' shows.

I hated all the singing on television, a sickening, depressing series of moans and shrieks that went on for too long. Hearing names like Alma Cogan, Alan Breeze, Mario Labonza, Frankie Vaughan, Peculiar Fart, Andy Stewart, Sabrina, Maurice Chevalier, Doris Day, Winifred Attwell, Flanders and Swan, made me feel ill. The Black & White Minstrel Show was the worst, and brought on explosive diarrhoea. Whenever singing or dancing came on telly I left the room.

But Koestler, Muggeridge, Russel and the rest, I quickly gathered, were called intellectuals, as indeed was Bernard Levin. People looked up to them. The idea of them crooning brainless songs accompanied by dancing nancyboys got up as jamjar golliwogs was preposterous. I was deeply impressed, and resolved, there and then, to become an intellectual myself. I became a regular viewer of shows like 'The Brains Trust', gradually abandoning the antisemitism my Red Grandad had exposed me to.

Koestler was the best looking and most stylish of the TV intellectuals, so he became an early model in my bid to join their ranks. I was unaware as a twelve year old that he was a CIA asset, and a wife-beating piss artist. Koestler often sported a cravat or spotted dicky bow, which I thought the finest garments I had ever seen. I longed to wear a spotted dicky, often taking the tram to the local branch of Austin Reed to gaze at them through the window. But it was impossible. Where I was born, walking the streets in a spotted dickie bow would have the same outcome as putting a sign around your neck saying, 'Please beat me to a pulp and leave me hanging from the park railings.'

The anecdote I came across in the Koestler biography has in it Koestler, Sartre, and Camus - Simone de Beauvoir is the diarist. 'Mamaine' is Mamaine Paget, Koestler's longterm partner and skivvy:

As a joke, Sartre was making love to Mamaine, though so outrageously one could scarcely have said he was being indiscreet, as we were all far too drunk for it to be offensive. Suddenly Koestler threw a glass at Sartre's head and smashed it against the wall. We brought the evening to a close. Koestler didn't want to go home, and then found he'd lost his wallet and had to stay behind in the club; Sartre was staggering about on the sidewalk and laughing helplessly when Koestler finally decided to climb back up the stairway on all fours. He wanted to continue the quarrel with Sartre. 'Come on, let's go home', said Camus, laying a friendly hand on his shoulder; Koestler shrugged the hand off and hit Camus, who then tried to hurl himself at his aggressor; we kept them apart. Leaving Koestler in his wife's hands, we all got into Camus' car; he too was suitably soused in vodka and champagne and his eyes began to fill with tears: 'He was my friend. And he hit me!'

A street in central Paris in the late 1940s. It's three thirty in the morning. Raining heavily. Koestler crawls along the pavement, muttering about his wallet and emitting dog noises. Sartre is doubled over the torrent rushing down the gutter helplessly laughing. Camus sits at the wheel of his car blubbering. .

Glastonbury Weekend

2010-06-29T12:16:00.002+01:00

I was at the first Glastonbury Festival, 40 years ago. And alas, there's truth in the cliché about not being able to recall such things. Went with Phil Roddis and Dave Lee I seem to think. I was about 20. Dave was with a plump chick who wore glasses, and they spent much of the time groping, as it was called in those pre-correct days, in his tent. The little tent had Sheffield Cats Shelter printed on the sides, because that was where he'd nicked it from.

Phil had lurched off somewhere on acid. I was tripping on mescaline when I fell in the shit ditch, a 5 foot deep trench with a foot of turds floating in piss at the bottom.

I had to take all my vile smelling clothes off and bury them, everything. I washed as best I could in a trickle of water from a sewage pipe. Someone gave me an old blanket, and I cut a hole in the middle and put it over my head. Safety pins appeared from somewhere.

I took up with a Frenchman who carried an impressively large North Vietnamese flag. We shared a gallon of scrumpy, some joints and more acid, then set off, in the middle of the night, for Glastonbury Tor, a few miles away. It was raining and windy. Beneath the tower on top of the Tor was the entrance to Annwn, the Celtic dreamtime. Sometime King Arthur would re-emerge from it. Just before dawn I stood shivering in the dark, listening to the wind batter the glistening black tower. Horses galloping. Drums.

Such mystical notions about Glastonbury and the Isle of Avalon were commonplace at the time, but have barely survived. There was a belief that Christ had visited and built a church. Joseph of Arimathea brought the whitethorn from Jerusalem. Most people at the festival would have read John Mitchell's The View Over Atlantis. I'd recently been passing round a copy of Lewis Spence's Mysteries of Britain.

I recall talking to a group of Anglican monks who had suddlenly turned up at the site one morning. They said they were concerned that the paganism they were witnessing could have dire consequences at such a sacred site. They'd come to warn us. They all had pale translucent skin, and as they moved the scent of frankinsense wafted from their white cassocks.

Every man his own football expert.

2010-06-28T14:51:00.002+01:00

I didn't support Germany at last night's match in Bloemfontein, but there are plenty of reasons why I didn't want to see England win. Nor did I expect them to. As I've been telling any fool who'll listen for the past few weeks, England were never more than mediocre.

The mauling by the Germans was a blessing, saving the lads from a more humiliating 7 - 0 pasting from the likes of Argentina.

You have to feel a twinge of sympathy for Rooney, Gerrard and Lampard, now they have to go home and witness on their 50" plasma screens just how ludicrous it was to imagine they ever had a prayer with players like Messi, Juan Veron, and Carlos Tevez.

The present form of English patriotism is not pretty, and encourages the worst elements. The English gutter press is a disgrace, calling the German boys Huns, and going on to accuse them of not being proper Germans because of where their parents were born. Fuckers who peddle this kind of shite deserve no success.

The abject nature of English patriotism is summed up by the singing of the shameful anthem, God Save the Queen. No one prepared to sing such a ridiculous song in public deserves any success. I'm willing to sing Jerusalem, but never that.

It's the remaining streak of imperialism that disfigures English patriotism. This is behind why Sarkozy has to appear deeply troubled by the deaths of 40 French soldiers in Afghanistan, yet there is no British outrage after more than 300 have been killed, and many more wounded. If patriotism is supporting our boys being killed at the rate of one a week, I'm not a patriot.

300 young lives lost and not a single British newspaper nor major political party is campaigning to get the troops out Afghanistan, and out of harms way.

A month ago I put a tenner on a Holland - Argentina final, and a tenner on Argentina to win. Looks like this could be a nice little earner.

More on that

2010-06-24T12:35:00.005+01:00

My remarks in support of Helen Thomas drew quite a few comments. I presume the ones in Chinese were both complimentary and supportive. Thanks for that.

I should point out to The Reality Show that Helen Thomas is neither an Arab, a racist, nor a hag. So far as I know she has never, during her many decades as a senior correspondent, used her position to argue, implicitly or otherwise, for the ethnic cleansing of Jews from Palestine.

Many years ago, when I began learning Arabic, I witnessed Arab racism first hand, and was taken aback by how entrenched and casual it was. My first teacher was an elderly Yemeni, a decent, good natured and considerate gentleman, for the most part moderate and tolerant in his views, yet cheerfully convinced that the Jews were behind all the world's ills. We became good mates, yet he remained mournfully disappointed in me for showing no interest in becoming a Muslim, for my misguided insistence that The Protocols of the Elders of Zion was a laughable forgery, and because I was always 'sticking up for the Jews' by making a distinction between Zionism and the Jewish people. He would also become exasperated when I contradicted his claim that the 'bloody tyrant' Winston Churchill was secretly Jewish.

A number of my classmates in those days were young Muslim lads, from Arab, Iranian, or Pakistani backgrounds - would-be militant Islamists, and often bigots of the first kidney. This coupled with a shockingly profound ignorance of their professed religion and its history.

If, as has been claimed by our security services, lads like this were being groomed by fiery preachers linked to the likes of Lashkar-e-Taiba, their indoctrination surely lacked all sophistication. They had no clear idea of the recent history of the continent they were living on, and knew nothing of the Middle East. WWII, Warsaw, the Shoah, 1948, the Nakhba, wouldn't have meant much to them. Their antisemitism was entirely quranic, involving putting to the sword Jews found hiding behind rocks at the end of time. Much of their sexism, racism, prejudice and general bigotry was in this cartoon dimension.

Ignorance, racism and bigotry are remarkably similar in every culture. To experience the Jewish version view some footage of Israeli settler demonstrations, read the Jerusalem Post, or take a look at Pamela Geller's Atlas Shrugs blog, available on the right of your screen.

And yes, I know what sort of fate a person like me might face were I living in one of the Arab regimes that surround Israel. Some who left comments on this blog seem to have the idea that I'm a Liberal, and as such deserving of this and that indignity. I'm not a Liberal, I'm a Communist. My likely fate under the current crop of repressive regimes, from Egypt to Iran, is easy to imagine - no doubt they'd have me shackled to a slimy cellar wall, being continually bum-banged by rotating platoons of the elite,(US trained), presidential guard. Murderous Israeli bigots might be more contemporary, and simply deploy a sniper, (with the latest US laser sighting system), to put one though my head.

Criticism of Zionism and the government of the State of Israel in no way implies apologies for Egypt or Syria, Hamas or Hizbollah, Fatah or the PA.

........

"We've shot an amazing number of people," McChrystal recently conceded.

Read The Runnaway General Rolling Stone's profile of the US's Afghanistan warlord HERE,

A Word for Helen Thomas

2010-06-12T14:06:00.003+01:00

I'd guess that when whoever it was rudely stuck a camera in Helen Thomas' face she had recently been listening to an Israeli government spokesperson, explaining their murderous raid on the Mavi Marmara.

It's enough to exasperate anyone, hearing the likes of Mark Regev smoothly claim that the IDF was 'not expecting trouble' when its elite commandoes boarded a boat carrying what they said were hundreds of Hamas supporters, including at least 50 armed mercenaries, and a number of prospective shaheeds.

Helen Thomas is an octogenarian journalist who has covered Israel since before 1948, and what she said was simply an outburst, incited by listening, time after time, to barefaced lies from the Israeli government. Unfortunately, what she said gave AIPAC and the rest of the propaganda machine the timely chance to make out that critics of Israel want to drive Jews into the sea, wipe them off the map. Just like the Israelis say Hamas and Iran does.

But Helen Thomas was talking about Israeli settlers, the ones on the West Bank and in East Jerusalam who are continuing to build settlements on Palestinian land. The settlers who are supported by the Israeli government - the Foreign Secretary, former strip-club bouncer Avigdor Lieberman is one of their leaders. Many settlers are Americans and Europeans, who are motivated by fanatical religious Zionism, and the delusion that that God has given them the right to take, by force if necessary, what does not belong to them. These people have recently taken to gathering in mobs to surround Arab properties, hoping to intimidate the owners into leaving. In Jaffa last week they turned up by the busload from all over Israel to beseige the last remaining Arab neighbourhood, shrieking and chanting racist abuse at the occupants. One woman, living on her own, had them yelling through her letterbox that she should get out of their property, God says so.

Helen Thomas was suggesting that if any of these people ever recover from the delusion of Zionism, they could consider returning to somewhere like North Dakota, and perhaps build a farm there.

No one in their right mind proposes driving Israelis into the sea, not even Hamas and Hizbullah.

The best comment on the flotilla incident came from Ilan Pappé in the Independent on Monday - 'The Deadly Closing of the Israeli Mind', read it HERE

Halfwits

2010-05-19T14:35:00.001+01:00

Image of Edith Piaf is by Angelique Houtkamp

A recent poll of 10,000 people between the ages of 5 and 18 invited them to rank in order of importance a variety of activities. Watching television and playing computer games, believe it or not, came first. Only 2 percent ranked Saving the Planet above that activity.

I read this in a copy of the newspaper they give away on the tram; not more than a single 4 inch column, 10pt bold. I've not yet seen the full results of the this poll, so before concluding that modern youth is uniquely moronic, I'd like to see more detail.

I noted that at Snorri's St Gwynllyw Infants School the 5 year olds were doing a project on Saving the Planet. Prominent on the classroom wall there was a large mural comprising a map of the World, with pictures of endangered animals attached with ribbon. Above it the legend in letters cut from coloured paper, Together We Can Save the Earth.

What can a 5 year old make of the ruin of the planet and the imminent danger of extinction? Surely a dark, terrifying prospect. To bear it we domesticate it. It becomes a moment of the spectacle.

I may check out this poll. The fact remains that this supposed result came as no surprise, I expected it. My unexamined view is that most young people are boneheads. Very depressing, though clearly preposerous. In back rooms and attics, bars and dancefloors, passionate, intelligent young women and men are formenting the downfall of capitalism as we speak. Some do it while watching tetevision.

Sweetcorn

2010-05-18T20:32:00.000+01:00

I was leaving the house with my youngest daughter and my little grandson Snorri, she was giving me a lift to the supermarket. As I was locking the back door I made a few remarks about frozen sweetcorn. In my view fresh sweetcorn, on the cob, boiled with a little salt and sugar is infinitely superior to the frozen product. Nothing ruins the delicate flavor of sweetcorn like stripping it from the cob and freeezing it. Even the canned variety is preferable. People who freeze sweetcorn deserve to be horsewhipped.

I could see immediately that Klara disapproved of what I said about sweetcorn, though my remarks were delivered without rancour. I suspect she was offended by the mention of sugar, which she detests. I got the impression that she was imagining me boiling corn on the cob in stiffly salted sugar syrup, which I would serve to a delighted Snorri sprinkled with demerara.

It took a while for her to compose an irked riposte. As we were getting into her car she said irritably, 'Dad, you're such...so narrow-minded...such a bigot. You take up these extreme opinions and then you force them down other people's thoats. You're always doing it.'

Klara is four months pregnant, and this was not the first time I'd seen her flushed with teetering, unpredictable emotions. I didn't want to upset her, so I offered a commendation of frozen garden peas, explaining that I had no objection at all to freezing food in principle. 'Frozen peas', I said by way of conciliation, 'are naturally sweet.'

Nothing further was said about vegetables. We motored through the city streets in pregnant silence. My sweet little Snorri sat in the front seat beside his mother, in his hands, as always, a toy car. I leaned over and fondly stroked his hair. Some minutes passed.

'You're so insensitive', Klara announced at last with a sigh. 'Other people just don't exist for you. You live in your own little world with your opinions and nothing else is real. No wonder Mum's hysterical.'

'I see', I replied calmly, 'an insensitive bigot. Good grief.'
'You must know you are. People have told you often enough.'

I was about to enquire after an example, when I noticed the engagement ring on Klara's finger, a fine antique rose gold and emerald ring they'd bought only a week ago. Of course, I hadn't met her fiancé Gustave, since she remained reluctant to expose him to my insensitive bigotry, and her mother's hysteria. I sensed Snorri tauten in apprehension.

'Pull over just here', I said airily, 'I'll walk the rest of the way.'

Snorri wound down the front window and I put my head through and kissed him goodbye.

'Whatever happened to greengrocers?' I wondered aloud. 'Vanished from the face of the Earth.'

Todesfuge

2010-01-13T13:20:00.004Z

It's probably coincidental that the second poem I'm presenting here in it's entirety is also a masterpiece about Death. I was struck on my first reading by Larkin's Aubade, realising immediately that I'd come upon a great work of art. Such sudden recognitions happen seldom in a lifetime. These moments are what poetry and song are for - music and voices that summon what people used to call grace, that leave you wondering where to direct your gratitude for such a gift.

Like Larkin's poem, Paul Celan's Todesfuge needs no commentary or explanation, both poems are unflinching marvels of directness and clarity. Maybe you should skip my forthcoming ramblings and gropings and simply scoll down to read Celan's poem.

Paul Celan's name came up not long ago in the course of my reading around Martin Heidegger. I knew of Celan's reputation, but wasn't familiar with his work. All I knew of Celan was that he was a German speaking Jewish poet celebrated throughout Europe, that he was a sometime admirer of Heidegger, that his parents had been murdered by the Nazis, and he had spent time in Nazi labour camps, and that after the Second World War he'd visited Heidegger in Freiburg, and been given the opportunity to seek of an explanation for Heidegger's turn to National Socialism in 1933. I also knew that he had got no such explanation from the great philosopher. No one ever did.

Great philosopher? Clearly, many people have thought so. The figure of Martin Heidegger bestrides 20th Century European intellectual life like no other. It's not possible to understand the intellectual climate of modern Europe without engaging with Heidegger's radical critique of modernity. The troubling thing is that it's difficult to see what possible connexion there could be between Heidegger's finely wrought philosophy, with it's celebration of the pre-socratics, and poets such as Hölderlin, and the squalid racism and power worship of the Nazis. Didn't Heidegger think that modern technology, and the instrumental reasoning that makes it possible, were a terrible error? How could he reconcile this with support for National Socialism, the bringer of mechanised death to Europe? Also, Heidegger was the only philosopher or artist of any stature to throw in his lot with the Nazis - Louis Ferdinand Céline's fascism was a symptom of a head injury, while the Nazis pet philosopher Alfred Rosenburg was a bufoon.

In 1957 Heidegger sat in the front row at a reading of poems given by Celan at Freiburg University. The reception given to Celan's poems, which would've included Todesfuge, was rapturous. Impressed, Heidegger invited Celan to spend time at his retreat in the Black Forest. Celan accepted, though obviously this must have been difficult for him given Heidegger's past. The poet and the philosopher wandered the forest pathways. Neither has left any account of what was discussed. Celan later sent Heidegger a very cryptic poem, which the philosopher proudly showed to other visitors to his retreat.

I'm not the only one intrigued by this meeting. I found an Australian radio presentation that bravely attempts to imagine what might have been said. You can listen to it HERE

You should also listen to Todesfuge in the original German. You'll find a version HERE

Hearing the masterpiece in the original it becomes clear that it's not a fugue but a tango. 'Death Tango' was Celan's first title for the poem.

Todesfuge

Black Milk of Daybreak we drink it at evening
we drink it at noon and morning we drink it at night
we drink and we drink
we dig at a Grave in the Air there one lies unconfined
A Man lives in the House he plays with the Serpents he
writes
he writes while it falls dark over Germany your golden
Hair Margerete
he writes and steps from the House and they’re shining the Stars he
whistles his Jews up to dig at a Grave in the Earth
he commands us to strike up the Dance.

Black Milk of Daybreak we drink you at night
we drink you at morning and noon we drink you at evening
we drink and we drink
A Man lives in the House he plays with the Serpents he
writes
he writes while it falls dark over Germany your golden
Hair Margerete
Your ashen Hair Shulamith we dig at a Grave in the
Air there one lies unconfined

He cries dig the soil deeper you there you others sing out and
play
he grabs the Steel at his Belt he waves it his Eyes are
blue
dig your Spades deeper you there you others play on for
the Dance

Black Milk of Daybreak we drink you at night
we drink you at noon and morning we drink you at evening
we drink and we drink
a Man lives in the House your golden hair Margarete
your ashen Hair Shulamith he plays with the Serpents
He cries play Death more sweetly Death is a Master from
Germany
He cries stroke the Strings more darkly you’ll rise like Smoke in
the Air
then a Grave you’ll have in the Clouds there one lies unconfined

Black Milk of Daybreak we drink you at night
we drink you at noon Death is a Master from
Germany
we drink you at evening and morning we drink and we drink
Death is a Master from Germany his Eye is blue
he strikes you with leaden Bullets he strikes you true
a Man lives in the House your golden Hair Margarete
he sets his Dogs onto us and he grants us a Grave in the Air
he plays with the Serpents and dreams Death is a Master
from Germany

your golden Hair Margarete
your ashen Hair Shulamith

Translated by A.S.Klein at Poetry in Translation

Section 60 : Stop & Search

2010-01-12T21:53:00.002Z

I was carrying a large ripsaw on my shoulder because I'd just borrowed it from my mate, call him Rafiq. He's a plumber. When he's finished work he likes to go straight upstairs to a bedroom and smoke heroin. His missis complains about him sitting on the bed in his filthy overalls, getting the black soot from the bottom of the tinfoil all over their bedspread. The pillows sometimes.

I sit with him now and then on the edge of the bed. He hands me a roll of foil and makes a rolling gesture with his forefinger. This particular day he'd scored on the way home from work and had a half ounce lump. We sat smoking for about an hour, Rafiq tossing noggins onto my foil, discussing matters relating to crime and criminals. His missis, a bustling, tidy, good natured woman with traditional values, probably put her head around the door, then went downstairs tut tutting.

As I was leaving, Rafiq reached into a Kellogg's Cornflakes box and brought out one of his foil tubes. The box is full of them, they all have a thick crust of melted heroin on the inside of the tube. The tubes are his emergency stash. He bit off a chunk from the lump of block and handed it to me along with the tube. I picked up the ripsaw from the kitchen, where Rafiq's missis was washing the dishes. She tut tutted as I went through the door.

I knew there'd been a shooting in Sharrow that afternoon, so when I saw the police cars at the bottom of the hill I wasn't suprised. When I got closer I saw that four scuffers had a tall black youth up against one of the cars. They were holding him while one of them went through his pockets.

I didn't expect the scuffers to pay me any attention, but as I approached one of them began to walk towards me with his arms raised. I was going to be stopped, so I deftly took the tube and the noggin from jeans pocket and flipped them onto the pavement behind me. There was the barest sound as they bounced under a parked car.

'Would you just come and stand beside the car please sir. And pick up what you've just thrown under that vehicle.'

Another scuffer came over and led me by the oxter towards the police car, while the other got on his knees with a torch and searched under the car. Within seconds he was holding the tube and noggin on the palm of his hand and presenting them under my nose.

'These are what you chucked under the car then sir.'

'I've never seen them before in my life. What are they?'

He was Asian, had a rather pleasant face, and I thought he was a bit short for a scuffer. He smiled.

'I heard them drop behind you. I'm not daft sir. I know when someone's got rid.'

'It's not mine. What is it? Why am I being stopped?'

'Section 60 sir. We're stopping and searching everyone in the area.' He sniffed the tube and passed it to his mate. 'Heroin.'

'What's Section 60?'

He looked up at the night sky as though there were something printed on it. 'Section 60 provides for a situation where a serious incident has taken place, and the Assistant Chief Constable or above signs an order requiring that for a certain period officers search everyone found on the streets in a designated area.'

'I've never heard of it. When was this dreamed up?'

'I'm detaining you on suspicion of possession of a Class A drug sir.'

'This is scandalous. When did they pass laws giving these sweeping powers to the police? I'm just a passer-by.'

The other scuffer had the boot of the police car open, and was dropping the tube and the noggin into an evidence bag. Soon I was in the back seat of a police car, handcuffed next to the tall youth. 'Outrageous. Section bloody 60. Searching members of the public and bungling them into the backs of police cars. Handcuffed. Where we going anyway?'

The short scuffer was in the front passenger seat, my ripsaw on his lap, he turned and mentioned some place I'd never heard of. In a chatty sort of way, with lots of smiles, he explained the situation as he saw it. We both knew the heroin was mine, so why didn't I just own up to it? 'Hardly the crime of the century, is it sir?'. Were I to admit it was mine I'd just be a case of filling in a few forms, followed by a caution, and we could both be back on our way in a hour or so. Otherwise, it could all become a bit more drawn out. 'Hardly the crime of the century is it?'

We drove though the night for a good twenty minutes to the outskirts of the city. I'd no idea where we were going. Then we pulled into a wired compound, with a big fortress like building such as you might expect to see in Ulster. We were led through a series of thick electronic doors. Loud buzzers sounded, cameras followed us down long windowless corridors.

We were led into an office, the handcuffs were taken off, and they sat us on a bench.

'How long, you say?' I asked the short copper.

'Two hours, tops. Leave it with me', he said, then went through a door.

He was back about an hour later. He'd been to a canteen and was finishing off a sandwich. Then we sat at a desk, the evidence bag with my tube and noggin in it between us. He had a sheet of paper and was getting ready write. I mentioned a solicitor. He looked disppointed, and explained that at this time a solicitor could take hours to get here. Why didn't I just own up to the heroin, then he could have a word with his sergeant, and we could both get off home? I said I felt a bit uncomfortable acquiring a criminal record in such a peremptory manner. I was thinking of applying for a job at the Post Office, I lied.

'Well, sir', he smiled, putting down his pen, 'it's your time. I mean, I get paid for this, so it's all the same to me. You could be here all night in a cell.'

I coughed up to possession. He wrote some stuff down, and I signed it. Then I was taken back to the bench. Two hours later the short copper reappeared and stood next to me before a tall counter while a sergeant behind it read something aloud from a sheet of paper. The sergeant handed me back my ripsaw, and I was led back down the long corridors, buzzed through the electronic doors, and out into roaring glare of the night.

I hadn't a clue where I was, and couldn't recall the name of this police fort. I couldn't make out where the main road was, so didn't know which direction to set off in. I stood there for a good half hour, freezing cold in the drizzle and wind. When two scuffers emerged from the building I asked them for a lift back to the city, explaining that I couldn't walk the streets, lost, in the middle of the night, carrying a big ripsaw. They obliged, even dropping me off at my front door.

This is how I became a Home Office registered drug addict.

A week or so later I got a letter from some agency or other summoning me to an appointment. I noticed the words 'Substance Misuse' on the letterhead. A photostated map was enclosed. The letter explained that if I failed to attend the appointment I would be arrested.

I wore my dark blue woollen Paul Smith three piece suit to the appointment, light grey button down collared shirt with an olive green silk tie, Hugo Boss black brogues, and carried a black calfskin leather satchel over my shoulder. I'd splashed my upper body liberally with Crabtree and Evelyn's Extract of Jamaican Khus-Khus. My interviewer was a talkative woman of twenty-five, wearing a very short tight navy skirt and purple stockings. I didn't follow much of what she said to me, but I produced a preposterous lie for every question she asked. When I elaborated on the social implications of Section 60 she seemed genuinely concerned.

The next day I was at a chemist's shop cashing a script for Deathamoan, 70ml a day. Of course, I don't drink this filthy stuff. But there are people who are prepared to do so, and thank me for selling it to them at the going price of £10 for a 100ml, bringing in an extra income of around £50 a week. Modest, but not inconsiderable. You see, I managed to make Section 60 work for me.

Dawn

2009-12-24T20:02:00.003Z

I'm posting complete a poem by Philip Larkin. Later I'll talk about why this is one of the essential poems of the twentieth century, and why Larkin is among the finest voices in our language.

An aubade is a piece of music that is sung or played at dawn.

Aubade

I work all day, and get half-drunk at night.
Waking at four to soundless dark, I stare.
In time the curtain-edges will grow light.
Till then I see what's really always there:
Unresting death, a whole day nearer now,
Making all thought impossible but how
And where and when I shall myself die.
Arid interrogation yet the dread
Of dying, and being dead,
Flashes afresh to hold and horrify.

The mind blanks at the glare. Not in remorse
- the good not done, the love not given, time
Torn off unused - nor wretchedly because
An only life can take so long to climb
Clear of its wrong beginnings, and may never;
But at the total emptiness forever,
The sure extinction that we travel to
And shall be lost in always. Not to be here,
Not to be anywhere,
And soon; nothing more terrible, nothing more true.

This is a special way of being afraid
No trick dispels. Religion used to try,
That vast, moth-eaten musical brocade
Created to pretend we never die,
And specious stuff that says No rational being
Can fear a thing it will not feel, not seeing
That this is what we fear - no sight, no sound,
No touch or taste or smell, nothing to think with,
Nothing to love or link with,
The anaesthetic from which none come round.

And so it stays just on the edge of vision,
A small unfocused blur, a standing chill
That slows each impulse down to indecision.
Most things may never happen: this one will,
And realisation of it rages out
In furnace-fear when we are caught without
People or drink. Courage is no good:
It means not scaring others. Being brave
Lets no one off the grave.
Death is no different whined at than with stood.

Slowly light stengthens, and the room takes shape.
It stands plain as a wardrobe, what we know,
Have always known, know that we can't escape,
Yet can't accept. One side will have to go.
Meanwhile telephones crouch, getting ready to ring
In locked-up offices, and all the uncaring
Intricate rented world begins to rouse.
The sky is white as clay, with no sun.
Work has to be done.
Postmen like doctors go from house to house.

Night Fears

2009-12-23T11:22:00.002Z

It's not the Dark Night of the Soul, not a panic attack, nor is it La Nausée. Existential discomfort more like. It happens now and then just after I've got into bed, the moment before my head reaches the pillow.

It's not a series of thoughts, more a rapid shift into a visceral sense of the precariousness, the futility, the risk, and the dread of living. I immediately get out of bed, get dressed, and leave the house by the back door. Practice has demonstrated that a brisk walk can dissipate these states.

It's 4:15 in the morning. I walk along a wide boulevard that leads out of the city, lined with trees and closed shops. I'm heading for an all-night supermarket about a mile up the road. I don't want to buy anything, but the destination provides some notion of purpose in a meaningless universe. If my mental state hasn't improved by the time I get to the supermarket I can continue along the road and out into the countryside.

It's freezing cold and spitting icy rain, I zip up, pull tight and stud the hood of my anorak. Hardly any traffic and no one about. A solitary jam sandwich splashes slowly past me down the middle of the road. Of course, I'm aware of the possibility of being stopped by the scuffers at this hour. I carry no weapons, and I have an explanation ready: toothache, I'm on my way to the supermarket for ibruprofen.

The jam sandwich comes towards me from the other direction. I'm not surprised when it makes a sudden turn and mounts the pavement in front of me. A plain clothed scuffer flings open the door and jumps out. He's holding a big rubber torch, agitated. He strides towards me, the torch ready to batter me over the head. He's a small feller.
Which way yer come from?
Av got toothache.
Put yer hood down.

Just as I'm exposing my head a lemon-curd sandwich pulls up behind me. A uniformed scuffer, an inspector, no less, puts his head out of the door, calls out, Not that one, then screeches off. The little feller lowers his torch and makes off. As he's getting into his car, he turns to me and says,
Do us a favour pal, don't wear your hood up along here.
You fucking what, I answer incredulously, it's freezing cold and pissing it down.
He drives off.

Because this country bristles with spy cameras, and the population is aware of being the most watched people on the planet, cameras following every move we make, the most popular form of dress is the hooded garment. This seems reasonable. There are times when it's convenient not to reveal your identity. The hood is a simple and effective answer to this need. But some people, and these are mostly young people, young men, wear their hoods up all the time. Unwilling to be watched. This inspires suspicion and fear. Hoodies.

So as not to inspire alarm, and as a favour to the police force, I continue up the road bareheaded, the cold rain beating at my face and the chill wind causing acute pain in my ears.

Of course you can answer your own door, sir, that's how we know we live in a democracy. Joe Orton, Loot.

As for the horrors, they faded on the way back from the supermarket.

A child denied

2009-09-10T15:04:00.004+01:00

This is a photograph I took of my daughter. She was sitting on the chair in the corner by herself in protest at my refusal to buy her a snake from the petshop I'd taken her to see earlier.

I tried to explained to her that the snake in the shop was just a baby python. He'd have to be fed live mouses for dinner, and when he got bigger he'd want to eat rabbits, cats, or even Hercule, the doggy. Soon, we'd have to move out of the house, because the python's head would be on the kitchen table, while his tail would be upstairs sleeping in her bed.

She didn't believe me, said snakes weren't as big as that, and we could get a snakearium with lights and a little house for him to sleep in. She'd been crayoning pictures of snakes since we got back from the shop, and she took her best one and tore it up, crumpling the pieces and chucking them on the floor.

She said she was going to sit on her own on the chair because she couldn't have a snake, and I was telling lies about pythons. He wouldn't eat Hercule for dinner.

You could have a turtle in a turtlearium, I told her, or a cheese lizard, which is a vegetarian.. But she only wanted that python called Jeremy in the petshop.

When I called for a smile for the photograph she made herself look sadder.

Lacan and the pig

2009-09-07T13:07:00.003+01:00

We know that philosophy began as a vast discussion with tragedy, with the theatre, with the impurity of the visible and performing arts. The essential interlocutors of Plato were on the stage, and included in this broader rhetorical visibility are the public stage, the democratic assembly, the performance of the sophists. We should not be surprised today that philosophy is, for an increasing part of its activity, a vast discussion with cinema. Because cinema and its derivatives, including television, represent on a human scale, after Tragedy and Religion, the third historical attempt at the spiritual subjugation of the visible, available to all, without exception or measure. Also present at the meeting, the democratic politicians and their sophist advisors, renamed "public relations consultants." The screen has become their supreme test. The question has changed in destination only. It goes: "if there exists a sovereign technique of semblance, and if this technique, when it is cinema, is also capable of producing a mass art, what torsion, what metamorphosis does this art impose on that by which philosophy supports itself, and which has the name 'truth'"? - Alain Badiou, Cinema as a Democratic Emblem

True. I'm not a philosopher, but, as many of these blog posts will confirm, much of my intellectual life has been an engagement with what I've seen at the cinema.

Badiou is supposedly a fan of The Matrix - just the first one, surely. Zizek often uses 'Welcome to the desert of the real' as a Lacanian catchphrase. I had an immediate problem with that film. Having an engineer's mind I couldn't fathom why the hyper-intelligent machines would choose to use human bodies as an energy source, rather than another less problematic species, pigs for instance, which can, among other benefits, breed more profusely and develop much quicker. And anyway, surely these intelligent entities would have solved the problems of nuclear fission, thereby realising an infinite energy source. Using living meat as batteries is frankly preposterous, as is the notion of generating billions, nay trillions, of lines of computer code for the sole purpose of deceiving human beings. Why not just off the lot of them and have done with it?

No doubt a Matrixian will offer to enlighten me about these quibbles. I remember seeing a 'making of The Matrix' documentary, where it was claimed that the Warchovsky brothers were inspired by a close reading of European philosophy, citing Baudrillard, among others. The film was intended to ask searching questions about the nature of reality. Bollocks. Thought experiments can't be constructed on such flawed foundations.

This is why most science fiction on film is little more than overblown space opera, or like The Matrix an extended shoot 'em up. I can only think two good ones - the original Solaris, and Tarkovsky's Stalker. Tell me I'm wrong.

Speaking of pigs. In a recent post I spoke sceptically about the prospective outcome of psychoanalysis. Here's an interesting paper by the Lacanian analyst Anne Shane that uses the film Babe to describe the outcome of analysis. This curious film I know really well, having watched it perhaps a dozen times with one of my children. It's superb piece of cinema, not least because of its soundrack, which includes three mice squeaking a beautiful refrain from Saint Saen's Symphony Number Three.

St Antony of Rimini

2009-08-30T01:55:00.001+01:00

While I'm no pacifist I'm not in favour of judicial killing under any circumstances. Since early childhood, scenes of execution in films have remained among the most vividly recalled - from Lesley Howard's guillotining in A Tale of Two Cities, Cagney's screaming appointment with the chair in Angels With Dirty Faces, to the most harrowing of all in Krystof Kieslowski's masterpiece, A Short Film About Killing.

A person's views on capital punishment are for me a touchstone, determining all other assessments of that person's opinions or personal qualities. In the spirit of Sartre's statement that 'all anti-communists are swine', I make the same sweeping gesture concerning apologists for the death penalty.

I've heard all the arguments about vital revolutionary necessities, heard the tales about Spanish anarchists of the 1930s, choosing the most magnificent vistas and exquisite sunsets when dispatching fascists, and listened to the intricately constructed logic of thought experiments that point inexorably to the firing-squad, but I remain unmovable.

Which is why, despite the man's odious crimes and unrepentant responsibility for the deaths of many thousands of civilians, I would not condone Tony Blair being put against a wall and shot.

Guardian readers who have not, through relentless exposure, become finally deaf to irony will have noted with the flicker of an eyebrow the small headline on page 6 of today's paper:

Materialism a threat to planet and human identity, says Blair

It may have been Donald Rumsfeld who rightly pointed out that being a hypocrite is better than having no values at all. The piece goes on to report that Blair delivered a speech at the 'prestigious' Communion and Liberation conference in Rimini. The adjective is superfluous, since had the event not been prestigious Blair would not have been there. The speech was made during a stopover Blair made on his way to a holiday aboard a five-deck luxury yatch as the guest of an American billionaire.

I'll quote a little of what he's alleged to have said - I use that qualifier because I'm not entirely convinced that some cunning devil isn't making all this stuff up. The language seems too thoroughly unctious, too evocative of the sermons of Rev. J.C. Flannel, to be authentic:

This is surely the role of faith in modern times...To represent God's truth, not limited by human frailty, or by the interests of the state or by the transient mores of a community, however well intentioned, but to let that truth bestow on us humility, love of neighbour, and the true knowledge that indeed passes all understanding.

Of course, since leaving office and becoming a multi-millionaire, Blair has entered into the Roman Catholic communion. I'll be frank about my prejudiced view of Roman Catholicism. This is not a religion but a conspiracy against the human spirit. Of all the main religious movements centered around the person of the rabbinical carpenter's son from Nazereth, it is the furthest removed from its source. I'll not speculate on what attractions it held for Blair.

I was once listening to Radio 4 interview with Blair's missis, Cherie. Her aquisitiveness is well known, and she's openly caricatured in the press as a greedy scouser, elbowing her way to piles of designer freebies like a footballer's wag, and stuffing her face at prestigious charity banquets. At one point the interviewer, a bit impertinently but with the customary delicacy, asked her about the vast sums of money she and Tony were raking in. She talked of the deprivations of her working class upbringing, touching upon her feckless piss artist father, and wondered whether the experience might have caused her to need millions in the bank in order to feel secure. Oh, the relentless vulgarity of the times we live in.

Dreaming

2009-08-29T01:57:00.004+01:00

I had a dream last night of the type that Burroughs calls a 'Land of the Dead' dream. These are characterised by being set in a region of permanent starless night, in an oddly familiar landscape of paradoxical topographies, where there is no discernable difference between the inside and the outside of structures.

Such dreams are uncommon, and though they're distinctly unsettling and call for attempts at interpretation, it's difficult to reassemble much of them on awakening, since the action is usually fitful and disordered. But last night's dream was remarkably different from other examples of the genre my unconscious has screened for me. All the other Land of the Dead features were present, including narrative incoherence, but this one was distinguished by the fact that it was, for the most part, pleasing, rather than being disturbing or ominous, and I'm able to clearly recall some scenes from it.

The dream concerned a former girlfriend I haven't seen in some forty years, (distinct personalities are unusual in LoD dreams). Perhaps for the sake of the narrative coherence of this tale, and for readers of a certain sensibility, I should say that I was in love with her, though this would be misleading.

She was the first posh girl I'd ever had what people now call a 'relationship' with, being from a part of society with which I'd previously never had any direct contact. In a tangible sense she was a different species, and this was utterly fascinating. Her parents were academics, and she was reading French Literature at Cambridge. At the time I was working, when I could force myself to turn in, at a concrete mouldings factory, and reading the labels on stolen pharmaceutical products.

I used to love, and that's the word, to stretch out on the couch at her flat and simply watch her - for she was beautiful - doing the things that other people did, but that she could perform with an air of such radical alterity. For instance, the elegant disdain with which she pushed a vacuum cleaner over the carpet, or the way she could sit at her kitchen table reading, while at the same time unerringly transferring her delicate underwear from the washbasket into the washer with the tip of her shoe. Such sights were a marvel.

Before meeting her I'd only dimly considered the notion that her species had sex. When I mentioned this to her she chuckled, and placing two fingers lightly on my lips quoted St Teresa of Avila, 'Nous ne sommes pas des anges, nous avons un corps.'

It was an initiation into a fragrant mystery. In contrast, the girl I was living with then was a farmer's daughter, for whom sex had no mystique. Following the example of the farmyard animals, with particular attention paid to the donkeys, she proudly claimed to have been having sex of one kind or another since the age of six. (Which would would explain her fondness for coitus a tergo, during which she often liked to noisily eat her fish supper from a small trough, without benefit of cutlery - if she's now reading this I hope it induces a face-searing jolt of recognition. Serves her right for the breadknife incident.)

The message the dream might have been carrying, I sense, was occluded by the the pleasure I felt of having this girl brought to mind. As often in LoD dreams there was a general air of dereliction and decay. In the opening scene the girl and I were ascending, side-by-side, a steep, rickety wooden staircase:

[S]taircases and ladders in dreams [are] unquestionably symbols of copulation. It is not hard to discover the basis of the comparison: we come to the top in a series of rhythmical movements and with increasing breathlessness and then, with a few rapid leaps, we can get to the bottom again. (Freud, Interpretation of Dreams)

Yet the dream oddly lacked any erotic charge at all. At the top of the stairs we went into a room, dark, cluttered with indistinct objects, and of course without a roof. We laid down together on a bed made from thick lengths of wood (sleepers!), so arranged as to make a sleeping posture impossible. We were fully clothed in thick overcoats made heavy by rain. She lay on her side curled up with her back to me, I was on my back, feeling discomfort from pieces of the wood pressing against my spine.

At one point I noticed in the darkness that there was another bed opposite us. On it sat, expressionless, silent, a heavy set man, bald, barechested - possibly Far Eastern in appearance - who was watching us.

I think the sequence where we ascended the staircase was repeated.

Lacan on the telly

2009-08-21T22:46:00.001+01:00

Here's a rare treat - a French television show made in 1973 with Jacques Lacan, (see my last post), in 1973. Lacan's son-in-law, Jacques-Alain Miller, is asking Lacan questions on psychoanalysis. It seems that Lacan's replies were delivered in a style that the master thinker thought appropriate for a televisual performance. Surely, his celebrated seminars, delivered before large audiences of the leading French and continental intellectuals of the period, cannot have looked like this.

Yes, it's ludicrous. British viewers familiar with the now almost forgotten wartime films of Will Hay, or with the lectures of the sublime Professor Stanley Unwin, will be struck with the similarity of Lacan's delivery.

This gem was discovered on the superb Ubuweb, a wonderful resource for film, video, music and poetry. It was on Ubuweb I found a full and subtitled version of Guy Debord's Society of the Spectacle, along with all of his other films.

Reading Heidegger

2009-08-14T04:29:00.006+01:00

I was anticipating a flurry of emails from readers asking for an explanation of the protracted silence on this blog, the last post being nearly a month ago. Surprisingly, I find that this has not happened. So to anxious readers who have perhaps composed a message and for one reason or another not sent it, to those who are merely reticent because of past experience, and to others who have been enduring patiently, I offer my apologies.

The reason for my silence is that I've been re-reading Heidegger, renewing an aquaintance with that most difficult of philosophers who I abandoned in frustration over a quarter of a century ago. Now I'm no longer burdened with the distractions of being young, and while I'm reluctant to claim to be any wiser, I have picked up along the way a few mental dispositions that seem to be making this second encounter less fraught and more fruitful. The chief among these is undoubtably persistence. Heidegger himself frequently reminds his readers of this - persist in this endeavour, he declares, and then step back a moment.

And why do I think that studying Heidegger is worth the all perplexity and prolonged effort it entails? Because I persist, that's why.

My initial project, begun some time ago, was to make a survey of the state of contemporary Western philosophy. I might have added 'since Marx', because the truth of the matter is that what I set out to look for was some inkling of a renewal of Marxism, or at least an opening for a politics of emancipation for these times. Because in an emotional respect the past three decades or so have been marked by an accumulating sense of loss.

I came upon Marxism as a barely educated teenager. My ancestors were industrial workers, miners, steelworkers, soldiers and sailors. I learned nothing at school. If I later became one of that vanished tribe, the working class intellectual, it was because I was chivvied off the streets, while serving an apprenticeship in shoplifting and petty theft, by Trotskyists from the Labour Party Young Socialists, who put into my hands pamphlets by Lenin and Trotsky, introduced me to the habits of reading and discourse, opening up the world and its history. It was from these sources that I first experienced the soaring exhilaration that can be had from ideas. Something similar might befall a young man today, but his recruiters and mentors would more likely be fascists.

The emotional charge from all this remains. As Ginsburg says, 'I get sentimental about the Wobblies'. Hearing the Internationale can bring about a searing rush in the breast. Watching the scene from Bertoluci's Novecento, where the workers and peasants raise above them the impossibly gigantic red banner is almost unbearably intense. Before long there will be no one left able to access these emotions.

A vivid memory comes to mind: around the mid 1970s I was leaving a dole office, having signed on for unemployment benefits, as I very often did at the time. I was carrying a copy of Rilke's Duino Elegies. Outside the dreary building there was as usual a parade of sellers of various revolutionary newspapers, each calling out their title and a brief positional slogan - 'Socialist Vanguard. Supports the Irish Worker's Struggle.' One of them spotted my Rilke, and he pointed to it and said to me, 'Bout the only decent thing to come out of fucking Germany in the thirties, that was.'

In that moment the longhaired Workers Fist seller and I shared a unique solidarity, a kinship, possible only in an singular epoch perhaps, a time when another Europe was being glimpsed. I can see him now, his grin sending static through his beard, my own smile reflected in his mirror shades. Never saw him again. The Workers Fist feller would've been able to call this from memory:

Who, if I cried out, would hear me among the Angelic
Orders? And if one were to suddenly
take me to its heart, I would vanish into its
stronger existence. For beauty is nothing but
the beginning of terror we're still just able to bear,
and why we adore it so is because serenely disdains
to destroy us. Every Angel is terrible.

...

So, a lot of attention has been expended on difficult texts. For a little light relief I'll DJ a few riffs that might serve as a jingle or ringtone on the theme of the current condition of Western philosophy.

You can't barge far in philosophy today without coming upon the slippery Slovenian thinker Slavoj Zizek. Not only is he a conspicuous presence, quoted and referenced on an array of political and cultural topics in prestigious journals like the NLR, the LRB, and the NYRB, while he's less than 60 years old there's already an institute founded for the study of his work and times - the lively and entertaining International Journal of Zizek Studies

He's startlingly erodite and an engaging performer. You can see him in action on YouTube, for instance in the clip of his closing remanks to the 2006 'Future of Communism' conference at Birbeck. He looks every bit the engaged intellectual, an exotic species rarely found in this country outside of the psychiatric facility. Hirstute, of course, as he delivers he pokes and mauls the air in front of him, welshcombs his grey mane and tugs furiously on his misshapen teeshirt. I took to him immediately.

There's a rumour he's done a beer advert in Slovenia, and I wouldn't be taken aback were he to appear on Jonathan Ross's couch, but it would be a mistake to take him for a nouvelle philosophe type wanker. His origins are in the Slovenian stalinist era punk movement, and he remains active in an agitprop (does that word still exist?) arts collective, NSK (Neue Slowenischer Kunst).

Zizek says he's a dialectical materialist, which is alright with me, though Hegel is clearly his main man. Odd juxtapositions are a speciality. Reading Zizek is exhilarating, he writes much as he speaks, and if you imediately get the sense you're being unmercifully provoked, it seldom gets tiresome. Some chapter headings from The Parallax View (2006) will do for now:

The Unbearable Heaviness of Being Divine Shit.
The Solar Parallax: The Unbearable Lightness of Being No One.
The Obscene Knot of Ideology, and How to Untie it.

His other main man is Jacques Lacan. It seems that Zizek's avid promotion of Lacan is responsibe for a major ongoing revision of the view, formerly held in Britain and the US, that psychoanalysis is as dead as Marxism. Zizek's efforts have paid off particularly in America, where Lacan now figures prominently in culture and film studies. See for instance Lacan in America

I wasn't familiar with Lacan, so I read some popular short introductions - Looking Awry, an Introduction to Jacques Lacan Through Popular Culture, How to Read Lacan, and Lacan for Dummies - all by Zizek.

A common experience with Lacan, particularly among anglophones, is that he's painfully difficult to approach, both in terms of language and concept, other than through interpreters like Zizek. Cunningly perhaps, Lacan chose not to write any books, preferring to present, over a period of decades, series of lectures, which clearly contained a measure of performance, delivered before audiences of the cream of France's intellectual and artistic elite. Over the years the lectures have been transcribed and published. He made notes, though he presumed that only himself and his son-in-law would be able to decipher them. There are baffling neologisms, odd coinages, algebraic constructions, mathemes and graphemes. Zizek suggests you might read Lacan the way you would Mallarmé.

Again, what immediately strikes the anglophone sensibility is Lacan's repeated declaration that he is primarily a clinician, and his intention is to set the practice of psychoanalysis on a firm scientific basis. We assume that by this he means that he wants to make psychoanalysis more effective in alleviating human suffering. Given Freud's less than inspiring summary of the objective of psychoanalysis - that of turning profound despair into ordinary misery - Lacan's refoundational project appears to amount to creating a psychoanalysis that really works.

Lacanian psychoanalysis has been now practiced for the past forty years, particularly in France, and in Argentina, where apparently it reigns supreme. But I've yet to come across news from those countries of the emergence of a new and effective cure for despair. There's an interesting acrticle HERE by Dylan Evans, a former Lacanian psychoanalyst, and author the widely read Dictionary of Lacanian Psychoanalysis, that deals with this point.

But you see, as Zizek would quickly remind me, this way of looking at Lacan misses the mark, being merely an instance of what Heidegger calls 'technological framing'. Another reason to read Heidegger...

(Incidentally, all the books mentioned, and many more, can be had on Scribd in pdf format. This is a sort of YouTube for documents, and excellent resource for those who don't mind reading books on computer terminals.)

Straw Dogs

2009-07-17T16:08:00.001+01:00

This post is presented in solidarity with Gary McKinnon, the British UFO enthusiast who the Americans want to punish, probably to death, in one of their murderous hellholes. Gary's hopes of escaping extradition are, alas, in the hands of a particularly spineless running-dog - Justice Minister Jack Straw.

I well remember Straw from his days as president of Leeds University Student's Union. At the time the union was a hugely popular meeting place for drug dealers stoners and freaks from all over the country. Then newly built, it seemed that it could have been designed for that very purpose. There were lots of intimate nooks and crannies, where dealers would set up their scales on the low tables, hacking up with Zippo blackened flick-knives great kilo slabs of Red Lebanese, Afghani, or Nepalese Temple Balls, for the queues of customers clutching wads of notes. From midday onwards there was a permanent sweet blue haze hanging in the air.

At this time LSD had become so cheap and abundant that it was more often given away than bought and sold. Glassy eyed trippers milled bewildered from nook to nook, groups of them sat in crosslegged rings on the floor debating the universe, couples writhed on the upholstery exploring polymorphous perversity.

The odd nook might be loud with a mob of engineering students or ruggerbuggers, chucking beer around, setting fire to piles of beermats, spewing up, or trying to pull each others jeans off.

Everyone knew who Jack Straw was. Now and then you'd catch a glimpse of him striding purposefully through the blue fugged mayhem, taking care not to look too closely at what was going on in the nooks. No one gave much of a toss about him, but there was a sense that he might be quietly plotting to put an end to the party.

I have this vivid memory of him walking up to where perhaps a dozen of us were sitting around a table, skinning up and passing joints. He just stood there with what might've been a smile on his face until the table went quiet and everyone was gazing up at him, then he turned and went. As he walked away this Scots voice called after him with exquisitely poised sarcasm, 'Away now then Jack, yer doss wee twat.'

I flashbacked on this scene when I saw Straw, as Blair's Foreign Secretary, striding towards the speakers podium at the UN General Assembly - chin up, chest out, looking in his stiff double-breasted pinstripe suit like some lad allowed out in his old fellers regimental blazer.

(Incidentally, you can get the measure of the likes of Straw, Blair, Mandelson and rest of the New Labour entity, by reading Alain Badiou's superb The Meaning of Sarkosy. {Verso, London 2006. Translated by David Fernbach} The finest piece of polemics written this century)

Send no Money

2009-05-30T00:52:00.002+01:00

The fuss over the resignation of Ruth Padel as Oxford's professor of poetry isanother example of cultural enfeeblement. As I understand it, Ruth Padel is claiming to have passed on to journalists her concerns about Derek Walcott so as to spare Oxford University the embarrassment of a possible headline in the press such as Sex Beast Poet Gets Chair.

This seems reasonable enough under the circumstances, and it could be argued that a Roderick Padel would not have been called upon to resign for doing the same thing. What bothers me though is the way that the world of poetry is exposed and presented as the faintly ludicrous concern of a close circle of privileged academics and touchy downbeat intellectuals. 'One is left with no enthusiasm for the whole thing', a disappointed literary chap pronounced. Queyt.

Surely, Fellow Creatures, poetic productivity is a crucial indicator of social wellbeing. Without poetry and song we have no bearings in the universe. I guess the current problem is that poetry often deals with notions such as death and despair, futility, ecstatic union with the divine, intense emotion, madness, the nature of love, emptiness, pain and loss, beholding the signs of Allah, heralding a newly made world to the toiling masses, considering toads or my cat Geoffrey, howling at folly and injustice, sailing to Byzantium, rotting corpses, the exquisite properties of soap, drunken boats, visions and portents. People are too busy now, and simply have no time for this kind of thing. And anyway, it could be upsetting, and send you a bit funny.

Which newsclip would you rather hear when you turn on your radio in the morning? :

Salford now has a burgeoning finacial services sector that has become an engine of growth and development for the whole region.

or

Salford has now been overrun by poets and artists, and performance venues are struggling to meet an ever increasing demand. The pressure on accommodation has become so acute that the City Council is appealing to the government for funds to relocate the overflow to the Lake District.

Seriously. Which?

.....................

I can't raise much enthusiasm for the furore over MPs expenses. It seems people are saying they're angry about it, but it's just boring and almost routine. My former comrade Peter Hitchens, who many years ago used to share with me a pitch outside Belsize Park tube station, where we flogged copies of the much missed Worker's Fist, made a good point in his piece in the Mail on Sunday. You have to marvel, he points out, at the sheer chutzpah of David Cameron, and the skill of the Tory spinners. Cameron and his fragrant wife share a personal fortune of around £40 million, yet see fit to claim £30 thousand expenses to have servants clear the wisteria from the garden of one of their extensive properties. Luckily, some other Tories had made claims for daft extravagances, like moats and duck condominions, so Cameron's claim seems reasonable and fair.

The Wire interview

2009-05-18T14:13:00.006+01:00

Bill Moyers, one of the very few mainstream US journalists with anything interesting to say, recently interviewed David Simon, creator and co-producer of The Wire. It's in two parts, and I urge you to watch it HERE

Moyers says in his introduction:

'When television history is written', one critic says, 'Little else will rival The Wire. 'And when historians come to tell the story of America in our time, I'll wager they will not be able to ignore this remarkable and compelling portrayal of life in our cities.'

I agree. He goes on to compare The Wire to Gibbon, for its portrayal of the decadence of an empire, and to Dickens, for that writer's description of the dark undercurrents of Victorian London. These comparisons are apt enough, though I'd prefer a comparison to Mayhew, less sentimental and voyeuristic than Dickens, and to Engels, for its comprehensive and incisive depiction of contemporary working class life. (Something that, incidentally, The Wire shares with the sadly neglected recent film The Wrestler.)

Simon has plenty of useful things to say in the interview about the US elite's 'War on Drugs' strategy, though he doesn't venture beyond the current discourse of American liberalism, and so a sense of frustration, pessimism, and disappointment is evident - but he can hardly be blamed for that, since in America, as elsewhere, this is the only oppositional discourse with any hope of getting a hearing.

Simon sees the WoD in structural economic terms, being a consquence of the fact that in the modern economic system some 10-15% of the population, for various reasons, is entirely superfluous to requirements. This is true, but in Britain at least I'd opt for a much higher figure of 20-25%.

You could present this in crude diagramatic terms. The social structure of late capitalism might be represented by a diamond shape - vast wealth at the top apex, (as Simon points out with some outrage, one percent of elite Americans own over 20% of the wealth, and counting), broad contentment in the middle, and in the bottom sector a range of relative to abject deprivation. Simon, as a liberal, implies that he'd settle for a society that looked more like an equilateral triangle. We 21st Century communists are working towards a model that might resemble a circle, or a sphere.

But don't let me distract you from watching an excellent interview.

Advertising Feature

2009-04-11T12:23:00.002+01:00

I read a recent SF story by Dave Lee, called Code, that fiercely describes groups of future youths who tool around with genetics to become the animals of their choice - an entirely feasible possibility, given our current grasp of quantum mechanics. The curious reader may be able to find the tale here.

Don't know whether it was coincidence, but in the few hours after reading it for the first time I caught sight of an unusual proliferation of animals and birds. From the window here in the dog's room I saw a big she-fox snuffling around the front garden garden. It was half an hour before dusk, and I'd only ever glimpsed her before in the dead of night. Moments later a familiar squirrel shot up an elder full of skittering bluetits. Then a young hedgehog appeared on the pathway. I watched him for a while as he snorted about, looking for his dinner. The notion occurred to me that these creatures were delivering a message to me. From somewhere or other. A warning maybe I guessed.

The hedgehog suddenly made for the front gate, and I pictured him the moment before being squashed under black car tyres on the main road at the top of the street. I can't think of an animal that could defeat a hedgehog's superb defensive technique. The spines are an engineering masterpiece, sharp as needles and pointing in every direction. ('The fox knows many things, but the hedgehog knows one big thing.') Without motor vehicles, and allegedly Diddycoits, who some claim roast them in clay balls, hedgehogs could expect to live long and purposeful lives.

I went to fetch some gloves to shift him into the back garden. It's walled, and there's a compost heap where he'd find a very productive worm mine. Even with gloves it was tricky picking him up.

Bearing him carefully along the path I suddenly felt this enormous sense of privileged kinship and responsibility for the little spiked feller - and I thought, this is what Blake meant when he spoke to the worm. Here was the message being delivered.

Enchantment. Remarkable, don't you think?

Here's a song about foxes and snow by the excellent Seattle band,Fleet Foxes. It's currently 165 in the UK charts.

Onwards to the G20

2009-03-31T15:15:00.004+01:00

My friend who lives at the top of the street is a Recreational Services manager with the council, and I sometimes arrange with him the loan of pieces of equipment. Yesterday I was fancying one of the minature JCBs I'd admired earlier in the park, to help me build a frog sanctuary in my back garden. When he let me in they were having a meeting.

My friend the park keeper is also General Secretary of the Peoples and Workers Party (GB), a Pyongyang inspired microgroup. He and the other two local members were preparing for the G20 demonstration on Wednesday, tacking huge pictures of Kim Ill Sung and Kim Jong Ill onto placards, and emptying boxes of great piles of glossy leaflets in Korean. They wore crisp new matching cerise polo shirts, and had been to the barbers.

The story goes that some years ago my friend and neighbour won an open plane ticket from inside a confectionary wrapper. He chose to fly to North Korea because during the 1966 World Cup the national team had played their group matches in our city, and he'd been immensely impressed by them. They had battled courageously, and went on to lift the group Fair Play Trophy.

He was in Pyongyang for over a week, and when he got back he was telling everybody about the worker's paradise he'd discovered in North Korea: beer at 35 pence a pint, massive fishing clubs, sports and social, magnificent parks. After a few pints in the Hangman he'd become particularly enthusiastic, bringing himself to tears recalling the kindness of his friends in the Pulgunbyol District Police. Then he joined, and later became Gen. Sec. of the PWP(GB). His wife would have nothing to do with his 'thing', as she called it. As usual she was sitting in the middle of the couch, smoking cannabis and watching daytime TV.

I paid him £2.50 for a translation of a Kim Jong Ill speech on Human Rights abuses in the USA, and told him I was on my way to make my own arrangements for the G20 demo. As I closed his front door he called out, 'American journalists. Chinese border. Israeli spies'. I didn't mention of course that I was on my way to attempt to retrieve Nestor Makhno's flag.

This was the huge battle stained black flag that Makhno had galloped under when he rode with the Revolutionary Insurrectionary Army of Ukraine, fighting the Austrians, Denniken, Petlura, and later the Red Army. It had flown above the Gulyai Polya Autonimous Workers and Peasants Council.

Defeated by the Bolsheviks in 1921, Makhno managed to take the flag with him to exile in Paris. After he died the flag changed hands a few times, eventually crossing the channel in the late fifties with the British anarchist and Spanish Civil War veteran, Albert Meltzer. It was now on the top of a wardrobe in my friend's bedroom.

My friend is now semi retired, but was formerly a prominent member of a local anarchist group much influenced by the Norse tradition. The ranks of the once vigourous group have now been decimated by drink, drugs, motorbike accidents and infirmity, but a handful survive, most of them working for the council in one capacity or another.

Makhno's banner came into my friend's keeping, he says, after a 1969 conversation with Albert Meltzer in a pub near Conway Hall, Red Lion Square, where an international anarchist conference was taking place. He agrees that both he and Meltzer were two gallon drunk when he gave him the flag, but he decided to keep it because of the great honour its custody bestowed, and because of the flag's undoubted magikal properties.

Since then Makhno's flag has been raised at many of the biggest actions and demonstrations in Britain, though it saw its last outing at the Orgreave coal depot, during the miner's strike, where the flagpole gained further distinction by being rammed into a police inspector's earhole.

I was going to propose to my friend that I borrow Nestor Makhno's flag to take to the G20 demo. I'd asked him on a number of similar ocasions in the past to make use of the flag, but he'd refused outright. He suspected I might be a Trotskyist. Other political flotsam like me had tried to get their hands on the flag, he said, but he'd fucked them all off.

Before I'd touched his brass raven doorknocker he yanked open his door, saw my face and said, 'No', then he shoved the door shut. It was on a thick chain latch.

'On yer fuckin bike', he growled through the door.

'We should talk about this in a respectful manner, comrade.' I had to shout.

'Told yer, on yer way. Trotskyist cunt.'

'Do I need to remind you that that flag belongs to the entire workers movement?', I appealed.

I heard him angrily undoing the chains to get the door open, then he stuck his beard through the crack, and I saw a pair of lips appear from among the grey and orange scrub.

'Aye, comrade, but not to the butchers of Kronstadt.'

Then he slammed the door shut again, rattling the raven's beak against the wood. I'm planning a final cunning attempt to get my hands on Makhno's banner before the G20 demo. My friend is a notorious old goat, and I'm arranging for a local sex worker to visit him posing as an admirer of Emma Goldman. If this ruse works, prepare to be awed by the flag at the G20.

Shaken fan reads shock poem

2009-03-30T13:29:00.002+01:00

I was put onto this video by the music business newsletter RockRap Confidential. You can subscribe by emailing, rockrap@aol.com

How the scam works

2009-03-30T13:19:00.003+01:00

This piece by Michael Hudson is short and to the point enough to reproduce entirely.

The free market at work, financial style.

March 27, 2009 "Counterpunch" -- Newspaper reports seem surprised at how high banks are bidding for the junk mortgages that Treasury Secretary Geithner is now bidding for, having mobilized the FDIC and Fed to transfer yet more public funds to the banks. Bank stocks are soaring – thereby bidding up the Dow Jones Industrial Average, as if the “financial industry” really were part of the industrial economy.

Why are the very worst offenders – Bank of America (now owner of the Countrywide crooks) and Citibank the largest buyers? As the worst abusers and packagers of CDOs, shouldn’t they be in the best position to see how worthless their junk mortgages are?

That turns out to be the key! Obviously, the government has failed to protect itself – deliberately, intentionally failed to do so – in order to let the banks pull off the following scam.

Suppose a bank is sitting on a $10 million package of collateralized debt obligations (CDOs) that was put together by, say, Countrywide out of junk mortgages. Given the high proportion of fraud (and a recent Fitch study found that every package it examined was rife with financial fraud), this package may be worth at most only $2 million as defaults loom on Alt-A “liars’ loan” mortgages and subprime mortgages where the mortgage brokers also have lied in filling out the forms for hapless borrowers or witting operators taking out mortgages at far more than properties were worth and pocketing the excess.

The bank now offers $3 million to buy back this mortgage. What the hell, the more they bid, the more they get from the government. So why not bid $5 million. (In practice, friendly banks may bid for each other’s junk CDOs.) The government – that is, the hapless FDIC – puts up 85 per cent of $5 million to buy this – namely, $4,250,000. The bank only needs to put up 15 per cent – namely, $750,000.

Here’s the rip-off as I see it. For an outlay of $750,000, the bank rids its books of a mortgage worth $2 million, for which it receives $4,250,000. It gets twice as much as the junk is worth.

The more the banks holding junk mortgages pay for this toxic waste, the more the government will pay as part of its 85 per cent. So the strategy is to overpay, overpay, and overpay. Paying 15 per cent is a small price to pay for getting the government to put in 85 per cent to take the most toxic waste off your books.

Michael Hudson is a former Wall Street economist. A Distinguished Research Professor at University of Missouri, Kansas City (UMKC), he is the author of many books, including Super Imperialism: The Economic Strategy of American Empire (new ed., Pluto Press, 2002) He can be reached at mh@michael-hudson.com

Our Fred's little earner

2009-03-28T15:18:00.004Z

I can't work up any enthusiasm for the invitation to get indignant over Sir Fred Goodwin's modest £16 million payoff. Over the last couple of decades I've noticed few complaints about undeserving people with vast pallet loads of money. As I recall it we've celebrated the lifestyles of the rich and famous, and not bothered much about where all the cash came from. Relaxed about people getting filthy rich. A cultural aristocracy has emerged, broadly called celebrities, that includes people rich beyond the dreams of avarice. The numbers are as difficult to grasp as the billions and trillions being bandied about in the current banking panic.

Take David Beckham, undoubtably a graceful footballer and a nice lad with a hansome jib. He has a fortune worth well over £200 million, and palaces on two continents. Then there's Elton John, unfairly called by some an irascible wee fat old puff, though in my view a fine lyricist and spectacular performer, who's amassed more than twice as much, and has double the palaces. Damien Hirst, performance artist, construction manager, and canny bilker of billionaires, was telling us recently that the proceeds from his recent car boot sale had made him a dollar billionaire. Damien has outdone Saddam in palaces.

And what does it say when Bono, bandy legged anthem botherer and stuff strutter on the global stage, owns a big chunk of Forbes Magazine, publisher of the eponymous Global Rich List, and vulgarly known as the millionaire's bible. Someone tried to tell me it sells for $200 a pop. Bono has fine reception rooms in each of his estates in Dublin, London, Paris, New York, Washington, Los Angeles, and Pago Pago, to which the world's movers and shakers await invitations.

When things were going well, Broon would've put old Fred Goodwin's £16 million earner down to that dull old mule 'hard work'. For Broon marches under the banner of 'hard work'.

Speaking of which, last week I saw former funnyman and management consultant, John Cleese, with a $24 million real estate portfolio, publicly moaning that he'd have to 'work dammned hard' for two months every year to pay for his ex-wife's palace refurbishment.

We could afford to enjoy the spectacle of the millionaire lifestyle because debonaire spivs of Goodwins kidney, with Broon's encouragement, had been able amass huge amounts of surplus wealth to pay for it. Gazing into the celebrity bubble allowed us a glimpse of what increasing prosperity and free markets might bring us. If we worked hard.

Now someone is going to have to pay for all the treasure that's been shovelled into oblivion to keep the markets going. A shaken Ant and Dec, pictured today on the cover of the Mirror, have already sacrificed £6 million from their £30 wad. There are signs of hope though. Secondrate 80s one-hit popsters, Spandau Ballet, have reformed and will tour again. One of the band reported, 'We've had a few rehearsals now, and we sound like a million dollars.'

The Trough

2009-03-24T17:58:00.001Z

Here's a fine piece of reporting from the American News Project, about the daily round of junketing on Capitol Hill.

And here's an Alternet article by the filmakers who tried to crash the parties.

Threads

2009-03-24T15:22:00.005Z

Here's piece of history for readers who like the 'degrees of Kevin Bacon' type diversions.

Edward Carpenter (1844 - 1929), the celebrated visionary reformer, socialist, poet, and what we would now call gay rights activist, lived for most of his life in my home city in the North of England. (Wikipedia has it that he lived in a 'gay community' here, which would be spendid, but it's not true. His remote cottage is pictured above.) There are council buildings bearing his name, and a statue in one of our parks. While his pose on the plinth may not exactly resemble a teapot, it seems camper the more you look at it.

During the brief period three decades ago when the red flag fluttered over our Town Hall, a revival of interest in Carpenter was encouraged by the city council, which celebrated his contributions to socialism, trades unionism, and the emancipation women, while neglecting his pioneering and immensely brave gay rights activism. I doubt that many in people this city familiar with Carpenter would be aware that he was a shirt-lifter.

He lived as an openly gay man at a time when to do so could bring upon you the fate of Wilde or Parnell. Carpenter got away with it because of his innate discretion, his personal magnetism, and the great respect he commanded among educated workers, and progressive circles in Victorian and Edwardian England and abroad. He was very well connected, much admired, and something of a guru.

In the 1890s he published, at his own expense, a widely circulated pamphlet on homosexuality, Homogenic Love. A quote from it gives a flavour of Carpenter,

I have said that the Urning men in their own lives put love before money-making, business success, fame and other motives which rule the normal man. I am sure that it is also true of them that they put love before lust . . . I believe it is true that Uranian men are superior to the normal man in this respect – in respect of their love-feeling – which is gentler, more sympathetic, more considerate, more a matter of the heart and less of mere physical satisfaction than that of ordinary men. All this flows naturally from the presence of the feminine element in them, and its blending with the rest of their nature.

When the sage was in his eighties, he was paid homage in my home town by a wealthy young American admirer, Chester Alan Arthur III, who was at the time collecting material for a work on homosexuality among the Fenian Brotherhood. Carpenter was of course a massive fan of Walt Whitman, as was his visitor. Carpenter had visited Whitman in 1877, and he mentioned to Chester Alan Arthur III that while there he had enjoyed some sack action with the great American poet and visionary. The octagenerian Carpenter then gave the much impressed Chester Alan Arthur III the best blowjob of his life, which he recalled forty years later to the poet Allen Ginsburg.

At last his hand was moving between my legs and his tongue was in my belly-button. And then when he was tickling my fundament just behind the balls and I could not hold it any longer, his mouth closed just over the head of my penis and I could feel my young vitality flowing into his old age.

Now the links emerge. Chester Alan Arthur III in later life became the sometime lover and sugar daddy of Neal Cassady, model for Dean Moriarty in Kerouac's On the Road, seminal novel of the Beat Generation. So there's only two degrees of separation between Carpenter and the Beats.

There's more. Neal Cassady was also the driver of the Merry Pranksters schoolbus, (destination: 'Furthur'), which toured the US in the 60s distrubuting free LSD, and inciting what came to be called 'happenings'. A little history would be interesting here.

By the end of the 1960s the ranks of LSD enthusiasts had become divided into two camps. Both shared the notion that LSD might change the world for the better, but they were divided about how to do it. The positions could be identified with the names of Timothy Leary and Ken Keysey. Broadly speaking, the Leary strategy was to proceed by turing on and creating an enlightened elite of the best and brightest, whose influence would permeate society. Keysey and the Merry Pranksters wanted to give acid to an many people as possible, and see what happened.

On this side of the Atlantic at least the divisions were clearly discernable, Leary followers were Hippies, while the Keysey tribe called themselves Freaks. Freaks took The Fugs version of Leary's 'Turn on, Tune in, Drop out' seriously, were full-time unemployed drug fiends, lived in chaotic affinity groups, and favoured the overthrow and non-replacement of the State. Hippies were much more media friendly.

I was an early admirer of Keysey and the Merry Pranksters, and soon took up freakery. There was an abrupt change of syle, I cut my hair short, abandoning bright flowing finery, bangles beads and bells, in favour of a look that suggested I might be on my way to work - both as a cunning camoflage and to distance myself from hippies. Because my local circle of freaks included people who had blown their crusts long before taking LSD, or were just plain weird, the ranks were predominantly working class. Some even managed a few days tripping in the steelworks, or down the pit.

The purpose of this digression is to show the global threads running through this city that link Carpenter, Walt Whitman, Kerouac, Cassady, the Merry Pranksters, and a small but significant working class heresy that flourished here some forty years ago. A chain over a century long. Edward Carpenter was the best known and most popular hippie of his time.

I've taken much from Colm Tóibín's excellent review of Sheia Rowbotham's 2006 biography of Carpenter in the London Review of Books. Read it HERE.

See also The Edward Carpenter Archive HERE.

Dirty Habits

2009-03-22T15:12:00.004Z

We all relish being apalled now and then. My own taste involves ocasionally exposing my raw nerves to the rantings of selected rightwing nut-the-bricks, and other irritants. If you look to your right you'll see that I include in my Blogwatch the loathsome Atlas Shrugs, placed there so readers can share in my perversions.

In the privacy of my own livingroom I'll shut the curtains and tune in Top Gear for the mildly offensive, punch-him-in-the-face, Jeremy Clarkson - intensifying the frisson by reminding myself that I'm watching the most popular windbag in the country, who my compatriots would vote in as Prime Minister if they had the chance.

For stronger meat I'll turn to Youtube, rubbing my sweaty palms together in anticipation of watching clips of the noxious little squit Bono, leader of the Greatest Rock Band on the Planet. I might even play an illegally downloaded track from his shite new album as accompaniment. (Fellow self-sickeners with a Bono habit can get a decent fix here)

Americans who 'enjoy' such unnatural pleasures are much better served, they have the wildly popular Rush Limbaugh,(catchphrase:'He can talk faster than he can think'). British perverts accustomed to the likes of Sir Jeremy, St Bono, Lord Geldof, Sir Alan Sugar and the like require a health warning. I tell you man, hearing Limbaugh, it's like your dealer forgot to step on your wrap.

Here's a taster. This is some of Limbaugh's plan to save the economy.

1. Every man and woman between 18 and 60 who signs up for unemployment benefits is automatically registered for the military draft...

2. A U.S.-led coalition of the at-least-semi-docile will invade selected oil-producing countries, including Venezuela and Iran... all the other English-speaking provinces whom we subsidize (England, Canada, Australia) – will share in the (sp)oil(s).

3. Disband the United Nations. Liberals, their allies in underdeveloped countries and various Euro-smarties have for decades accused the United States of trying to be the world’s policeman. Unfortunately they were wrong and the world has suffered for it...

4. Deport all undesirables. Not just the wetbacks, anyone who fails a basic English test. If they can’t learn the common tongue that unites our great nation, they need to leave...Our beefed-up military will protect our southern border with orders to shoot to kill. No more amnesty. No more sending people back in busses. You cross illegally, you die. End of story...

5. Legalize all drugs. In times of crisis, necessity trumps morality... By legalizing and taxing marijuana, heroin, methedrine, cocaine, etc. we can turn the dreadful losses of ineffectual enforcement into mega-profits...

Appalling enough for yer? You can get some more of Rush's Economy Plan here

Mass Observation

2009-03-21T22:13:00.002Z

After doing some casual Mass Observation, such as nebbing on conversations in pubs, on buses and trams, or sidling up behind people in queques, it seems to me that we're experiencing a period similar to the Phoney War at the end of the 1930s. We're told that the economy is in the process of plunging over the edge of a cliff, and that catastrophic climate change is now inevitable, yet it seems no one really believes any of it. You could get the impression that the middle classes are for the most part quietly confident that eating organic, recycling their newspapers, buying a bike or taking the odd bus, and growing a few vegetables is the way forward. The rest, the majority still in work and with adequate incomes, hope that by ignoring such inconvenient concerns they'll eventually go away. After all, as the government says, once the stimulus packages kick in, we'll begin to see an upturn by about the middle of next year.

Meanwhile, it's only March and our next door neighbours, the French, have been out on the streets in their millions twice this year. This baffles and bemuses the British when they see the 10 second clips on the nightly news, and the media make no attempt to explain what's happening. But you hear, repeated like a mantra, that demonstrating is useless - look at the Iraq war demo they say. Of course, I knew that at the time, as I trudged through London wearing an awkward smirk under a Hizbullah banner, beside a bunch of joyful Lebanese teenagers. It had all been decided already. If ever there was a chance for us to stop being so English, brick in some shop windows and torch some cars, that was it. And we missed it. Thousands of human lives were at stake, fer fucks sake.

The long consumer boom has dulled out wits. We don't really know how to believe in very much at all anymore. On both sides of the Atlantic the blather is all about undeserved bonuses for fat cats, the bastards at HBOS, and in the US the greedy fuckers at AIG. As Michael Hudson has pointed out, the bonus shock horror has served the financial elite nicely, deflecting attention from the governments as they shovel unimaginable sums down a fiery bottomless pit, in the hope of maintaining a system that keeps half the world's population in abject poverty while it trashes the planet. The biggest transfer of wealth in history.

And don't you think it's a bit rich, as it were, that all of a sudden we've begun to express a little distaste at undeserved wealth, when as a culture we've created a religion based around the worship of money, celebrity and prestige?

I'm a Baby Boomer, and some of my generation briefly entertained vastly audacious and unfounded hopes. My friends and I were among the halfwits who believed that LSD plus revolutionary marxism might change the world. Bliss it was to be alive in that dawn, and heaven itself to be young. I mention this to point out that the 'pre revolutionary situation', as I would have grandly called it at the time, could not have happened without a generalised mood of crisis. These things don't happen very often. Could this sense of phoney war presage another wave of outrageous audacity - just when such a thing has, finally, become absolutely vital for survival?

As a would-be revolutionary and disaffected troublemaker, I've become case hardened by defeat. I watched as the wave that rose in the 1960s - from After Bathing at Baxters to Volunteers -(you'll know what I mean), gurgled down the tubes. I've watched as the British working class had its arse kicked by little men in suits. One defeat after another. You'd think such hopeful fools would've cleaned their act up long ago. Wait and see though, eh.

Liars

2009-03-12T16:15:00.003Z

At the website of John Mearsheimer, who, along with Stephen Walt, wrote the controversial The Israel Lobby and U.S. Foreign Policy, I noted that he was preparing a new work on the subject of lying in international politics. I look forward to reading it.

This brought to mind a recent TV interview I watched with Jacob Zuma, likely to be the next president of South Africa. The interviewer asked Zuma about the increasing levels of violence in South African society. Murder, robbery, rape and bloody mayhem are rife in that country. Johannesburg has more murders than any capital in the world. Zuma brushed the question aside with a swish of the hand. It was not so, he said, South Africa was no more violent nor crime ridden than anywhere else. He explained that the cause of this mistaken impression was the unique openess of the South African media, which was more diligent in its reporting of crime than the media of other countries. South Africa was daily becoming less violent and more law abiding. Wait and see, he blithely informed the interviewer, by 2010 South Africa will have a crime rate of zero.

Hearing this sort of barefaced baloney from politicians is hardly uncommon, we even expect it of them. In another recent interview I saw Shimon Peres angrily thump the arm of his chair and declare, 'Israel has never attacked anyone. Never!'

The purpose of this kind of lie, and the most commonly deployed, is to curtail discussion. South Africa is experiencing unprecedented levels of violence and crime because it is a grotesquely unequal society, and the ANC has failed miserably to do anything about it. Bigshots like Zuma have no immediate plans other than to line their own pockets. Israel has not decided who to attack next, Lebanon or Iran.

Other types of fanny serve other purposes. Gordon Brown's cringe inducing panegyric delivered before the US Congress might lead you believe him entirely ignorant of American history, other than the fairy tale version dreamed up by Hollywood. Sadly, this is true. The last Labour leader to have read a book not bought on a rail station platform was Michael Foot, who was doomed for that very reason. Blair, who was appointed a Middle East envoy as malicious joke, once cheerfully admitted he had never heard of Mohammad Mossadegh.

"When a man has so far corrupted and prostituted the chastity of his mind,as to suscribe his professional belief to things he does not believe;he has prepared himself for the commission of every other crime."~Thomas Paine"The Age of Reason" 1793

No Paper Bag for Drugs

2009-03-10T17:26:00.002Z

Years ago I had a mate, a mid level cannabis dealer, who used to amuse himself writing letters to local and national newspapers describing in ludicrous detail the deleterious effects of dope smoking - grotesque enlargements of the genitals, pathological consumption of jelly babies, monsterous bearded growths on buttock cheeks. One or two letters were published by gullible editors and it was a good laugh. But my friend claimed his letters had a serious purpose. He was opposed to the idea of decriminalisation on economic grounds, since the illegality of cannabis was the only factor that allowed him to make a meagre profit from what was basically a common or garden weed.

My dealer friend had no real grounds for concern, because there is no realistic prospect of progressive legislation on drugs. Nor is there any hope for a rational objective debate on the issue taking place in the mainstream. In the words of the memorable speech by the Baltimore police major in the excellent The Wire, there has never been, nor ever will be, a 'paper bag for drugs'.

There are simply too many players for whom prohibition is both convenient and highly profitable. The global recreational drugs industry is vast, ranking just behind the motor industry in economic terms. The US and Europe spend more on cocaine than they do on education and overseas aid combined.

As better informed legislators are aware, it's clear that no amount of prohibitionist legislation can make any significant impact on demand for recreational drugs. The UN declaration of creating a 'drug free world' is obviously absurd. If the further repressive measures that some politicians are itching to get on the statue books were effective, then Iran, with some of the harshest punishments for drugs use on the planet, might be the model. But that country has the largest population of drug users in the world. The abject failure of prohibitive legislation has prompted some self-appointed drugs experts to pin their hopes on research to come up with vaccines to immunise the next generations against the effects of selected drugs, but that prospect thankfully remains science fiction.

The main beneficiary of prohibition is organised crime. Prohibition magically transforms easy to cultivate weeds and kitchen sink chemical processes into hugely profitable commodities. No other commodities come close to offering the profit margins available to cocaine and heroin traders. Once the basic agricultural product has been processed, using cheap easily available chemicals, the value of the product doubles every time it moves down the chain to the consumer. Factor in adulteration at the wholesale stage and margins go through the roof. A lot of people make a lot of money, is there any wonder that some are prepared to kill to protect and promoted this trade?

States also benefit from the prohibition status quo in less obvious ways. There's the basic principle that the state has the right to legislate on the chemical composition of the brains of its citizens, including the notion that there is an officially sanctioned range of states of consciousness, ('working, asleep, drunk', as Timothy Leary put it), outside of which lies only subversion. This is why the 1960s counterculture caused such alarm among the American elites.

Prohibition is also useful to the police, providing them with easy access to search warrants, and enabling them to keep a high profile among whole swathes of otherwise law abiding citizens. Traditionally, drugs squads have enjoyed low status in the police force because, at street level, busting users is easy danger free work.

State intelligence services have been known to use the huge profits of the drugs trade to fund 'off the books' covert operations. The well documented links between some state intelligence services and organised crime, inevitable given the nature of their operations, have made this possible. Elements of the CIA and the Pakistani ISI for example have a long history of involvement in the South American and Asian drugs business, as documented by various ex CIA agents, and academics such as Professor Peter Dale Scott. The Kosovo Liberation Army, which has morphed into the Kosovo civilian administration, was largely funded by heroin, a blind eye having been turned by the various intelligence agencies involved in the region. Kosovo remains a major transit point for the trade.

The medical establishment played a key part in the early years of prohibitive legislation, lobbying against the availability of opium, an effective remedy for a whole range of ailments, and much cheaper at the time than visiting a physician. Prohibition provided doctors with a much enhanced fee paying patient base. The medical profession continues to provide the state with research that justifies continued prohibition. People continue to ignore medical advice, which annoys many doctors intensely.

This is the merest sketch of the range of forces and interests lined up against those who hope for any meaningful change in the drugs laws, absurd and futile as they are. So there's no forseeable paper bag.

U2 Ltd

2009-02-27T13:10:00.005Z

It seems that on the eve of the release of the new U2 Limited album, No Line on the Horizon, some of the band's protesting Irish compatriots are saying that Bono and his business partners are robbing the world's poor.

When the Irish government revised its generous tax exemption scheme for artists, U2 Ltd shifted its assets to a finance company in Holland. Considerable sums are involved, the U2 Ltd wage bill alone for 2007 was £21 million, and the new album is expected to sell millions worldwide.

Aside from depriving the exchequer of a small and struggling nation of millions in revenue, the campaign group Debt and Development Coalition Ireland (DDCI), says that the U2 Ltd decision will also adversely effect the Irish government overseas aid budget.

A DDCI spokesperson said: We wanted to raise our concern that while Bono has championed the cause of fighting poverty and injustice in the impoverished world, the fact is that his band has moved part of its business to a tax shelter in the Netherlands...Tax avoidance and tax evasion costs the impoverished world at least $160 million (£142.5m) every year. This is money urgently required to bring people out of poverty.

I've heard some people say that Bono is a squit who has become a byword for inflated self-importance. I've never met him, but I can't say I like the cut of his jib. I've listened to U2 Ltd albums and seen a couple of shows, and these certainly are pompous and self-important, replete with bombast and empty posturings, and in the end bereft of any import. But that's just my view.

Ponder for a moment the vacuity of the title of the new album. I haven't heard it, but Jim Carroll, the Irish Times blogger has had a preview, this is what he says.

[It's a]blustery, burpy, over-cooked melodrama...an album to fill stadiums, newspapers, radio stations, web sites, quarterly target spreadsheets, bank balances, pension funds and investment opportunities in the tech sector.

For another account of Bono's Irish scandal see Where the Cheats Have No Shame by Harry Browne.

And you might also profitably read Irish troublemaker Eamonn McCann's piece Make Bono Pay Tax in the current Counterpunch.

Glasnost

2009-02-26T15:17:00.002Z

During the celebrated Gdansk shipyard dispute, the negotiations between the Solidarnosc union delegates and the shipyard management were relayed by loudspeaker from the meeting room to the crowds of shipyard workers surrounding the building. This is what's known as transparency and democracy in action. There are no good reasons why all such discussions should not be conducted in this way.

Now listen to the weasle Jack Straw, explaining his refusal to publish the minutes of ministerial discussions about the 2003 Iraq invasion.

{1}Confidentiality serves to promote thorough decision-making.

{2}There is a balance to be struck between openess and maintaining aspects of our structure of democratic government.

{3}Disclosure of the Cabinet minutes in this case jeopardises that space for thought and debate at precisely the point where it has its greatest utility.

Read them again.

Straw already sounds Prime Ministerial.

Bearing in mind that the deliberations concerned were about undertaking an act of aggression, involving widespread death and destruction, which was opposed by the majority of British and World opinion, in what way did secrecy serve thorough decision-making?

There was nothing thorough about the cabinet's Iraq war deliberations. Clearly, Blair already had the date for the invasion from the Cheney/Bush cabal, and it was going to go ahead - 'legal' or otherwise. There was no point in any discussions.

What's needed, since no Public Inquiry worth shite will ever be forthcoming from New Labour or the Tories, is an independent war crimes commission along the lines of the Sartre - Russell hearings after the Vietnam war. It would be a start.

A billion dollars worth

2009-02-25T16:16:00.004Z

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - The United States plans to pledge more than $900 million (621 million pounds) to help rebuild Gaza after Israel's invasion and strengthen the Western-backed Palestinian Authority, a U.S. official said on Monday.

So the US administration, having connived with Israel in the massacre and destruction in Gaza, is now propsing to share the tab with Saudia Arabia. The hypocrisy is breathtaking. As I've remarked before, Hillary Clinton is a shameless opportunist. The Saudi tripehounds needed to voice objections to the slaughter for domestic purposes, but the US was involved in every stage of the planning and carrying out of this crime.

Obviously, the gesture is intended to reassure moderate Palestinians, along with Arabs and Muslims, that when decent Americans launch missiles at your house, killing your women and children, they do the right thing and pay for the damage.
S

Binyam Mohamed

2009-02-25T15:20:00.003Z

HERE is what Bisher al-Rawi, a British resident released from Guantanamo 2007, said about Binyam Mohamed, another British resident himself released after six years of detention and torture in Gitmo earlier this week. He is speaking about Binyam Mohamed's concern for justice,

He is so British -- I mean so British! The way he stands, the way he talks, his painstaking use of logic. He's such a gentleman. And he is knowledgeable and he stands up for his rights in a really British way. Like with S.O.P. This is something the guards have. It is called Standard Operating Procedure -- S.O.P. And the funny thing about this Standard Operating Procedure is that it changes every day. Every day you have new Standard Operating Procedure. And Binyam, he draws attention to this and insists on his entitlement to be treated the same way as the Standard Operating Procedure dictated the day before. And they hate him for this. But he's just being British.

Touching that Bisher al-Rawi should associate the British with standing up for justice and human rights, particularly given his own and Binyam's experience. I fear the perception is more a matter of style than substance. The British ruling class has been lying and plundering with a deferential smile for centuries. I watched an interview with my friend Harold Pinter last night, where he described how charming 'these people' could be at dinner parties, or with their families and friends. Then in their working lives they would be involved in the most brutal and apalling mayhem. What he was interested in, Pinter said, was observing them when they were alone. He tried to imagine Henry Kissinger sitting alone in a room on a wooden stool.

With me it's Blair. The Pipsqueak Bombadier. Here is a trully British monster. I try to imagine him standing before a war crimes commission. He's an ignorant and vaid man, who I'll concede was led up the garden path by far more devious minds, so I would be disappointed to see him shot. I submit to the forthcoming commission that Blair be exiled and confined to Sark, in perpetuity. There he might reflect on his bloody hands, and perhaps compare himself with Napoleon.

An excellent resource for the story of the British residents abandoned by our government in Guantanamo, and other sites of America's Secret Gulag, can be found at the site of British historian and journalist Andy Worthington

Rather than being proud of being British, I'm wary of so much as carrying a British passport. With some technicalities smoothed out I could get and Irish one, though my main hopes lie in Scottish or Welsh independance. There are at present only distant aspirations for Cornwall and the Isle of Man. I'll be first in the queue at the Scottish Consulate in Manchester for the new dark blue saltaire emblazoned passport, though I suspect I might be trampled in the stampede.

Modern Liberty

2009-02-22T14:21:00.003Z

This week sees the opening of The Convention on Modern Liberty which starts on Saturday in London, with other sessions following in cities all over the country. The convention will present an attempt to catalogue the liberties the public has given away, in a list compiled by the University College Law School Human Rights Programme. I'll be following the deliberations.

It has come to something when a liberal journalist like Timothy Garton Ash, writing in the Guardian on Thursday on the continuing erosion of Civil Liberties ends his column, To be honest, I still cannot quite believe this is happening in my country. It feels like a bad dream. But it is happening, and we must stop it. Now

Dream indeed. It's necessary to step back for a moment to see what has been happening here. By small but significant increments, three Labour governments, each one a more distant parody of what was once called the Labour Movement than the last, have escorted us by the oxter sleepwalking towards a surviellance state. No less than three thousand new crimes have been put on the statute books. It's precisely because there has been no significant public opposition to these steps, coupled with a reluctance to see them as incremental, that the state has been able to get away with it. Given the chance, ruling elites will always use available technologies to increase the reach of their control. When people cease to value their liberties, they can easily be persuaded to give them up.

Two recent, though perhaps forgotten, incidents come to mind.

Last summer the West Country police took it upon themselves to ban a rock concert by the band Babyshambles, on the ludicrous grounds that the performers might deliberately seek to 'wind up' the audience, leading to a situation where Public Order offences might be committed. The band's frontman, Pete Docherty, is a notable tabloid buffoon and scapegoat, and many hack hours have been deployed by the gutter press in inciting mass disapproval of the man's personal life. The police of course took this into consideration, knowing that they could do as they liked so far as Docherty and his mates were concerned. Predictably, there was no liberal outrage at the police walking all over civil liberties on such a flimsy pretext. Now the police have a precedent to ban any gathering they care to on similar grounds. State 1, People 0.

Then earlier in the year a brave soul took it into his head to walk from Lands End to John 'oGroats bollock naked. For aesthetic reasons he'd resolved to stay clear of cities and towns, and ramble only along the least travelled paths. Every now and then there was press and television coverage showing the man being arrested and bundled into a police van covered with a blanket.

I developed a great admiration for this sturdy and deeply tanned feller. He refused to wear clothes in the police cells, and as soon as the police let him go he resolutely took up his walking staff and went on his way. He simply wanted to walk the country bollock naked.

My ancestor, William Blake, had a similar disregard for clothing, and would have celebrated the naked rambler as a token of Liberty. During the Civil War years more radical brothers and sisters went naked into churches to expose the Hypocrisy of Religion. So you see we have a tradition of bollock naked dissent going back hundreds of years. In 2009 we no longer cherish it.

US Government Reports Bonanza!

2009-02-15T09:16:00.002Z

Wikileaks has helpfully just made available 6,780 semi-secret reports - representing the total output of the Congressional Research Service (CRS) over the past ten years. The CRS is Congress's analytical agency, the sober part of its brain if you like, and has a budget of over $100m a year - leading Wikileaks to claim it's offering a billion dollars' worth of free downloads. Nearly 2,300 of the reports were updated within the last 12 months.

The release of the documents comes, reluctantly it seems, after years of pressure on Congress, and on the CRS itself, from supporters of open government, including the Federation of American Scientists. As the Wikileaks editorial points out,

Free from meaningful public oversight of its work, the CRS, as "Congress's brain", is able to influence Congressional outcomes, even when its reports contain errors. Arguably, its institutional power over congress is second only to the parties themselves. Public oversight would reduce its ability to exercise that influence without criticism. That is why it opposes such oversight, and that is why such oversight must be established immediately.

A list of reports available can be seenHERE

Waitrose

2009-02-13T20:48:00.001Z

I was in Waitrose this afternoon, which for visitors who dont know, is a posh supermarket, catering for people who don't have to consider the cost when they buy their groceries. I was standing before a shelf, marvelling at the range overpriced superfluities on offer. I had in my hand a tub of Cadbury's Cocoa, priced at £1.75, and was considering the meaning of the fact that just a few days ago I'd bought an identical tub from my friend's corner shop for just £1.09. Just then I heard a raised voice beside me.

'Alright pal, hand over that bottle you've got under yer coat, or we'll av yer locked up.'

I turned to see an elderly gent, shock of unruly white hair, face the worse for drink, clutching two bottles of Vladivar vodka. He was being confronted by a small, stocky man and a smaller plump woman, both had their backs to me.

'I've never ed owt like it', slurred the old feller in his defence, bringing the Vladiver bottles closer to him.

It was clear to me in an instant that the accusers were not store detectives but members of the public, and that they were man and wife.

'Come on pal', chipped the little man, rolling his shoulders, 'Let's av that bottle, or am fetchin coppers.' His missis wagged her head.

A jolt of hatred for the man's voice pulsed through me, and I peeked at a bottle of Duchy Originals Lemon and Elderflower Cordial with a view to smashing the little twat over the head with it. I pictured the old drunk making a triumphant escape with his three bottles of vodka.

I struggle with these impulses. They have Anti Social Behavior Orders for people like me.

Soon the senior citizen was surrounded by Waitrose staff in neat green uniforms, who escorted him out of the building. The little couple followed the procession, clearly pleased with their intervention.

'Ave never ed owt like it', I heard him say convincingly as they relieved him of the bottles. I watched as he went meekly out of the automatic doors.

Half a dozen street drinkers, waiting for him patiently on the subway benches over the road, would see him come back empty handed and feel the bitter sting of defeat.

Another setback for the working class.

How it might end

2009-02-04T16:25:00.003Z

I've mentioned before that I've had difficulty understanding the current phase of Capitalism. I learned little to help me from the few Economics lectures and seminars I attended at university, since, cruelly, they had been scheduled at the beginning of the working week, when I was suffering from drink and drugs hangovers. This is something I've regretted, but never put right in any systematic way.

So when I've found myself asking fundamental questions about how late Capitalism works I've only been able to come up with impressionistic answers. For example, the basic question of the source of society's wealth was formally straightforward. The Northern English city where I live used to be a major centre of heavy industry, surrounded by coal mining areas. When I was a child the whole city was blackened by the fumes from factory chimneys. Whole swathes of the city had nothing but factories and workshops. The forge hammers thumped night and day. My first job, after leaving school at 15 years old, was inevitably in a steelworks. I recall catching the bus to work for the 6am shift. It was packed with smog damp workers, smelling of cutting oil and Swarfega, hacking their lungs up and pulling on Park Drive cigarettes. (One morning, halfway to my stop, I got off the bus, having decided then and there to join the upcoming social revolution I hoped might spread from sundrenched California.) The steelworks and mines are mostly all gone now, only a few small manufacturing concerns remain.

Yet the city is incomparably wealthier. The city centre gleams with stainless steel and glass. People don't catch the bus to their jobs in factories, but drive new cars to offices and shops. New office blocks and apartment buildings appear overnight. The city skyline has bristled with cranes for the past two decades. Young people no longer start working at 15, they go to university. No one listens to half-baked talk of social revolutions.

What has troubled me is this: if nothing much seems to be produced anymore, where does this fabulous wealth come from? In a phrase I dimly remember from one of my old Economics textbooks, what makes Sammy run?

The current economic crisis has brought the question into sharper focus, and provided a partial answer. Credit. Like most people, I couldn't fail to be aware of this, but I never developed a proper grasp of how the magic worked. Clearly, the past couple of decades have witnessed an unprecedented transformation, with living standards and prosperity, for the overwhelming majority, growing as never before. It takes an effort to steady yourself so as to look back some thirty years and see the world as it was then. It was another country, populated by an entirely different people.

The political elites have proclaimed the final triumph of Capitalism, heralding a future of continual economic growth and increasing prosperity, and most people had good reason to believe it. In old-fashioned terms, what used to be called the working class, which once included a range of people from teachers and nurses to skilled industrial workers and labourers - the majority of the population - has been dissolved into a huge class of prosperous property owners, that sits in the social scale below the hyper-rich and the owners of capital. An underclass of the disadvantaged, the feckless or unlucky has emerged, but comprising perhaps no more than 10% of the population.

For myself, the routine act of taking out bin bags full of rubbish has often prompted the question, is this sustainable? This question I sometimes fleetingly ask myself arises not solely from environmental concerns. Relative to most people I have a modest income, and not much access to credit, yet the contents of the binliners I throw out bear witness to an extraordinary level of consumption. This is not a trivial observation. My eldest daughter is a nurse, and her partner has an adequately remunerative job that involves wearing a tie, yet the bin provided by the local council for the waste produced by their consumption regularly overflows, with many more binliners having to be piled up beside it. Aside from the mortgage on their house, they owe the banks about £50,000 for credit extended to buy consumer goods. This is an average family, and the situation is not by any means extraordinary. Is this sustainable?

Rummaging through the contents of these binliners reveals that most of the consumer goods come ultimately from abroad: peelings from exotic fruits and vegetables, wine bottles, empty couscous and sundried tomato boxes, grounds from Monsooned Malabar coffee, a slightly stained shirt and a pair of socks with a hole in them, spent batteries and disposable razorblades...Yours will tell the same story. From the point of a curmudgeon, most of what we consume is obviously junk, to others it's fun, part of the pervasive living to shop culture, though from an environmental perspective it's ludicrous. Environmental concerns seem to be just another lifestyle choice available to the prosperous, but does importing all this stuff make sustainable economic sense?

The government assures us that the current economic difficulties will not last long. These problems have been brought about by certain regulatory oversights, and are not systemic. There will be a few hardships as firms go out of business and people lose their jobs, but in a year or so, once credit begins to circulate again after the various stimulus packages kick in, we can get back to more spending and growth. More of the same, but better regulated. Of course, the government is bound to radiate optimism, because for markets to function effectively confidence is everything. They may well be right.

I've deliberately underplayed the environmental aspect of the issue, but my personal intuitions lead me to the suspicion that the scale of consumption we're being urged to continue indefinitely are not environmentally sustainable, and will eventually bring disaster. The fact is though that no government or mainstream political party would ever dare lay hands on the notions of permanent growth and expanding consumption, because to do so would undermine the whole basis of the economy. After decades of spectacular growth, and rising prosperity for most of the population, there is no constituency willing to listen to a message of austerity in any form.

But what if the current crisis in the economy is terminal? It would not resemble the classical Marxist model of the demise of Capitalism, which may be why what remains of the Left in Western countries seems to have been taken aback by it.

As I've mentioned, and you will have gathered, my grasp of Economics as it currently functions is impressionistic. For what seems to me a more focused analysis, and one certainly not coming from the Left, I recommend a visit to Howitends.co.uk It's not clear who's behind this site, but it offers a clearly presented and plausible account of the current crisis, and, as might be gathered from the title, one that considers it indeed systemic, and probably terminal.

It's worth reading the whole thing, but if that can't be done, then at least have a look at the Executive Summary, and The Future.

2009-02-01T14:21:00.005Z

Here's a video from MEMRI TV, the Israeli Intelligence funded website that monitors the media in the Middle East.

Now look at thisHa'aretz story about the work of Rabbis attatched to the Israeli Defence Forces. Here's a couple of extracts:

Rabbi Aviner... describes the appropriate code of conduct in the field: "When you show mercy to a cruel enemy, you are being cruel to pure and honest soldiers. This is terribly immoral. These are not games at the amusement park where sportsmanship teaches one to make concessions. This is a war on murderers."

"Is it possible to compare today's Palestinians to the Philistines of the past? And if so, is it possible to apply lessons today from the military tactics of Samson and David? A comparison is possible because the Philistines of the past were not natives and had invaded from a foreign land ... They invaded the Land of Israel, a land that did not belong to them and claimed political ownership over our country ... Today the problem is the same. The Palestinians claim they deserve a state here, when in reality there was never a Palestinian or Arab state within the borders of our country. Moreover, most of them are new and came here close to the time of the War of Independence."

In addition to the official publications, extreme right-wing groups managed to bring pamphlets with racist messages into IDF bases. One such flyer is attributed to "the pupils of Rabbi Yitzhak Ginsburg" - the former rabbi at Joseph's Tomb and author of the article "Baruch the Man," which praises Baruch Goldstein, who massacred unarmed Palestinians in Hebron. It calls on "soldiers of Israel to spare your lives and the lives of your friends and not to show concern for a population that surrounds us and harms us. We call on you ... to function according to the law 'kill the one who comes to kill you.' As for the population, it is not innocent ... We call on you to ignore any strange doctrines and orders that confuse the logical way of fighting the enemy."

When some European Jews considered the nightmare of becoming a defeated and persecuted people they dreamed up Zionism. Many Palestinians faced with the same dilemma turn to Political Islam.
..................

I doubt that many people need proof that it's barely possible to talk sense about drugs in the mainstream media.

The British govenment has just upgraded the classification of cannabis, making punishments for its sale or possession about three times as severe. This was done in the face of objections raised by the governments own 'drugs experts', (whoever they might be).

This legislation, of course, has nothing to do with cannabis, nor public views on its use, which remain for the most part either tolerant or indifferent, despite gutter press attempts to whip up a moral panic around the issue. The darker purpose of the legislation clearly forms part of the general assault on Civil Liberties, broadening the space where the state can police the private activities of citizens.

Recently the American TV network CNBC screened an anti-drugs documentary on the US marijuana industry, Marijuana Inc. One commentator described it as, 'An odd mix of anti-drug propaganda and weed-porn'.

Alongside the film CNBC ran an online poll soliciting viewers opinions of marijuana legalisation. Only 97% were in favor. They put this disclaimer on their comments section:

**As of this posting, CNBC has only received comments favoring decriminalization of marijuana.
...................

Last week the French showed the way they respond to the banksters bailout plans, coming out on strike and taking to the streets in their millions, closing industrial plants, universities, schools. So what gets British workers off their arses? Foreigners, of course. British Jobs for British Workers.

The British press likes to present this kind of thing as an amusing trait of the French. The BBC didn't even bother to explain in any detail why the French people had taken to the streets in such numbers. Generally speaking, the British press doesn't concern itself much at all with our closest neighbours. Odd.

2009-01-27T12:12:00.003Z

The Fatah activist said, regarding the rockets fired at Israel from Gaza,'Well, America should supply Palestinians with the same weapons they give the Israelis. Then they would not have to fire inaccurate home-made rockets. It would be precision bombing.'

Breaking Gaza’s Will - Israel’s Enduring Fantasy
By Ramzy Baroud

"I think that Gaza is now being used as a test laboratory for new weapons," Mads Gilbert, a Norwegian doctor who had recently returned from Gaza told reporters in Oslo.

"This is a new generation of very powerful small explosives that detonates with extreme power and dissipates its power within a range of five to 10 metres

"We have not seen the casualties affected directly by the bomb, because they are normally torn to pieces and do not survive, but we have seen a number of very brutal amputations."

The dreadful weapons are known as dense inert metal explosives (DIME), "an experimental kind of explosive" but only one of several new weapons that Israel has been using in Gaza, the world's most densely populated regions.

Israel could not possibly have found a better place to experiment with DIME or the use of white phosphorus in civilian areas than Gaza.

The hapless inhabitants of the strip have been disowned. The power of the media, political coercion, intimidation and manipulation have demonised this imprisoned nation fighting for its life in the tiny spaces left of its land.

Chomsky.... interview

...right in the middle of the Gaza attack, December 31, the Pentagon announced that it was commissioning a German ship to send 3,000 tons of war material to Israel. That did not work out, because the government of Greece prevented it but it was supposed to go through Greece but it could all go through somewhere else. This is right in the middle of the attack on Gaza.

Actually there were very little reporting, very few inquiries. The Pentagon responded in an interesting way. They said, well this material won't be used for the attack on Gaza, in fact they knew that Israel had plans to stop the attack right before the inauguration, so that Obama would not have to say anything about it.

New Bolivian Constitution...

If approved, the charter will enshrine the Aymara moral code as the state's ethical principal: "ama qhilla, ama llulla, ama suwa" (Don't be lazy, don't be a liar, don't be a thief.)

Iran-Contra 2.0

2009-01-23T14:43:00.004Z

As the sun sank over Cheney/Bush era, people around Bush started reminding him that he needed a Legacy. All Presidents need a Legacy, even ones who might have made a few mistakes. Look at Nixon, resigned from office in disgrace to avoid impeachment, but left a tour of China as his legacy.

'Yeah, said Bush, don't want some schoolkid in Crawford opening a book in a 100 years time, and thinking, who's this GW Bush asshole?'

For reasons not easy to get to the bottom of, Bush decided to make a Palestinian - Israeli settlement his legacy. He would broker a deal between the two parties - giving Israel security, and the US a friendly and compliant Palestinian administration. The US had been working with Mahmood Abbas and the Palestinian Authority for some time, helping them set up a viable civil administration, and arming and training the PA Security Services. All that was needed now, Bush heard from his advisors, was an election, like the one we had in Eye-rak. Looks great on CNN, and would strengthen Abbas's hand when he negotiates Palestine away to the Israelis.

Those in Mahmood Abbas's faction in Fatah were not keen on elections in 2006, it was too soon, they hadn't completed the roundup and arrest of Islamist and other opposition leaders, and they thought they might not win. But the clock was ticking on Bush's Legacy, so pressure was put on the PA, their misgivings were ignored, and the elections went ahead.

Hamas won 56% of the seats in the Palestinian Legislative Assembly. Condoleeza Rice claimed surprise at the result, 'I don't know anyone who wasn't caught off guard by it', she told a press conference. 'Who the fuck recommended this?', said an outraged Pentagon official.

It's at this point we begin to glimpse the mind of a great leader and thinker at work. The single biggest obstacle standing in the way of his peace settlement Legacy, Hamas, the Islamist terst organisation, had become the democratically elected majority in the Palestinian government. He needed a strategy. He asked around, but in the end decided himself. Here it comes... Saddle up boys, we're gonna run 'em outa town.

He was going to bring about a Palestinian civil war. For this purpose he put to work 'our boy', as he called him, Mohammad Dahlan, CIA asset and director of the PA's Preventive Security Service, a highly professional, US trained, Fatah goon squad. With the nod from the Israelis, the US arranged a tool-up shipment, via friendly Arab countries, of $120m in light arms and cash.

This is what fuelled the violence, killing hundreds of people, that resulted in the Hamas takeover of Gaza. How long was it going to be before the Israelis took on Hamas?

This is a much abbreviated version of a story by David Rose in the current Vanity Fair. You are urged to read it,HERE.

Extracts:

With confidential documents, corroborated by outraged former and current U.S. officials, the author reveals how President Bush, Condoleezza Rice, and Deputy National-Security Adviser Elliott Abrams backed an armed force under Fatah strongman Muhammad Dahlan, touching off a bloody civil war in Gaza and leaving Hamas stronger than ever.

Vanity Fair has obtained confidential documents, since corroborated by sources in the U.S. and Palestine, which lay bare a covert initiative, approved by Bush and implemented by Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice and Deputy National Security Adviser Elliott Abrams, to provoke a Palestinian civil war. The plan was for forces led by Dahlan, and armed with new weapons supplied at America’s behest, to give Fatah the muscle it needed to remove the democratically elected Hamas-led government from power. (The State Department declined to comment.)
........

Again, on Obama's remark about 'facing down Communism and fascism'. Didn't they sound oddly old fashioned? If we sit for a moment in a quiet, fragrant room, perhaps recall a haiku to evoke a state of receptiveness, we can decode these two words more easily.

Communism points in the direction of what's been called the pink tide, rising in Latin America. The regimes Alberto Morales in Bolivia, and Hugo Chavez in Venezuela, are both in the process of disentangling their economies from US corporate interests, and are using the proceeds of the sale of their resources to improve the lives of the poor. To the Imperial Court and its scribes this is beginning to look like Socialism, or worse.

Chavez wears fatigues and a red beret, and has very cordial relations with Fidel. Morales is a decent Indigenous person, but all kinds of leftwing schemers have his ear.

Obama's new advisor on Bolivia, Greg Craig, heads a legal team that represents former President of Bolivia, Gonzalo Sanchez de Lozada, a rightwing hardman, who once had a good business privatising Bolivian companies and selling them off to US corporations. Craig's view of Bolivia is that Morales is leading 'an offensive against Democracy'. Note the military turn of phrase.

Fascism clearly means Islamofacism, a term now beginning to be preferred to Bush's less specific 'Tursts', a word showing signs of becoming meaningless through repetition.

A paper further examining the meaning and provenance of these terms in relation to US Foreign Policy is in preparation.

2009-01-21T15:08:00.003Z

While President Obama strikes out to his second day in office, he should take some time to consider the increasing resemblance to Fascism being exhibited by the Israeli regime. Their military spokeswoman accused Hamas of being a racist antisemitic organisation, built upon the Protocols of the Elders of Zion. Just the sort of people who would push women and children in front of tanks. Ehud Olmert feels the pain of every Palestinian civilian casualty, and Tzippi Livni tells us everything is as it should be in the Gaza Strip. The PR was planned long before the bombers took off, as was the timing of the calloff to coincide with Obama's inauguration.

There's an interview here with Noam Chomsky about the Israeli attack on Gaza. For those who haven't the time to read it all here's a short piece :

Ehud Olmert was in the United States in May 2006 a couple of months after the withdrawal. He simply announced to a joint session of Congress and to rousing applause, that the historic right of Jews to the entire land of Israel is beyond question. He announced what he called his convergence program, which is just a version of the traditional program; it goes back to the Allon plan of 1967. Israel would essentially annex valuable land and resources near the green line (the 1967 border). That land is now behind the wall that Israel built in the West Bank, which is an annexation wall. That means the arable land, the main water resources, the pleasant suburbs around Jerusalem and Tel Aviv, and the hills and so on. They'll take over the Jordan valley, which is about a third of the West Bank, where they've been settling since the late 60s. Then they'll drive a couple of super highways through the whole territory — there's one to the east of Jerusalem to the town of Ma'aleh Adumim which was built mostly in the 1990s, during the Oslo years. It was built essentially to bisect the West Bank and are two others up north that includes Ariel and Kedumim and other towns which pretty much bisect what's left. They'll set up check points and all sorts of means of harassment in the other areas and the population that's left will be essentially cantonized and unable to live a decent life and if they want to leave, great. Or else they will be picturesque figures for tourists — you know somebody leading a goat up a hill in the distance — and meanwhile Israelis, including settlers, will drive around on "Israeli only" super highways. Palestinians can make do with some little road somewhere where you're falling into a ditch if it's raining. That's the goal. And it's explicit. You can't accuse them of deception because it's explicit. And it's cheered here.

Robert Fisk speculates here about the chances of a War Crimes Tribunal to investigate Israeli attacks on schools and UN compounds, and the use of chemical weapons on Palestinian civilians:

After killing hundreds of women and children, Israel was the good guy again, by declaring a unilateral ceasefire that Hamas was certain to break. But Obama will be smiling on Tuesday. Was not this the reason, after all, why Israel suddenly wanted a truce?

Sticker

2009-01-21T10:31:00.003Z

I found this available for printing on to teeshirts, caps, mugs and keyrings at the Zionist public relations operation over at Atlas Shrugs. Bottom Right.

Sitcoms

2009-01-20T15:10:00.005Z

I'm something of a connoisseur of bad sitcoms. The British have a distinguished history of making them, stretching back to the birth of television. As you might expect, nearly all have social class as a central theme, wherein assorted stand-ins for the ranks of the social order jostle and collide, mostly resulting in very disappointing entertainment. I can't imagine that foreigners could understand them. There have been some fine exceptions, a portrait of a brooding Tony Hancock hangs in my hallway, but I would estimate that around a shocking 80% of the sitcoms made here have been very bad.

I particularly relish bad middle class sitcoms. This is because, as my mate Peter Hitchens wrote in the Mail on Sunday, people like me hate the middle classes, the Yeomanry of England. He was talking about the Left in general, but then went on accuse New Labour of a secret agenda to punish and abuse the middle class. A delusional notion that lends me to suspect the man might not be a full shilling.

I do admit to some prejudice towards the middle classes, but hate is far too strong a word. It might be something to do with being able to trace my ancestry though three generations of industrial workers that makes me look upon them from a certain vantage. Sometimes with horrified fascination, sometimes amused contempt, a bit of resentment. This is not hate.

At one time, because of a prolonged insomnia brought about by a drugs shortage, I used to get up at 6am to watch repeats of Surgical Spirit, which might have made a good title for a dour comedy about Glasgow lowlife, but was a ripe and nerve twanging example of its genre, about posh doctors and their curiously distracted and shallow relationships.

If you share my taste for sitcom shite, perhaps with a couple of blue Valium, BBC 3 is presenting at the moment some proper laugh free material with moderate squirming.

According to BBC 3, Grown Ups is an Adult sitcom about the trials and tribulations of being a twentysomething, where adult means material of a sexual nature. Its very thin on any full on sex capers, so they do a lot of going through doors talking about shagging, knob size, dry humping soft furnishings, and premature ejaculation. The crevice at the heart of this show, down which the laughs fall, is the character's unbearable lightness of being.

Grant, for instance, is supposed to be a solicitor. I've had some experience of hiring solicitors, on mission critical briefs, and if I spotted someone like Grant so much as collecting the office teacups I'd take my business elsewhere. The Law Society should contact BBC 3 to discuss a possible Bringing to Disrepute action, in that the program suggests that people like Grant, clearly delusional and undergoing a hyperexcitable episode, are given licenses to practice law.

Yes, the pert Sheridan Smith as Michell manages be faintly arousing, but you feel it might involve taking advantage of the afflicted. Here's the storyline she battles, In a bid to win Grant over, Michelle throws herself in the canal. I don't think I can add to that.

A sitcom can jump the shark, or to use an expression from the last century, become too daft to laugh at, as soon as the first episode, like Grown Ups. Two Pint of Lager and a packet of Crisps, with Sheridan Smith playing a single mother partnered with a halfwit, did so when it introduced a Shakespearian poltroon as Gaz's drain bandaged brother, further enfeebling the overall signal to the funnybone, already strained by the disturbing Louise, making you want the Social Services take her away before she cuts someone with with the scissors in her handbag.

My favourite good sitcom of the last few years has been Curb Your Enthusiasm. A masterpiece.

Generosity in Victory

2009-01-18T22:29:00.003Z

I stumbled upon a comment posted on the rabid Zionist and Islamaphobe Atlas Shrugs blog, (available for inspection on my Blogwatch), from a Mr Ibrahim, who claims to be a former Middle East correspondent for the New York Times, entitled 'A Letter to my Arab Brothers and Sisters.' Mr Ibrahim says that resistance to Israel is futile, and until it is abandoned Palestinians can only expect further death and destruction. He cites Egypt and Jordan as examples of the benefits afforded by this realisation. Since these countries ceased supporting the Palestinian's struggle they have been rewarded generously by the US, and are now experiencing development and prosperity. Further, most other Arabs couldn't care less about the plight of the Palestinians. Those in the Gulf are too busy spending their vast oil revenues on impressive cultural and educational projects, while in the Magreb they're preoccupied with simply developing their societies out of poverty.

Only Syria continues to actively support the Palestinians, but does so only for its own cynically self-serving purposes, such as pleasing its paymaster, Iran. Likewise the PLO has been for the most part just a means for the leadership to enrich itself at the expense of sympathetic donors and the Palestinian people - Yasser Arafat being a prime example of one who lined the pockets of his family.

It's no use, Mr Ibrahim's letter goes on, elderly Palestinians waving the keys to their former homes in Jaffa or Nazareth, to where there will never be any return for them. Palestinians must accept that the are a defeated people. Only once the struggle to 'liberate' Palestine is abandoned can the situation move on. He suggests that the Israelis, and the US, will be generous victors. When reality is accepted, and the resistance is abandoned, peace and democracy can begin to be built in that part of historic Palestine that remains to its people.

While readers digest these points, it's worth having a look at the sort of generosity in victory that the Zionists might extend to the defeated Palestinians, by turning to how Israeli Arabs, some 25% of Israel's population, are treated. Many Israeli Arabs, including their representatives in the Knesset, understandably felt strongly about the massacre of their people in Gaza. Many demonstrated, and made a fuss. Israel responded with mass arrests, and imposed a ban on the political parties that represent them from taking part in the forthcoming (democratic) elections. Not content with disenfranchising Israeli Arabs, some in the Knesset are proposing that they be expelled from the country, and are actively campaigning to that end. Read about it HERE

Educational Terrorism

2009-01-16T15:23:00.003Z

The New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman, in this op-ed piece, reveals the true purpose of the Israeli terror bombing and chemical weapons attacks on Palestinian civilians. It's an educational project.

Citing with approval the salutary educational success of the 2006 Israeli assault on Lebanese civilians, Friedman's pro-terrorism argument offers a promising new approach to terror organisations worldwide. Hamas might argue that their rocket attacks on Sderot and Ashkelon are intended to educate Israeli civilians that they cannot continue to enjoy their Californian lifestyles while their Palestinian neighbors suffer oppression and death at the hands of the Israeli government.

2009-01-14T15:40:00.002Z

Palestinians and other oppressed peoples should not waste their time with expectations that the coming inauguration of Barack Obama will signal any real change in US foreign policy. His VP Joe Biden is a self confessed Zionist, his choice of the barefaced opportunist Hillary Clinton indicates broad continuity with Cheney/Bush policies for the Middle East, and one of his most significant staff appointees, Rahm Emanuel, is in fact a former member of the terrorist Israeli Defense Forces.

Obama is a fully integrated member of the craven US political establishment. His skin colour is of negligible significance. Before the election the Republican Party approached Colin Powell to run for the presidency, he refused. Had he accepted, the ambition crazed Condoleeza Rice would have needed no persuasion to become his running mate. This ticket might well have carried the election. The US Empire would then have been headed by two people of colour.

The recent US Congress resolution in support of Israeli aggression in Gaza was almost unanimously carried. I knew the names of the two who voted against before it was announced - Ron Paul, and the excellent Ohio Congressman Dennis Kucinich. Republican presidential candidate Ron Paul is an honorable and principled defender of the US Constitution. Dennis Kucinich was the most prominent supporter of moves to impeach Cheney/Bush over the Iraq war.

Why this overwhelming consensus on a policy issue inside the US political establishment, a phenomena surely unique outside total dictatorships, like Saddam Hussein's? The main answer has to be the hugely influential and massively funded Israeli lobbying apparatus. When yesterday Ehud Olmert bragged that he'd 'phoned Bush, had him dragged from the podium in the middle of a speech, and instructed him to tell Condoleeza Rice how to vote at the UN, I, for one, believed him, despite the flurry of face-saving American denials. The truth is that without the nod from AIPAC, Obama could not have won the election.

Because of the might of the Zionist lobby, the US media continues to present its audience with a discontinuous, ahistorical narrative about the Zionist and Palestinian conflict. This is a depressing feature of American public political discourse in general, but on this issue it's particularly blatant. An illiterate Punjabi peasant could retell the story of Palestinian dispossession and oppression at the hands of the Zionists more accurately than many educated Americans.

At times I've switched from the unbearable and heartbreaking scenes of dead and injured Gaza children shown on Al Jazeera to CNN. Of course, the major concern expressed there is the Hamas rockets fired from 'refugee camps' into Southern Israel. Not once have I seen it explained to CNN viewers why it is that Palestinians are living in refugee camps, and where exactly they originally came from. Not unexpectedly, Americans are not allowed by their government to receive Al Jazeera, the only TV network with correspondents inside Gaza.

As most of the World knows, the State of Israel could not have been brought into being and sustained had its creation not served the strategic interests of the West, Britain and the US in particular. There was also the question of salving the bad conscience of the West over its inaction, and in some cases complicity, over the mass murder of European Jews. The Palestinians continue to pay the price for this. I know it's a fading dream, but one once shared by many Palestinians and non-Zionist Jews, but might there still be a solution to this tragedy through a democratic and independent Palestine for Jews and Arabs alike? The dying 'One State Solution', with 'Do Not Resuscitate' above it's bed.

I've heard it said that one reason for America's sympathy for Zionism is that they too are a settler nation, built on the expropriation and extermination of the original inhabitants of its land. Perhaps the Palestinians will eventually share the fate of the Native Americans. Many will simply fade away, while others live on reservations, and eventually succumb to alcoholism and drug addiction, and the luckier ones might thrive as tourist attractions or casino operators.
...

Watching the war criminal Tony Blair yesterday receiving his medal from George Bush for contributions to global 'peace and democracy', I could only be reminded of Tom Lehrer's remark that 'satire died the day Henry Kissinger was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize'.

Warsaw Ghetto

2009-01-12T22:38:00.001Z

The parallels between the Warsaw Ghetto and what's happening now in Gaza can't be easily be pushed aside as irrelevant. The Jews of Warsaw were ethnically cleansed, to use a vile expression not invented then, and herded inside a densely populated military cordon, where they were deprived of food and clean water, medical supplies, and the light and heat needed to make life tolerable. Their only friends beyond the walls and barbed wire were a few Communists and some Polish people of conscience. The Red Cross and other humanitarian organisations were denied access. When the Nazis assured the World that all was well there were plenty willing to believe them.

Present day Israelis honor the brave men and women of the Warsaw Ghetto who were able and willing to resist Nazi barbarism; rightly so, they were an inspiration to the human spirit. Armed with a few inadequate weapons stolen from the enemy, passed to them by sympathisers, or made from whatever materials they could lay hands on, they faced the most technologically advanced army in the World, knowing that acts of resistance would bring massively disproportionate retaliation.

When the Zionists say, 'No country in the World would allow its citizens to face daily rocket attacks without a response', they should recall the Warsaw Ghetto. No people in the World would allow themselves to be forcibly driven from their land, herded into ghettos and refugee camps, slowly starved by an encircling military cordon, then bombed from the air and shelled by tanks and warships, and be expected not to resist in any way they can.

Silence

2009-01-11T20:04:00.002Z

No posts for the past few weeks. My laptop was smashed up by my sister-in-law, and it's taken this long to get it up and running again, though with limited capabilities.

She stayed with us for a week or so following a death in the family. A less than delightful woman when sober, she becomes a screaming maniac after a few drinks. Australians call such people 'two pot screamers', which is appropriate. For reasons she's kept to herself she picked up my laptop from the kitchen table and smashed it down a couple of times with full force, amazingly destroying only the hard drive in the process.

The widow of a celebrated professor of Media Studies at a prestigious university, she has more than enough spare cash to replace the laptop, but denies all memory of the incident. I had to replace the hard drive myself. This is the second time her berserk antics have cost me dearly. Previously I lost more than £5000 when she called the police when drunk and reported me for certain admittedly illegal, but in no way immoral, activities I happened to be engaged in.

Happy New Year

2008-12-31T20:51:00.003Z

Could it be that the current massacre happening in the Gaza Ghetto is a kind of warped game show, whereby the Israeli electorate, especially those in Sderot & Ashkalon, get to watch & assess the relative ruthlessness & brutality of the contestants before they vote for them?

I keep having to stop myself from using the word crime - but it's a debased coinage in the absence of any meaningful idea of international law. Whatever Israel does, & says is kosher, & America agrees, is de facto not a crime. This is obvious. Were it a crime for Israel to first starve one & a half million people, then bomb their crowded cities killing hundreds of civilians, then surely there'd be a massive wave of outrage, condemnation, & demands to put a stop to it from the international community?

But here's a piece from the Israeli daily Haaretz, presented to illustrate, for the benefit of the antisemites whose opinions stain the comment pages of the world's best news sites, that not all of 'the jews' are cheering the carnage from the sidelines.

And could it be that the feeble Abu Mazen & the leaders of Fatah, along with the puppet rulers of the Arab regimes, are complicit in all this? Is this what is meant when they say that 'it would not have happened if Palestinians had been united'? Abu Mazen has made clear his willingness to take over the running of Gaza should Hamas do the decent thing & capitulate. The West Bank based Palestinian Authority has, after all, been helping the Israelis to tighten their seige of Gaza. See here, for instance :

And could not Barack Obama, perhaps sporting the 'I Love Sderot' teeshirt he got earlier this year, have deployed his famed eloquence more effectively than his single comment so far: ‘If my daughters were living in a house that was being threatened by rocket attacks, I would do whatever it takes to end that situation.’ ?

We're clearly begining this year as we mean to go on.

Sarkozy fears spectre of 1968 haunting Europe

2008-12-24T13:24:00.002Z

As disparate but linked militant youth protests simultaneously erupt in a number of countries across the continent, French President Nicholas Sarkozy has retreated on two controversial pieces of domestic legislation out of fear that a spectre is haunting Europe - the spectre of 1968.

Mr Sarkozy, the outgoing chairman of the six-month rotating European Union presidency, has dropped plans for changes to high school curricula and Sunday retail opening hours in dread that the "Greek syndrome" - the two-week-long youth riots that have rocked the country with the most widespread unrest since the overthrow of the military junta in 1974 - could spread to France, or even across the continent.

"We can't have a European May '68 for Christmas," the French leader said to his cabinet, according to reports in Le Canard Enchaîné, referring to the left-wing student protests and general strike in France in 1968 that led to the eventual collapse of the government of Charles De Gaulle.

Similar protests took place that year around the world, particularly in the United States and Germany, but the 'événements' of '68 hold a unique place in the French political imagination.

Note my recent post pointing to evidence that Sarkozy might be a longstanding CIA asset.

....

With the current economic crisis throwing up numbers in the order of billions & trillions, almost rendering them meaningless through repetition, these amazing photographs by Chris Jordan offer an antidote to inumeracy.

The Bailout Raffle

2008-12-22T20:07:00.002Z

Young Chuck moved to Texas and bought a Donkey from a farmer for $100.00.

The farmer agreed to deliver the Donkey the next day. The next day he drove up and said, 'Sorry son, but I have some bad news, the donkey died.'

Chuck replied, 'Well, then just give me my money back.'

The farmer said, 'Can't do that. I went and spent it already.'

Chuck said, 'Ok, then, just bring me the dead donkey.'

The farmer asked, 'What ya gonna do with him?

Chuck said, 'I'm going to raffle him off.'

The farmer said, You can't raffle off a dead donkey!'

Chuck said, 'Sure I can, Watch me.. I just won't tell anybody he's dead.'

A month later, the farmer met up with Chuck and asked, 'What happened with that dead donkey?'

Chuck said, 'I raffled him off. I sold 500 tickets at two dollars a piece and made a profit of $898.00.'

The farmer said, 'Didn't anyone complain?'

Chuck said, 'Just the guy who won. So I gave him his two dollars back.'

Chuck now works for the government as a top advisor on the Bailout Plan!

(Thanks to Futurefastforward.com )

And this from Woodrow Wilson:

I am a most unhappy man. I have unwittingly ruined my country. A great industrial
nation is controlled by its system of credit. Our system of credit is concentrated. The growth of the nation, therefore, and all our activities are in the hands of a few men. We have come to be one of the worst ruled, one of the most completely controlled and dominated Governments in the civilized world, no longer a Government by free opinion, no longer a Government by conviction and the vote of the majority, but a Government by the opinion and duress of a small group of dominant men.

Woodrow Wilson, US President

Apartheid Trams

2008-12-14T13:43:00.003Z

Some people might not be aware that the many tentacled French corporation Veolia, which may supply you with water, or empty your dustbins, is the same Veolia that is currently building a light railway in the East Jerusalem region to connect illegal Israeli settlements built on occupied Palestinian land.

You can see a video here.

Can Veolia's transit system fairly be called apartheid trams? Yes. The people who live in the settlements are racists, who have no intention of allowing arabs to live beside them, except perhaps as roadsweepers.

The building of a permanent transport system between the settlements will further consolidate the ethnic cleansing of East Jerusalem, making any peace solution based on the 1967 borders & a shared capital almost impossible.

I checked & found that my Local Authority contracts Veolia Environmental Services , & enquiring emails will be sent to my local councillors, (all Green, as it happens.) Why not do the same?

Panto capers

2008-12-08T15:41:00.003Z

Slow posts over the past week or so. This is because I'm appearing in Panto in a small town in West Yorkshire. Despite being just over six feet I'm playing leading dwarf Soapy, in Snow White & the Seven Dwarves, an exhausting role that requires a wearisome amount of waddling around the stage in massively oversize boots. It's a talking part, & I have to painfully deliver my half dozen lines in a loud high pitched shriek. The theatre is only heated during performances so it's freezing. Snow White is being played by a preening young woman who once appeared in the teen soap Hollyoakes. Her dressing room has a one bar electric heater installed, & she refuses to share it with the rest of the cast.

For those who aren't familiar with Panto - it's a peculiarly English form of entertainment, performed usually for children, in order to humiliate entertainers with declining or extinct careers. I won't elaborate, since Panto is a national disgrace, which no country with claims to civilisation would countenance.

I earn a little more for my thrice weekly Panto appearances than I would for, say, collecting fares on the tram, or scanning groceries at a supermarket. Panto is the exception to my dictum that I wouldn't work for anyone daft enough to employ me.

I'm intending to take my revenge on the night of the final performance. Moments after the curtain I'll take the stage in my Soapy costume & deliver a speech to the assembled children & parents about the government's plans to encourage schools to routinely search pupils for drugs, weapons & stolen goods.

If my oratory is able to convey some of my outrage at this proposal, & touches the conscience of a single parent, before I'm bum's rushed off the stage & bundled away by security, then it'll be worth it.

For the past few days I've been putting together a draft speech. Were it not for the kiddies, it would begin Wake up, you stupid bastards!

How it ends

2008-12-04T19:46:00.003Z

Mandelson, at the weekend: "Internationally people say to me, Your Prime Minister has been transformed. His standing has soared. People really do look to him like some Moses figure who is going to lead them away from this economic mess to the promised land."

I present the above quote to indicate the level of delusion now gripping some sections of our governing classes, & the stark contrast between their perceptions & those of the reality-bound general public, or what used to be called the masses.

Anyone who has much of a memory, & has paid the least attention to recent events in the world, can conceive an outline of what's happened - we've been been gobbling up credit, the banks are sitting on worthless piles of paper, nartural resources suddenly look finite...

And Moses proclaims, Give banks money to get credit circulating, stimulate more growth, spend more on stuff, like you did when you thought it was free.

We don't demand enough of our Prophets.

I live in a large Post Industrial city in the North of England. When I was a kid the city was predominantly black or dark brown, as were the rivers that ran through it. In the city centre the sandstone civic buildings were bible black. Whole swathes of the city were nothing but long roads of huge factories, rust & black corrugated iron, with big peeling green 'vacancies' boards at the gates. Flames from furnace doors licked the night sky, the earth shook with the thud of forge hammers. People coughed & steamed on packed buses, sang in pubs on Thursday nights.

In thirty years the city has been transformed. It can now be viewed in colour. The civic buildings have been scrubbed, tubs of exotic foliage surround them. The gleaming city centre shops are ringed by broad roads jammed with shiny new cars. Cranes sweep the sky. The factories have gone. Singing is not encouraged on licensed premises.

Something always troubled me about this metamorphosis. I've studied economics at an English redbrick university, though the course lectures & tutorials had, by sheer bad luck, been scheduled to conflict with my drink & drugs intake, so I was denied the chance to develop a proper grasp of the subject. But I did manage to gain the insight that the creation wealth is related in some fundamental way to the production of goods.

I've witnessed this profound change, from a city manufacturing metal stuff that was hauled out on lorries & trains, to a richer, more modern one that appears to make nothing. How would I explain this to an enquiring ten year old?

Which brings me to my introduction. I usually refuse to click on the Google sponsored ad you see on stacked at the sides of webpages. The other day I found myself looking at a website I'd clicked on before I could stop myself. Oddly, it didn't seem to want flog me anything, saying at the bottom of the page: If you are formulating a strategy for a business or are an individual trying to safeguard the future for your family we can help you to understand the underlying trends and to anticipate what the future holds.

After half an hour of reading I had the impression that here was as clearly presented & plausible an explantion of the current economic crisis as I've come across. Read it here at How it Ends.

Are Brits the most stupid people in Europe?

2008-11-27T19:45:00.002Z

After numerous high-profile government mishaps with its citizen's personal data - a laptop containing 150,000 medical records left in a taxi by an official being just one example - it seems the majority of the British public are still happy to entrust their private details, including fingerprints, to anyone in a suit who asks for them.

A poll cited in today's Guardian reveals that as many as 75% of UK citizens would be willing to provide biometric, ie. fingerprint or iris recognition data, to government agencies, banks & other organisations. Fear of identity theft & credit card fraud was said to be the reason.

The same poll conducted in France showed 59% willing to comply. The figures for Italy were 63%, & Germany 62%. This is a considerable diffence. How can it be explained?

I suggest it's question of political culture & history. The British, unlike the other countries mentioned, have not experienced serious political instability since the Civil War, & are unable to imagine the State as anything other than the remote, rather dull entity they currently perceive it to be. It may ocasionally become an an annoyance, but for most people it could never be a threat.

As well as a lack of awareness of the social implications of new information technologies, there's also a very limited public grasp of the climate, energy, & resources issues that face the planet. A failure of imagination. This helps to explain the British public's lack of interest in the preservation of its Civil Liberties, & by extension other people's.

Sarkozy after meeting Vladimir Putin

2008-11-25T22:42:00.001Z

Sarkozy & the CIA

2008-11-25T22:09:00.005Z

Those who have ploughed the deep & rocky furrow that is 9/11 investigations will recognise the name Thierry Meyssan. What we now know as the 9/11 Truth phenomenon began in 2002 in Europe, with Meyssan's articles, films & books. Here's what the New Statesman said about him in 2002:

The most common theories of all, however, derive from Thierry Meyssan's bestselling book L'effroyable imposture (The Frightening Fraud). Meyssan is the director of the Voltaire Network, a prominent left-wing think-tank, and it is hard to overestimate the impact of his book in France. It were as though Matthew Taylor of the IPPR or Mark Leonard of the Foreign Policy Centre had suddenly announced that the US government was involved in the 11 September attacks. Central to Meyssan's thesis is the argument that the Pentagon was not struck by a plane at all, but rather that a carefully planned truck bombing or missile strike was set up by the US government to look like a plane crash. He believes that the government plotted the whole affair, in part to control rogue agents within the security services. (Johann Hari.)

The idea that it was not an airliner, but a missile or some other weapon, that hit the pentagon, became what was called the No Planes Theory, & it caused ane early split in the online 9/11 investigations community, dividing it into two sometimes hostile camps. To promote the No Planes Theory it was necessary to explain the hundreds of people driving along the beltway that passed less than 500 metres from the Pentagon Building who said they saw an airliner.

Supporters of the No Planes Theory are now a tiny but tenacious minority. I've read some very tightly argued pieces from its proponents, involving holograms & mass hypnosis, but for me there are just too many eyewitness accounts that mention airliners.

As you might expect, it was not long before opponents of the No Planes Theory began to openly suspect that the theory itself was part of a disinformation operation run by elements of the Security Services, to make 9/11 investigators look like headbangers.

So, after that bit of background, this is the source of my information concerning Sarkozy's connection with the CIA. Do I think Sarkozy is a CIA plant? Entirely probable, but more evidence needed.

You can see Meyssan's article, in a sometimes muddled English translation, & in the original French, at Axisoflogic

Sucker Punch

2008-11-24T13:57:00.006Z

It's common, particularly among the middle classes I've noted, to hear people say, 'But I'm not a violent person'. Of course you are, fool. Just because you're scared of getting hurt, it doesn't mean that in some circumstances you wouldn't inflict violence on others, either by taking part or consenting to it.

I often feel like punching people who make these smug professions of non-violence, right in the lug hole. Because I try to follow the principle of Ahimsa I'm able to let go of these impulses.

And so, this weekend I took tea & biscuits with two friends of mine; one you might call a gentleman farmer, the other is a scholar of some repute. While discussing the privations that each expected to experience in the coming years, I brought up the Olduvai Theory. Since they weren't aware of it I explained it to them.

Readers can see a 2003 paper, The Olduvai Theory Energy, Population, and Industrial Civilization by Richard C. Duncan Here

Briefly, the Olduvai Theory, originally developed by the historian Henry Adams, grandson, & great grandson of two US Presidents, uses the formula e = Energy/Population to demonstrate that...

' The life expectancy of industrial civilization is approximately 100 years: circa 1930-2030...The exponential growth of world energy production ended in 1970... Average e will show no growth from 1979 through circa 2008. The rate of change of e will go steeply negative circa 2008. World population will decline to about two billion circa 2050'.

A number of independent studies concur.

Olduvai predicts that the end, depicted as a sharp cliff in the diagrams, 2008 clearly visible waving its arms on the headland, will come first through brownouts, followed rapidly by intermittent powercuts, followed by permanent blackout.

Strong stuff. My mate the scholar remarked that he'd always been aware that the current level of population was unsustainable. He'd even dreamed up a few measures aimed at population reduction. Kill anyone convicted of a violent crime, for instance. Top nonces & perverts who mess with children, do away with rapists. The more violent people are done away with, the more peaceful society becomes. The gentleman farmer shrugged in at-a-push agreement, & said he was buying a generator from B&Q.

Of course, my scholar friend quickly withdrew the main articles of his proposal, explaining it was an emotional outburst, or perhaps a thought experiment, like the one his colleague Martin Amis made, when he suggested punishing people for being Muslim. It was obvious, he said, that a Totalitarian state would be needed to carry out mass killings on this scale, & he wasn't keen on that idea.

I only present this to suggest what dangers a deepening economic crisis might bring.

I see in the news that billionaire Damien Hirst, has sacked some of the workers at his Science Ltd., company, where he employs people to produce his 'art'. These people need to be in a union to fight this. I suggest the IWW

Anyone can turn out stuff like Hirst's, which is why he uses gold & precious stones as a kind of copyright. I hear tell of a blacksmith & a butcher in the Yorkshire Dales who've teamed up to produce bisected cows in glass cases, which are loaded onto lorries & taken all over the country.

SOFA

2008-11-22T20:38:00.005Z

I support Muqtada As Sadr's position on the SOFA. Coalition forces need to leave Iraq without delay. The longer they stay the more harm they do.

Reports of demonstrations here

Imperialists have always used the threat that their withdrawal will result in bloodshed. This is what kept British troops in Ulster for decades. No government elected under occupation can claim legitimacy.

Withdrawal can surely be achieved without helicopter rooftop evacuations from the Green Zone.

The Iraqi administration that emerges after the complete withdrawal of occupying forces should promptly begin proceedings to demand reparations from the US & Britain for the loss of life, destruction of physical infrastructure, & economic hardship suffered by the Iraqi population as a result the invasion.

Those primarily responsible for the aggression, G.W Bush, Tony Blair, Cheney, Rumsfeldt, Hoon, & others, should be brought before an international court of justice & charged with war crimes. Charges relating to the deliberate targeting & murder of civilians by occupying Coalition Forces, abuse of Human Rights & the use of torture, could also be pursued.

Since the cost of reparations to Iraq would push the US economy under the ice, a Peace & Reconciliation Conference might be necessary.

A Shot in the Arm

2008-11-20T19:06:00.004Z

One immediate measure the Government could take to boost the plunging, or perhaps cliff diving, economy would be to drastically raise the level of benefits paid to pensioners, the unemployed, those on incapacity & invalidity benefits & non employed parents.

This would stimulate local economies much quicker than infrastructure projects, since those on benefits are more likely to spend any increase on locally available goods & services they could not previously afford.

I see city centre restaurants filled with booming claimants, bustling markets, a renaissance in local arts, leisure & entertainment. Bands investing in new equipment, new venues opening as the market for live music blossoms. I want someone to tell me what's wrong with this idea.

There are those who would oppose this proposal on the grounds that giving more money to a section of society that might include the feckless, the workshy, the chemically dependant & the sexually incontinent is immoral. This however is not an argument against the purely ecomomic good sense of taking such measures.

A 50% across the board increase in Benefits payments implemented now would give a significant boost to overall consumer spending within less than a fortnight.

Contact your Local MP by email & get them to see the economic sense of turning liabilities into assets by making benefits claimants engines of growth.

Wassup 2008

2008-11-19T14:11:00.002Z

Recall the irritating Budweiser 'Wassup?' ads that were on heavy rotation in the early part of this century? Here's an update. Four million YouTube hits is not enough.

As for those who missed the original ad, a zeitgeist piece, you can find it yourselves. I'll not be party to promoting that most disappointing beer. Aerated joey piss, or maids watter as they say in Yorkshire.

2008-11-18T17:31:00.002Z

We hear nothing whatsoever from British Government sources, nor individual New Labour MPs, about the deliberate Geneva Convention busting collective punishment of 1.5 million people in the Gaza Strip, described here by Jonathan Cook. If the current devastation in Gaza was the result of a hurricane or earthquake it might merit a few respectful condolences from the floor of the House, or a couple of minutes on primetime news. But the turning of Gaza into a vast concentration camp, without enough food, medical supplies or electricity, is Israeli Government policy, & is supported to the hilt by the US & Europe.

The justification for the West's support for this murderous policy, & the reason why it is willing to turn a blind eye to Article Four of the Geneva Convention, is supposedly to turn Gaza's population against the Hamas government it elected in a free & fair ballot in 2005. The international sanctions aimed at the Saddam Hussein regime, which killed as many as half a million children, were in part justified by the same objective, & continued for over a decade without achieving it.

Obviously, there are Gazans who aren't supporters of the Hamas Islamist program, but many voted for them because they promised an end to Fatah corruption & vacillation & a more honest pursuit of the stuggle for Palestinian national liberation. This is what the whole population of Gaza is being punished for.

Earlier this year a senior Israeli defence official spoke frankly about creating a 'shoah' in Gaza. The incremental tightening of the stranglehold over Gaza is clearly not the result of a few homemade rockets fired at Israeli settlements, but the working out of a long term policy of ethnic cleansing. The Israeli Zionists routinely accuse the Palestinian resistance of wanting to push them into the sea, & it looks as though the Israeli Government, with the connivance of the West, is planning to force the Gazans, if not into the sea then over the border into the Sinai Desert.

America the Illiterate

2008-11-17T17:53:00.002Z

I'm just going to present you with two quotes from an excellent but saddening article from Chris Hedges, at Information Clearinghouse, & urge you strongly to click on the link provided to read the rest of it.

" We live in two Americas. One America, now the minority, functions in a print-based, literate world. It can cope with complexity and has the intellectual tools to separate illusion from truth. The other America, which constitutes the majority, exists in a non-reality-based belief system. This America, dependent on skillfully manipulated images for information, has severed itself from the literate, print-based culture. It cannot differentiate between lies and truth. It is informed by simplistic, childish narratives and clichés. It is thrown into confusion by ambiguity, nuance and self-reflection. This divide, more than race, class or gender, more than rural or urban, believer or nonbeliever, red state or blue state, has split the country into radically distinct, unbridgeable and antagonistic entities....."

" Political campaigns have become an experience. They do not require cognitive or self-critical skills. They are designed to ignite pseudo-religious feelings of euphoria, empowerment and collective salvation. Campaigns that succeed are carefully constructed psychological instruments that manipulate fickle public moods, emotions and impulses, many of which are subliminal. They create a public ecstasy that annuls individuality and fosters a state of mindlessness. They thrust us into an eternal present. They cater to a nation that now lives in a state of permanent amnesia. It is style and story, not content or history or reality, which inform our politics and our lives. We prefer happy illusions." Information Clearinghouse

Police Interceptor

2008-11-14T22:12:00.002Z

With the leaves falling off the trees the Channel Five signal has begun to reach my satellite dish. You may be one of the millions of people who doesn't watch this channel, so you'll be unaware that it specialises in shows about the police, including American dramas like the CSI franchise, & various 'reality' police action shows. I sat through one last night called Police Interceptor, mainly because I'd shovelled down too much mutton stew, & couldn't get off the setee to switch it off.

Police Interceptor is about a group of overweight Essex scuffers, one of them amusingly called Spongebob, who tear up & down dual carriageways in Subaru Imprezzas chasing motorists & pulling them over to question them.

There's a particularly smarmy commentary in a chirpy Southern accent that constantly reminds us of the 'professionalism' of Spongebob & his pals. Policemen, & I've met lots of them, rarely have much in the way of personality, so the irritating commentary is probably needed to compensate for the dullness of the exchanges between the coppers as they speed from one interception to the next.

In last night's episode the use of the Automatic Numberplate Recognition (APR) system was demonstrated. The APR had flagged a vehicle that was on record as having connections with drug dealing. It was a red Ford Fiesta. Hang on a minute, I thought through the fug of mutton stew, I've known many drug dealers, but I've never come across one who would be caught dead from an overdose in a Ford Fiesta.

The red Ford Fiesta must have been of special interest to the Essex Constabulary, because it immediately becomes a major operation, deploying no less than four cars, with a senior officer co-ordinating, to chase it down. Tension builds as the fleet of police cars speeds through the night, exchanging terse bursts of radio contact. The professionalism of this team is evident. Eventually, the rear lights of Fiesta come into view ahead, & it's 'Go go go, go go go', as the car is simultaneously forced onto the hard shoulder, & its escape is blocked by a second Imprezza. Spongebob & his partner leap briskly from their vehicle & pull open both front doors of the Fiesta.

As I for some reason expected, the Fiesta contains two skinny youths, who blink in confusion as they're roughly dragged from their car & pushed against a wall. Their car smells of cannabis, Spongebob tells them, & it's going to be searched.

Not surprisingly, one of the youths decides to start swearing at Spongebob, calling him a dickhead. But as the commentary helpfully informs us, Spongebob has received special training in dealing with bad language from the public.

Listen children, I've received instruction, (not training, dogs & horses get training), in counter-interrogation techniques from a certain militant organisation which will remain nameless. You must resist the impulse to gob off at the police. Remain cheerfully polite, even appear helpful, but say nothing. Do not attempt to lie. If they try to use your first name, politely insist that they call you either Sir, or Mr O'Donnell, Mr Mohammad, or whatever. Politely refuse any offers of fags, or cups of tea. Try to smile.

After a prefunctory search of their car, revealing nothing, the two lads were handcuffed & taken to the police station. There they were intimately searched, from which the camera mercifully spares us, & we merely see Spongebob pulling on a pair of white plastic gloves. While Spongebob & his partner probe the youth's arseholes, another police detail ransacks their Fiesta. Nothing at all is found. After many hours the miserable skinny youths are released without charge.
The commentary breezily tell us that more than half of all such interceptions are like the one we have witnessed, & result in no suspicious finds or convictions.

So let's recap. Four expensive cars, containing eight stout police officers, including a senior officer on a very handsome salary, are deployed to chase & detain two undernourished youths in a clapped out vehicle. Half a police shift is spent searching & questioning the youths on the basis of the suspicion that the youths might have smoked cannabis in their car. The eight officers, professionals all, express no regrets whatsoever at this total waste of time & resources. After their encounter the youths will understandably conclude, for future reference, that all police are bullies & cunts.

Dear Member of the Public, do you think this is a suitable way to spend taxpayer's money? If you can get Channel Five, see the next episode of Police Interceptor.

Work

2008-11-13T16:27:00.000Z

If I hear another politician or businessman use the words hard work, hardworking families, or hardworking Americans, I'll have to go & lie down.

Broon is particularly fond of it. Just listen, he slips in the phrase at every opportunity. What does it mean? It's a current buzzword, a dogwhistle word our rulers use when they want us to wag our tails in appreciation. It signals that, in an aspirational society like ours, wealth & privilage is the typical outcome of energy & effort. The greater the effort, the greater the reward. In societies with gross disparities of income, the notion that wealth & success is achieved simply through hard work helps to assuage discontent caused by resentment of glaring inequalities. Without this idea our grotesque celebrity culture, with its abject worship of conspicuous consumption & prestige, would not be possible.

Blair used the formula to great effect in his efforts to dismantle the Labour Movement & transform the nature of the Labour Party. New Labour, he declared, was less interested in equality of income than equality of opportunity. Under the new dispensation the country would become a meritocracy, leaving behind the outdated ideas of Social Democracy. Typically, it was Mandelson, who worked his fingers to the bone in persuit of the rich & powerful, who said that New Labour was the party of business, relaxed about individuals getting filthy rich. These ideas are characteristic of a period of sustained economic boom, which we've experienced for over two decades now. There are indications that the party might be over, but you'll be hearing the hard work mantra every verse end.

A moment's reflection will reveal the obvious truth that there's no simple link between hard work & financial reward. It depends entirely on the type of work you're doing. Certain kinds of hard work, having your photograph taken for a glossy magazine, or managing a hedge fund, are rewarded much more hansomely than others, caring for the sick & elderly, for instance. None of this needs saying.

And just what is hard work? A personal anecdote: at one time I was running both a pub & a restaurant. I worked from 10 o'clock in the morning until around 1 o'clock the following morning, some 15 hours a day, seven days a week. The rewards were adequate. You might admire my capacity for industry. (If you want to see a businessman smirk with self-satisfaction, call them a workoholic.) But my partner was at home all this time, doing housework & caring for young children. Half a day looking after kids & I'd be shagged out, much as I love them. I'd take 15 hours of pulling pints & cooking fancy food over that anytime. Why? Because making money is enjoyable, & can't be described as drudgery.

In the 60's I had a badge pinned to my jacket that said 'Fuck Work'. I wore it to annoy adults, which is the duty of all young people. But the idea was in the air that we were going to do away with the miserable Protestant Work Ethic. We thought we might see the birth of Homo Ludens, with technology as the midwife. How wrong we were. Know what happens when you put your nose to the grindstone? Your fucking head gets ground off.

2008-11-12T13:33:00.002Z

Recently published findings by a group of German researchers has concluded that a propensity to cocaine addiction is genetically determined. Here it is.

Genetic factors, scientists believe, account for 70% of cocaine addiction, making it as heritable as schizophrenia and other mental health conditions. Studies of twins suggest alcoholism is about 50% genetic.

I have problems with this notion, beginning with the difficulty of determining just what is meant 'addiction' - not a straightforward construct when we begin teasing apart the the various cultural, social, medical & political threads from which it's made. But let's leave that aside. What is being said here is that addiction is a disease, & as such it can rightfully take its place alongside other genetically inherited disorders, & be treated accordingly.

The idea that drug addiction is a disease is an old one. It was the basis of what came to be called the British System for dealing with people with problematic opiate habits, begun in the 1920s & largely discredited & dismantled by the 1970s. This was in constrast to the approach broadly taken in the US, where drug users were seen as morally disordered people in need of corrective punishment. Under the British System doctors prescribed users with supplies of opiates. The resulting stablisation would allow the disease to run its course, so the theory went, & eventually the user would voluntarily refrain from drug use. A problem was that at the time there was no clear idea about precisely what kind of disease addiction was, its etiology & pathology. Genetics has now come up with an answer.

What we're witnessing here is another example of the medicalisation of human diversity, (or the pathologisation of deviance, if you want an uglier construct). The process began with the development & eventual ascendancy of biologically reductionist psychiatry, & has gained enormous momentum as a result of certain types of genetic research. There are now influential people who are asserting, with the prestige of science behind them, that whole areas of human experience, from entrenched misery to deviant thought & behavior, are largely the result of defective genes. 'The fault, dear Brutus, is not in our stars...'

Being a mere rude mechanical, I'm not in a position to argue the underlying science informing these assertions. What I can do, though, is touch upon some of the implications involved. For now I'll outline just one example, while urging readers to come up with others themselves.

A projected outcome of research into the genetic basis of drug addiction is the development of vaccines able to selectively block the effects of certain substances, the use of which society disapproves - cocaine for example. This is the strategy behind the funding of such research. The drug can be considered as akin to a virus. Through a process of genetic screening, those people identified as being at risk of 'contracting' addiction as a result of exposure to the substance would simply be innoculated, thus saving them from a life of recurring misery & financial ruin. Who could argue with such a sensible & humane proposal?

The companies providing the screening & supplying the vaccines would of course make huge fortunes for investors. When recently an English secondary school proposed the compulsory routine drug testing of its pupils, parents were reported to be widely supportive of the idea. Many parents would no doubt see it as their duty to have their children protected against drugs by paying to have them innoculated. Compulsory vaccination is just a step further. Again, who could object to a measure that could protect children from a scourge that might ruin their young lives?

I could. I want my children to be protected from as many of the random onslaughts of bacteria & viruses as possible. But I certainly don't want them to be given artificial immunity from the necessity of making moral choices.

Whether a person decides for or against the idea of using substances to alter brain chemistry is a moral choice. Here's where I part company with the almost overwhelming majority of medical, legal & political opinion. I think that the matter of chemical substances & states of consciousness properly belongs in the realm of religious belief. The state has no more warrant to determine the composition of the chemical soup in my brain than it has to decide for me whether I should believe in transubstantiation or not.

So long as substances exist, natural or synthetic, that can alter consciousness in some way, pleasurably or otherwise, there will be humans interested in using them. It was ever thus. All attempts to alter this fact are futile. The deranged obsessives currently working at US State research facilities on genetic methods of wiping out the psychoactive components of the coca leaf & the opium poppy are barking at the moon. They might as well attempt to extract the holy stuff from holy water.

A grown up society ought to be able to safely accomodate the basic human impulse to seek altered states though chemicals, instead of screaming blue murder every time a 16 year old lights up a joint. Doing so is is like trying to stop the little buggers shagging. The enculturation of drugs use - there's another awkward mouthful for you to consider.

Armistice

2008-11-09T21:40:00.002Z

The 1918 Armistice rememberance ceremonies bring military matters to mind.

A recent survey indicated that around 60% of the public either oppose or have reservations about the wars in Iraq & Afghanistan, while 85% 'support our troops'. What does 'supporting' British soldiers in these wars mean? Does it entail going to their funerals, welcoming them home with flags & bands, like the the recent controvertial parade in Belfast, or hailing them as 'heroes', & 'our brave lads?' Don't you think there's something odd, quaint even, about this? I know you read in the newspapers that the troops appreciate such gestures from the public. 'A slap on the back, or a handshake from a stranger in a pub at home means a lot to us', one said. This is the most personal support they're ever likely to get. But does it help to discourage war-mongering governments from sending our young people into harms way?

I suppose tradition plays a part. Britain has a long history of sending its young men to fight for obscure causes in faraway places about which they know nothing. The modern British Army, though, no longer deploys crude jingoism to maintain its espirit du corps & get new recruits. What's instilled now is the notion of professionalism, & the impression, cultivated in TV adverts, thay they're sort of heavily armed social workers of last resort. Contrast this with the American approach. In 2003 a poll revealed that most US troops in Iraq thought they were there to punish Saddam Hussein for his involvement in the 9/11 attacks.

There are very good reasons for young men & women to join the army. Spirited young people reject the idea of surrendering to the humdrum workaday experience they see around them. The paid employment on offer has become increasingly meaningless & tedious, hence the frenzied determination to spend the proceeds at weekends. Who in their right mind would want to work in a call centre, a bank, an estate agent or insurance office? When I was with extreme reluctance forced to seek paid employment, it was a choice between the steelworks, the coal mines, or a giant bread bakery on the outskirts of town. I chose the steelworks. As a 16 year old I could stand in the vast melting shop at British Steel, taking in the Göttedämmerung of noise, smoke & flame around me, in my flame retardant overalls, hard hat & wooden clogs, & say to myself, 'My god, this is fucking awful. But at least now I'm a man among men. I'm a steelworker.' All this has gone, but the army can offer something similar.

None of my children has entertained the idea of joining up, so I've never been faced with the problem of talking them out of it. Most of them can barely comprehend my politics, words like 'imperialism' mean nothing to them, & they see my suspicion of the State as paranoid & counterproductive. The notion of being killed by a bullet or IED is, of course, barely considered. Just ordinary kids. But I've rehearsed the arguments, just in case.

- Yes, I'd say, join The Professionals. See the world with a great bunch of mates. Learn new skills. Work hard, play hard. As a team. Your mother/grandmother will love the idea.

Obama Mubarack

2008-11-08T23:50:00.002Z

I was too young to remember Jack Kennedy being elected. But I recall I was in a fish & chip shop when I heard he'd been killed, overhearing a conversation & feeling something painful. A customer quietly spoke the news to the woman behind the counter. She put her hand up to her face. Her face.

I was a teenager when the Kennedy White House was sometimes called Camelot. I'd begun reading the Arthurian Legends without being aware of this. John Mitchell's book on Ley Lines had started me off. When I came across Lewis Spence's British Mysteries there was no stopping me. So when I heard mention of Camelot in connexion with John F. Kennedy, you can see, I paid attention. Jack Kennedy became associated with that era, when radical change for the better looked not just as though it was inevitable, but there was also the sense that it was going to be a bit of a pushover. I laughed, & hacked on my chillum.

Robert Kennedy. Elect Bobby. Watching him speak, blinking over the microphone, flicking his fringe all the time the way young men did in those days before sensible haircuts.

Robert Kennedy was the best President America never had.

On the day after the election, Ustadh Juan Cole, at his Informed Comment blog http://www.juancole.com/ has pictures of JKF, MLK, & RFK... under the heading 'Wouldn't it be nice if Jack, Martin, Bobby, Cesar and Patsy could have been around to see it?'
I don't think I can add anything to that.

As you know, by the time it got to trying to get George McGovern elected, the cause was already suspected to be hopeless.

I haven't heard many commentators recalling the days when Colin Powell was a prospective Presidential candidate. He wisely turned it down of course. There were murmurs about Condoleeza Rice too. What if it'd been Colin Powell, perhaps with Condoleeza Rice on the ticket, instead of McCain & the disasterous Sarah Palin? The Republicans might well have won with two black candidates.

Here's a quote:

"What else but a controlling emotional 'devil' so blinded American white intelligence that it couldn't forsee that millions of black slaves, 'freed', then permitted even limited education, would one day rise up as a terrifying monster whithin white America's midst." ( Autobiography of Malcolm X)

& for your edification, here's one from Aristotle. I mean the Aristotle.

"Those who live in a cold climate & in Europe are full of spirit, but wanting in intelligence & skill. They keep their freedom but have no political organisation, & are incapable of ruling over others." (The Politics)

Pay Attention

2008-11-01T20:18:00.002Z

West Yorkshire Police has taken the initiative of sending out patrols around city & town centre pubs accompanied by small, specially trained dogs, to sniff out members of the public who might be in possession of drugs. This means specifically cannabis, since other drugs are much more difficult to detect. Television reports suggest that the move has been popular with the public, especially pub landlords & managers. 'It's a good idea', one landlord said in an interview. 'It puts our minds at rest.' Seems the dogs wear badges that warn dopefiends not to be misled by their cuteness.

What is this country, the most spied-upon on the planet, becoming? Years of sneakily authoritarian governments has softened up the population to the point where most will abandon what's left of their privacy & civil liberties without a whimper. If you're not terrorist or a criminal, the argument goes, you've nothing to fear. No one who has lived through, or paid attention to, what has happened from the 20th century onwards should swallow this. But as I've said before, we're becoming people without memory. The healthy suspicion & wariness of authority that makes real democracy possible is being worn away by small increments. Listen: the State is a misfortune we reluctantly put up with. Your mind will be at rest when you're dead.

The State is going to monitor your phone calls, your emails & what you look at on the Net. For the first time in history the collection & storage of vast volumes of data, along with ways & means of interrogating it, has become technically easy. Your car registration number will be used to monitor your comings & goings. Your credit card will reveal what you buy. From next year the State will open a database, called 'Contact Point', that will detail the lives of your children from birth. The silence of Joe the Plumber on these matters is taken for consent. Klaus Bubblehammer the Disaffected Troublemaker would rather take his chances with terrorists & criminals.

Because Joe the Plumber didn't object to the police sniffing the pockets of harmless dope smokers out on the town for a few beers, ( & yes, because the tokers are too disorganised to deploy the simple tactic of smearing cannabis oil over pub furniture, to fox the dogs), the next step will be for the State to send out the cops with equipment to read the RFID chips embedded in the various devices people carry in their pockets, which will indicate where you where, at what time, & who with - all of which will be added to your database entry. Is that alright for you then?

& now for something completely different.

So far Notts Forest has only managed to win two matches all season, the second just last weekend, & they remain at the bottom of the Championship, or Second Division. What's happening here? Not so long ago Nottingham Forest was the best, & most exciting team in Europe. And they managed to become so without mercenaries or megastars. All the players were Scottish, Irish, or English, though there might've been the odd Dutchman. When Brian Clough signed the forward Gary Birtles he was working as a plasterer on a building site, & Clough warned him that if he didn't shape up he'd be clocking on again on Monday morning.

Which brings me to Blackpool. I have a notion, that could earn me lots of money, to bring back the tangerine Glory Days of Blackpool FC. I want to buy the club from the cretins who currently own it, & invest enough money for the club to reinvent itself. The potential supporters are already there - all the disaffected Man United & City, Liverpool, Everton, Bolton, & all the Lancashire hinterland, would rally to a club playing exciting football. The city of Blackpool has lost its bid to host one of New Labour's sinister & halfbaked 'supercasinos', so the football club is ripe for development. The project could be kicked off by putting together an 'all stars' team, a bit like Fulham attempted in the 80's with Best, Rodney Marsh etc., but with a better plan & more commitment. Interested investors should contact kbubblehammer@yahoo.co.uk

God help us

2008-10-27T22:25:00.003Z

Watching Christian broadcasting from the US on satellite makes me glad to have been born in a country that was never fully christianised. Christianity was always a minority concern in England, now more than ever - there are more Muslims here than practising Christians. In the neighbourhood where I grew up, in an industrial city in the North of England, there was only one family that went to church. Significantly, they were also the only family that owned a car. We used to watch them on Sunday mornings, getting into their gleaming Morris Traveller in their Sunday best, the two kids looking utterly miserable. It was assumed that, as the owners of a grocery shop, they went to church to distinguish themselves from the steelworkers, bus drivers & skivvies they lived amongst.

Even among English churchgoers the sort of religious enthusiasm you see in the huge congregations in American megachurches has been viewed with suspicion, probably because of the religious & political turmoil we experienced in the Civil War. The Church of England has never really been concerned with religious belief, being an instrument of class politics, ignored or despised by the bulk of the population. For much of it's existence it was 'the Tory Party at prayer'. In the later 20th Century, as a survival tactic, it developed the charming trait of becoming tolerant to the point of self-extinction, welcoming avowed atheists into the clergy, & turing a blind eye to vicars who delivered Buddhist sermons while bollock naked.

This explains why I've always found Christian observance slightly shocking & disturbing. I once found myself in Dublin early one bright Sunday morning, having spent the night showing some Irish mates how to drink pints of Guiness. While wondering why there were so many people about at that time of day, & discounting a football fixture, I realised that they were all herding into these great ugly church buildings. I'd never seen anything like this before, & the experience left me feeling so queasy that I had to find some open green space, & a park bench to sit on while I waited for the pubs to open.

American Christian broadcasts, though, bear no resemblence to any kind of religious practice I've ever experienced. Coming from a land of many beautiful but deserted & hushed churches, that smell of furniture wax & Brasso, it's startling to see these vast crowded astrodomes, where men in immaculate business suits & expensively coiffeured women strut & fret before the audience, microphone in hand, harranguing in bizzare intonations. It takes a while to work out they're speaking English.

It seems they worship an entity called Guard. Clearly, Guard & Jesus are the same entity. Both of them speak directly to these men in suits, in the manner of a robust & commonsensical bank manager, instructing them in the conduct of various activities, often involving grandiose construction projects for which cash must be raised. Obviously, Guard/Jesus is a bloke, & the Supreme Being at the same time. This is a religion without mystery.

My friend who is a Muslim scholar tells me this crude theology is blasphemous, & an example of what Muslims call shirk, or associating Allah with something created. As the Catholic theologian Paul Tillich has written:

"The concept of a 'Personal God' interfering with natural events, or being 'an independant cause of natural events', makes God a natural object beside others, an object among others, a being among beings, maybe the highest, but nevertheless a being. This indeed is not only the destruction of the physical system but even more the destruction of any meaningful idea of God."

As an atheist I have to agree.

These people would be just depressing or laughable were it not for the grotesque politics they've dreamed up, using the authority of the Bible to justify belligerence & destruction to the credulous. I watched one 'minister' telling his flock that climate change was a 'hoax', quoting scripture to justify the continued rape of the planet on the grounds that 'Guard wants you to be rich beyond your wildest dreams'. Another, calling himself 'Pastor' Somethingorother, stood before a map of the world, behind which were draped many imperial star-spangled-banners, expounding a biblical 'prophesy' that predicted the destruction of Russia, the expansion of Israel up to the Euphrates, the routing of the Satanist Muslims, the second coming of Jesus in Jerusalem, resulting in the conversion of the Jews, & the establishment of the Kingdom of Guard.

What's just as saddening is that some people claiming to be Muslims espouse similar nonsense. Some 'Neo-Taliban' are talking about a "Battle of the End of Time", also centred ultimately on Palestine, which will herald the coming of the Mahdi. See, http://www.counterpunch.org/shahzad10122008.htm

Jump you fuckers

2008-10-13T20:18:00.002+01:00

(Placard held up last week on Wall Street)

Not much to read in the newspapers at the moment. So far as I'm concerned the swathes of print devoted the the supposed 'financial meltdown' might as well be written in Armenian. Three days into the 'crisis' I gave up buying papers. It's not that I'm ignorant or dismissive of economics, far from it, as a fierce young marxist I devoured whole shelves of books on political economy. No, I sensed as soon as the story began to unfold that nothing would come of all this blather. The superlatives that were being tossed from one news bulletin to the next failed to impress - worst figures for six years, British economy technically in recession, ten percent knocked off value of shares. All of which may be tough bananas for the banksters & their like, but what's happening here is just a periodic market adjustment, & is about as interesting as the office computer breaking down. A real crisis looms when the prices of necessities begin to rise quickly, & when the price of oil rockets. Oil has recently dropped from a high of $150 a barrel to just $80, & continues to fall.

Of course I don't have any shares, & I don't own any of the kind of property that might decrease in value. I don't use banks either. All the money I have, & there's a fair amount of it, is in cash, &
it's stuffed into the tubes of a big brass bed, where it's safe. If anyone attempts to take any of it
I'll kill or severely injure them, for which purpose a heavy wooden knout hangs from the bedframe, finely inscribed in kufic script with the 99 names of God.

The only sound reason to put money in a bank is if you want to borrow larger sums from them. I did this once to finance the purchase of a number of technically advanced television sets, & found them far too insistent, not to say pushy, when it came to getting their money back. In the end their impertinence became so intrusive I decided to permanently suspend repayment. A couple of times they even had the cheek to send people to knock on my door & ask for money. I had one of my employees provide them with an address in the Former Yugoslav Republic of Macedonia where I could be contacted, & I've heard nothing further from them. 'It is only by not paying our bills', said my friend Oscar Wilde, 'that we can hope to be remembered among the commercial classes.'

Taking refuge from the boring financial news in the serious papers, I turned to the gutter press for entertainment. I have to confess to what's probably some sort of intellectual perversion. I often enjoy, if that's the right word for it, experiencing the sensation of being appalled. Picking up a copy of the Daily Mail, The Mirror, or The Sun, I head straight for the full-page columnists - the shreiking Melanie Phillips, the odious Littlejohn, the gallows enchanted Peter Hitchens, or the pipsqueak-next-door Tony Parsons.

My deviant fix on Saturday came from Parsons. 'So many suffer for the grimy greed of a few', his piece was headed. He lays into the gluttonous, bonus-hungry spivs, who got the beleaguered British taxpayer into this mess. They are worse than criminals, he bleats. When do decent men & women, like himself, who actually work for a living, get to the point where they have given all they have to give? It was that Thatcher, who proclaimed that getting your hands dirty at work was a thing of the past, & the future was in financial speculation & writing columns for newspapers, who started it all. Casino capitalism & the culture of unfettered greed has brought us to this wretched point.

And just as you're thinking, 'hang on a bit, this fucker sounds like one of them outmoded socialists', he hits the button. An Asian immigrant, who lives in a £1 million seven bedroom Edwardian mansion, is claiming £4,000 a week in benefits from the British taxpayer. Outrageous, yes, but Tony honestly can't tell the difference between this leech & the city spivs who abuse decent, hardworking capitalism. Oh, Tony, appal me some more.

First Veep Dabate

2008-10-03T14:49:00.002+01:00

A seemingly small point, but an important one. The first letter of the Arabic name for the nation of Iraq is an 'ayn'. It is not like an English 'i', as in lip, but since the Arabic letter is a voiced pharangeal fricative, a sound that is not heard in native English, the short 'i' is the nearest aproximation. Iraq.

Sarah Palin repeatedly said 'eye rack'. There is no such place. Nor is there anywhere called 'eye ran'.

Biden pronounced Pakistan the way most English many people do, so that it sounds like it's describing an Asian called Stan who runs a corner shop. It's a mark of respect to at least attempt to prounce the names of places where people live correctly.

Robert Fisk on Aljazeera this morning made the most important point. The debate was supposed to be about foreign policy, yet Palestine was barely mentioned. He said it looked like an agreement had be made by the paries beforehand not to bring up Palestine/Israel. Biden mentioned Hizbollah, but only to make the ridiculous claim that Hizbollah had been cleared out of Southern Lebanon by the Israeli invasion.

Why did Sarah keep winking at me? Margaret Thatcher did that & I find it disturbing.

Terror Mastermind

2008-09-28T15:30:00.000+01:00

During the Irish Troubles the Thatcher government passed a law prohibiting the media from broadcasting the voices of Irish Republican spokespeople. This was to deny republicans what the government called 'the oxygen of publicity'. So we witnessed on TV the odd spectacle of the likes of Gerry Adams explaining Sinn Fein policy in silence, while his words were read out by someone else, in a Northern Irish accent. It was daft, & made the government look ridiculous. But What it highlighted was the way that the State decides that its citizens are incapable of distinguishing information from propaganda. Our eyes & ears must be protected from exposure to certain views, because there are those among us who are impressionable & lack judgement, & might be in some part persuaded by them.

Some British Asians have found themselves being prosecuted, or losing their jobs, for visiting jihadist websites. We have to assume that, if you're a Muslim Asian, it is in fact illegal to investigate the reasons why some Muslims violently oppose American & British foreign policy. It's not illegal, but decidedly dangerous, for British Muslims to openly oppose, within their own communities, government actions, even when done so peacefully. Determined government pressure has been put on Muslims to accept the view that US & British actions in the Middle East & elsewhere are neither cause nor motivation for jihadist violence, even when such a view is obviously absurd. The public in general needs to get with the program, & accept that religious fanatics blow up themselves & others because 'they hate our freedoms'.

Launching Cruise missiles at crowded cities, & detonating explosive belts in busy markets, both result in exactly the same thing. The bloody bodies & ripped apart limbs of innocent civilians: mothers, fathers, sisters & brothers. Let's leave aside that fact that the former is far more effective in terms of numbers of victims. The people who instigate such actions are criminals.

Which brings me to Khalid Sheikh Muhammad - the Al Qa'ida 'mastermind' of the 911 attacks. Some will have seen the news photo of the dishevelled, unshaven, slack bellied KSM, (recall Saddam emerging from his rat-hole), being led into captivity by Pakistani police. Despite having one of the most gruesome terrorist rapsheets of modern times, the public knows little about him. Even less is known about the 19 hijackers who perpetrated the defining crime of our era. Hitler, Pol Pot, Charlie Manson, Geoffrey Dahmer, Harold Shipman...all the subject of endless fascination & speculation. But KSM's name barely registers on the street, let alone Mohammad Atta or Hani Hanjour. Odd.

I came across a transcript of the proceedings of KSM's 'Combatant Status Review Tribunal', which took place last March in Guantanamo. It can be found here:

http://www.defenselink.mil/news/Combatant_Tribunals.html

He claims to have been tortured while in detention, which immediately renders his testimony suspect. (Incidentally, Senator John McCain would know about the effectiveness of torture techniques - having made no less than 32 propaganda recordings for the North Vietnamese, telling listeners that he & his fellow pilots had been ordered to target schools & hospitals.)Here's KSM's confession, which I reproduce without comment:

1. I was responsible for the 1993 World Trade Center Operation.
2. I was responsible for the 9/11 Operation. frm A to Z.
3. I decapitated with my blessed right hand the head of the American Jew, Daniel Pearl, in the city of Karachi, Pakistan. For those who would like to confirm, there are pictures of me on the Internet holding his head.
4. I was responsible for the Shoe Bomber Operation to down two American airplanes.
5. I was responsible for the Filka Island Operation in Kuwait that killed two American soldiers.
6. I was responsible for the bombing of a nightclub in Bali, Indonesia, which was frequented by British and Australian soldiers.
7. I was responsible for planning, training, surveying, and financing the New (or Second) Wave attacks against the following skyscrapers after 9/11:
a. Library Tower, California.
b. Sears Tower, Chicago.
c. Plaza Bank, Washington State.
d. The Empire State Building, New York City.
8. I was responsible for planning, financing, and follow-up Operations to destroy American military vessels and oil tankers in the Staights of Hormuz, the Straights of Gibrater, and the Port of Singapore.
9. I was responsible for planning, training, surveying and financing for the Operation to bomb and destroy the Panama Canal.
10. I was responsible for surveying and financing for the assassination of several former American Presidents, including President Carter.
11. I was responsible for surveying, planning and financing for the bombing of suspension bridges in New York.
12. I was responsible for planning to destroy the Sears Tower by burning a few fuel or oil tanker trucks beneath it or around it.
13. I was responsible for planning, surveying, and financing for the operation to destroy Heathrow Airport, the Canary Wharf Building, and Big Ben on British soil.
14. I was responsible for planning, surveying, and financing for the destruction of many nightclubs frequented by British and American citizens on Thailand soil.
15. I was responsible for surveying and financing for the destruction of the New York Stock Exchange and other financial targets after 9/11.
16. I was responsible for planning, financing and surveying for the destruction of buildings in the Israeli city of Elat by using airplanes leaving from Saudi Arabia.
17. I was responsible for planning, surveying, and financing for the destruction of American embassies in Indonesia, Australia, and Japan.
18.. I was responsible for surveying and financing for the destruction of the Israeili embassy in India, Azerbaijan, the Philippines, and Australia.
19. I was responsible for surveying and financing for the destruction of an Israeli El -Al Airlines flight on Thailand soil departing from Bangkok Airport.
20. I was responsible for sending several Mujahadeen into Israel to conduct surveillance to hit several strategic targets deep in Israel.
21. I was responsible for the bombing of the hotel in Mombasa that is frequented by Jewish travelers via El-Al Airlines.
22. I was responsible for launching a Russian-made SA-7 surface-to-air missile on El-Al or other Jewish airliner departing from Mombasa.
23. I was responsible for planning and surveying to hit American targets in South Korea, such as American military bases and a few nightclubs frequented by American soldiers.
24. I was responsible for financial, excuse me, I was responsible for providing financial support to hit American, Jewish, and British targets in Turkey.
25. I was responsible for surveillance needed to hit nuclear power plants that generate electricity in several US states.
26. I was responsible for planning, surveying, and financing to hit NATO Headquarters in Europe.
27. I was responsible for the planning and surveying needed to execute Bojinka Operation, which was designed to down twelve American airplanes full of passengers. I personally monitored a round-trip, Manila to Seoul, Pan Am flight.
28. I was responsible for the assassination attempt against President Clinton during his trip to the Philippines in 1994 or 1995.
29. I shared responsibility for the assassination attempt against Pope John Paul the second while he was visiting the Philippines.
30. I was responsible for the training and financing for the assassination of Pakistan's President Musharaf.
31. I was responsible for the attempt to destroy an American oil company owned by the Jewish former Secretary of State, Henry Kissinger, on the Island of Sumatra, Indonesia.

If you pick the broken English of KSM's rambling statement to the court, you'll notice that he ends it by expressing regret at the civilian deaths caused by the actions he claims resposibility for. This hardly qualifies him for sainthood, but it's not something I recall hearing Bush or Blair do.

Summer of Love

2008-09-27T01:40:00.000+01:00

18:53 25/09/2008

It being the 60th anniversary of the founding of the National Health Service, BBC 4 screened a biography of Aneurin Bevan. An emotional exeprience for me. Surprised to find that Greg Dyke was an admirer too, he described closing the second volume of Michael Foot's biography of Nye Bevan in a flood of tears. Bevan was a giant, a proper working class hero, & his life inspires an emotional response like this.Seems we weep for the heroes of socialism like the shi'a weep on hearing the story of Imam Hussain.

The birth of the NHS was something of a miracle.Without a bruiser like Bevan making it happen with his fists it would never have come into being. Lots of doctors didn't want it, fearing, among other things,being overwhelmed by a stampede of poor people demanding treatment - which is exactly what happened.There were even reports of people getting prescriptions for gauze bandage to put up as net curtains. Bevan had to bribe the doctors, as he put it, with gold.

At the time the country wasn't generally enthusiastic about much at all. There was food & fuel rationing, & everyone had shivered through the coldest winter on record in 1947. The dismal details of the miserable postwar years can be found in David Kynaston's excellent Austerity Britain,1945-51. Though an avowedly socialist government had been elected, there was no mass movement of trades unionist & socialist activists - every gain was a struggle against the class interests of the former rulers & the inertia of the dog tired & often disinterested workers. Shagged out, war-ravaged economies are not ideal incubators of socialist revolution, as Marx had farsightedly pointed out. In Petrograd in 1917 the Bolsheviks had no more than 8,000 members.

During the BBC Nye Bevan documentary the Tory brahmin Michael Brilliantine was interviewed about the current relevance of the socialism that inspired Bevan. He leaned back in his chair & smiled. Yes it was smug, self satisfied. He said that, as Tony Blair had made clear, it was all utterly irrelevant now. So what my grandfather fought for after the First World War, what my father learned from the Second World War & down the pits, & what both of them passed on to me, is irrelavant. A waste of time as it turned out. As they say, how does that make you feel?

This had me thinking about my relationship to the past. My beautiful youngest daughter has never heard of Nye Bevan, despite her expensive university education. I wonder what she can possibly make of my pride at being the son of coal miners & steel workers. How could she make any sense of that? Will my gransons even know about it? We are people without a past, nothing connects us to where we came from.
Even our defeat is irrelevant.

It's also 40 years since 1968. What a year that was, I was 18 years old. The title 'Summer of Love', invented years later, wouldn't have meant much to me, being a self-styled freak rather than a hippie. Hippies were mostly a student & media phenomena.

I went to the the '68 Grosvenor Square demonstration against the war in Vietnam. I'd hitch-hiked down to London with the celebrated poet Robert E. Gilpin. It'd taken us nearly three days to get down the M1 motorway, since Bob, (or 'Dog's Knob'as his mates & admirers called him),had shoulder length hair, & motorists either hurled sexual abuse at us, or amused themselves by pulling in to stop, then screeching off as we panted towards them with our heavy kitbags.

The demo had already turned nasty when we arrived, & the scuffers were running at people with truncheons. At one point we came across three coppers dishing out a shoeing to a comrade, who was curled up on the pavement in a foetal position clutching his copies of Black Dwarf. I ran over & picked up a Wall's Ice Cream sign from outside a shop & floored one of the coppers with it. Dog's Knob managed to pull off another's helmet, & deployed it on the prostrate copper's head, swinging it by the chinstrap, much like a handbag. The bloodied comrade managed to get to his feet & leg it, then the enraged police came after us. One of them threw this trunchoen at my head, just missing. We legged it too.

They chased us for what seemed like miles. Belting down Kensington High St. with the coppers 20 yards behind us, Dog's Knob crashed into a young couple who were stepping out of what was then called a 'boutique', a shop that sold poncey clothes. She had on a startling white fur coat & white thigh boots,he an orange silk shirt & candy striped flares, & the bags of clothes they'd bought were scattered all over the pavement. Dog's knob thought this was funny, & let out an insane cackle that impeded his running. We dived down a side street then up a passageway, pinning ourselves against a wall, panting & sniggering.

When we heard the the police pass the end of the passageway we held our breath. The feller with the orange shirt was with them, we could hear him saying, 'They must've come this way, officer, you should cordon off the street.' After about 10 minutes we made a bold break for it, & to our amazement, got clean away. It took me ages to talk Dog's Knob out of the notion of setting off to find the twat in the orange shirt & caving his head in with a housebrick. When I spotted him on television years later I recognised him immediately, it was David Bowie.

Drill & Burn

2008-09-20T21:31:00.000+01:00

Let's get something straight, right from the start. Over here in Europe we regularly see comments sent from US citizens to our 'serious' newspapers telling us that we shouldn't 'interfere' or concern ourselves with American politics. It's not our business, they claim. Some have even suggested it's too complicated for us to understand. Oh Really? Then Why did 200,000 Berliners turn out to support Barack Obama?

Because what happens in America is vitally important to us. Like France in the 19th century, America has universal significance. Because all progressive, to use an American term, Europeans want to see the American project succeed. America has come to be Europe's spiritual homeland. And if we're angry & saddened by the fact that America has been hijacked by crooks & warmongers, it's because we're pro-American.

Now hear the best of America. A fine speech by Van Jones delivered a couple of days ago at Netroots Nation 2008 in Austin, Texas.

http://www.alternet.org/environment/99550/?page=1

Damien Sodding Hirst

2008-09-16T22:17:00.000+01:00

I don't really want to talk about Damien Hirst, it's far too depressing. We're told he's raked in another $22 million. The press has been bigging up his 'inovative' notion of flogging off the shite he turns out at auction, in one comprehensive greatest hits' sale, rather than having an exhibition as lesser talents might. Sensational.

His agent 'let slip' that he's now coined himself a billion, pounds or dollars doesn't matter. He's bought himself more palaces that Saddam Hussein dreamed about.

I'm relaxed about people skanking the hyper-rich. Given the chance I'd do it myself,it's preferable to eating them.'Art', Hirst is on record as saying, 'has always been about money'. Well, yes, but this short sentence implies that he views himself as an artist, to be considered in the same breath as the great patronised artists of the European heritage. He's nothing of the sort. He's a con-artist, pure & simple. The man's sheer greed makes the flesh crawl - maybe that's the whole point of the endeavour. Perhaps this is the emotional response he's really after, clever devil. Mildly diverting 'art' that causes a feeding frenzy among a lot of vacuous rich people.'I'd stop fucking them up the arse', he says, 'but they won't let me.'

I met him once in a pub in Soho, though he wasn't well known at the time. He was with Lilly Allen's old fellah, who I sort of recognised as a bit part actor I'd seen on TV. They were both obviously seasoned piss artists, all one line wisecracks & bellylaughs.I noticed he never bought a round of drinks, & I'd stupidly left a packet of Bensons on the table which they both helped themselves to. The only time I made eye contact with him was when he gurned at my fag packet & seeing only one left made a grab for it. Just in time I swept up the packet, put the fag in my mouth, & grinned at him in triumph. He pointedly ignored me for the rest of the afternoon.

As it happens I may have a souvenir of that afternoon. There's a bin liner somewhere in my attic containing items I ought to have dumped, but couldn't bring myself to - my Communist Party membership card for instance, & a couple of photographs of a former girlfriend I can't bear to look at now. There's half a beermat with the phone number of someone I've forgotten on one side, & a drawing by Damien Hirst of a matchstick man pissing into a bucket on the other. Offers over $20,000 will be considered.

Seven Years On

2008-09-12T04:41:00.000+01:00

Anyone looking into the the events of September 11 2001, which are likely remain the defining moment of our lifetime, will in a short space of time come upon statements like this: 'Researchers are uncovering extensive, credible evidence that the official account of the 9-11 attacks is untenable.' or 'Evidence is mounting that the September 11 attacks were instigated, if not carried out, by elements within the US administration.' I'll not bother to provide citations for these statements, since views like this are so commonplace, but both were made by people occupying professorial chairs at North American universities. Various polls, conducted by the likes of Zogby, have revealed that something approaching a third, & in some polls up to a half, of the US population believe that the official account of the 9/11 attacks is false.

The events that unfolded on 9/11 were incredible. Had this been pitched as the plotline of a Hollywood blockbuster it would seem too far-fetched. The ease with which the 19 hijackers evaded airport security to board the planes, carrying knives, stanley blades ('box cutters') & perhaps cannisters of mace. The way they were able to overcome the crew & passengers, & get into the flight decks of the planes with such primitive weapons. The flying skills of the hijacker pilots, three out of four scoring direct hits on their targets. Then the seeming lack of response from the Airforce, which was supposed to be protecting US airspace. They were able to hit the Pentagon, surely the most heavily protected building on the planet.

Then there was the incredible way the Twin Towers simply collapsed into their own footprints in a matter of seconds, videos of which were shown repeatedly in the following days, becoming the iconic image of the attacks. The nearby WTC 7, which was not hit by a plane, later came down in the same way, & it looked just like familiar footage of a building being demolished, as one shellshocked television commentator remarked at the time - 'un-be-lievable', he said. It was counterintuitive - three buildings collapsing at what looked like free-fall speeds down the path of maximum resistance.

No wonder that the day after the attacks, when a group of Arab terrorists were revealed as the culprits, there was already widespread scepticism. Some people just couldn't believe that Arabs, particulary ones directed by a cartoon villain skullking in a cave in Afghanistan, were capable of such a spectacularly sucessful & sophisticated operation, against the most advanced society in the world. We saw Palestinians in the streets, firing guns into the air & passing round trays of sweets in celebration, but in the Arab press many quickly pointed the finger at Mossad.

The behavior of the Bush administration only fuelled more scepticism. Following on the baffling 'My Pet Goat' incident, both Bush & Condoleeza Rice claimed at press conferences that the idea of bad guys flying planes into buildings had never ocurred to anyone. Then there was the barefaced attempt to stitch up the Iraqis. The blatant drumming up of fear & panic in the press was brought to a pitch by the bizaare anthrax mailings that October, which again they tried to pin on the Iraqis. It all seemed to be falling into place so conveniently for an administration that had been waiting for just such an opportunity to come its way. You could almost hear the sound of palms being rubbed briskly together in anticipation of wars they'd been planning for years. The Patriot Act was passed before anyone had a chance to read it. The secret Continuity of Govenment provisions were put in place, & the legislature remains in the dark about what's contained in them.

Over the past few years I've seen dozens of documenty films, & read hundreds of articles & blog posts dealing with the 9/11 attacks, including the US government's 911 Commission Report. So far I've yet to come across any bankable nailed-on evidence that implicates the Bush administration, or any 'deep state' elements within it, in the attacks.

Many of the documentaries I've sat through have been frankly preposterous, attempting to peddle conspiracy theories crafted to contradict even the most reasonable assumptions based on firm evidence. Some of the earliest ones, for instance, promote the so-called 'no planes' theory, which contends that the attacks, in particularly the one one the Pentagon, were carried out using missiles fired by the US military. The fact that hundreds of drivers passing by on the beltway, that runs some 300 yards beside the Pentagon, reported seeing a Boeing jetliner crash into it is dealt with by describing mass hypnotism techniques developed by the CIA. I've read closely argued papers, obviously written by highly educated people used to handling complex data, that come to similar, and barmier, conclusions. Taking the time to delve into the backgrounds of such writers can uncover connexions to looney tune religious or rightwing political organisations.

But there are plenty of investigative journalists, filmakers, scientists & academics who attempt to tackle the issues raised by the 911 attacks with honesty & integrity. Loose Change, (Final Cut) by far the best known 911 documentary, which has been downloaded & seen by millions around the world, is slickly produced & has a catchy soundtrack. It seems clear that the earnest young filmakers who put it together are not covertly pushing a political agenda. Three years ago it was plausible enough to have me burning copies & handing out or mailing them to everyone I thought might be interested. I wasn't the only initial enthusiast, the Labour MP Michael Meecher tried to arrange a screening at the House of Commons. A month later I was sending out apologies by email, directing people to places on the Net where they could find convincing demolitions of most of the film's major contentions. Now, if I ever come upon any real evidence, I probably won't be able to find anyone to consider it.

There are determined & highly competent investigators researching the murky wilderness of mirrors inhabited by the various state intelligence & security operations, which interface at points with organised crime. It's here where you can glimpse the odd shard that briefly reflects a little dim light. But the tangled threads of relationships & identities are far too complex for anyone but a dedicated specialist, with some access to inside knowlege, to persue. If anything like evidence were (or has) emerged from here, it could only be accessible to a small circle.

The same goes for the matter of the extraordinary way the three building collapsed. An advanced education in physics is needed to appreciate the ever increasing body of arguments that either advance or refute the notion that they were brought down by controlled demolition. To the layman they merely appear to have been.

Having said all this I can't agree with Alexander Cockburn (Counterpunch) that there are no serious questions about the events of 911. But I do agree when he says that the whole '911 Truth' issue has been a major distraction for the Left, most seriously in the US. There is, after all, ample solid evidence that Bush, along with Blair, are war criminals, who ought to be impeached. Plenty of brave attempts to get the ball rolling on this have been sunk by a lack of mass support. If just a quarter of the people currently sitting at terminals giving themselves migraine looking for the 911 clincher had put their backs into impeachment, Bush & Blair would be in jail by now.

I'm Voting Republican

2008-09-04T20:59:00.000+01:00

The Great Drought of '08

2008-09-04T20:51:00.001+01:00

I have some minor experience of the drugs market. I'll admit that I once foolishly got myself addicted to smoking heroin. But it was only for perhaps 25 - 30 years. I'd had enough by then.

So I obviously still know lots of people in the business, & they're all telling me that there's a chronic shortage of heroin. The only gear available is very weak, & for the most part bashed to death with paracetamol. This has been so for the past 2 or 3 months. It seems the shortage isn't confined to this area.

Lack of junk is an excellent motivator. If it could inspire Coleridge to walk all the way from Somerset to London to get opium, think how far present day junkies might range. This is a national phenomena. I doubt a drought as profound as this has happened in to the last 2 decades. It's even been covered in the national dailies.

My intuition, along with my reading in the papers & online about the bumper harvests in Afghanistan, with the British Army guarding the fields for the farmers while they bring in the crop, tells me that this is a case of a failure of distribution rather than supply. Heroin is money, stockpiles are kept by wholesalers in order to influence prices. It looks as though the one or two kilo level distributors are being denied supplies. This is unlikely to be the result of specific police activities. The function of the police is to apply sufficient pressure to keep the price buoyant. It's unheard of for the police to disrupt supply for more than a few days.

Although the average user rarely rubs shoulders with mid-level distributors, or middle management, rumours do trickle down as far as the neighbourhood dealers. The one I've heard the most is that some major players, from a country I won't name, believe that their organisation has been infiltrated by traitors & informers, & until these have been rooted out supplies are being witheld. This plot seems plausible.

Career Opportunities

2008-09-02T16:38:00.000+01:00

We're currently seeing frequently rotated recruitment adverts for the British Army on television. They show a group of squaddies in the back of a bumping lorry, one of them tells the camera, 'We work hard, but we play even harder'. They pull up at a wrecked village, & jump out into the lashing rain & mud. They are not carrying guns. The young woman commanding them briskly gives them their orders, then explains to us, rain teeming from her forage hat, that this is a disaster relief mission. There's been a hurricane, & they're there to help the villagers. It's clear that this village is in neither Afghanistan nor Iraq.

Perhaps the 'play even harder' bit might help explain the recent findings by Napo, the probation officers union, that at least 9 percent of the UK prison population of 93,574 (the biggest in Europe), is made up of ex servicemen, most of them having served in Afghanistan & the Gulf. That's over 8,500 - more troops than the British currently have stationed in Iraq.

The report says the number could be higher, & cites violent offences fuelled by alcohol & drugs as a common factor. It also said that the most of the men in the case studies had shown symptoms of untreated post traumatic stress disorder.

Of course, it's easy to find yourself behind bars in Britain. The prison population is not just the largest in Europe, it's bigger than the prison population of the rest of Europe combined. Locking people up in large numbers has been Government policy for the past three decades, both under the Tories & what used to be the Labour Party. Some magistrates & members of the judiciary, hardly bastions of liberalism, regularly complain about having to bang up so many people. The Government responds by proposing the building of 'Titan' prisons, to hold vast numbers of overwhelmingly poor, damaged or mentally distressed inmates - including more of the young men & women lured into the forces, sent to futile or illegal wars to be brutalised, devastated, & then let loose on the streets, awash with other youths enjoying our renowned culture of binge drinking & casual violence.

Antisemitism

2008-08-31T20:46:00.000+01:00

I first heard about jews from my Grandfather. Among my clearest early memories is of him sitting beside the fire in the wooden armchair we still have in the kitchen here, me at his feet playing armies with the ashes & cinders on the hearth. To amuse himself he'd sometimes dribble scalding tea into my ear. I'd be eight or ten years old.

I didn't pay much attention to the television in those days, in the 1950s there was nothing on it but posh people talking, or women dancing & singing in screechy voices. Now & then though my Grandfather, who could barely walk, would suddenly struggle to his feet & hobble towards it, trying to whack the little wooden box with his walking stick. It was 'bloody jews'that caused this.I must have asked questions about jews, because I learned all about them from him. The gaffers were jews, they were all rich & cared about nothing but making more money. They were mean & cheated people. A lot of them had shops. Our local butcher was a jew, & my Grandfather wouldn't set foot there. The rag & bone man who came round once a week with his handcart, who would give you a goldfish in a plastic bag for piles of old clothes, was a jew. Even though he looked like a tramp in his loppy old overcoat & greasy flat cap he was really a millionaire, & lived in a fancy house in Totley. Sheeny Ike, my Grandfather called him.

My Grandfather had been a Sergeant Major in the First World War. The only thing I can recall him saying about it was that at the Battle of the Somme the officers had ordered him to get his men to polish the brass on the artillery pieces in the teeming rain & knee deep mud. After he'd died I heard from my Mother that he was a Red, & an admirer of the Soviet Union - which was why my Mother, born in 1923, had an outlandish Russian christian name. He was a skilled man, an engineer, & could earn good money as a foreman or chargehand. But he was a union stirrer, & was always getting the sack for sticking up for the men. My Mother said he cared more about the union & his men than he did his own family. She recalled standing with my Grandmother at the front room window, watching for him coming up the street from work. If he way carrying his bag of tools over his shoulder it meant he'd been sacked again.

One day on my way to school I found a lump of yellow chalk & decided to write 'Juden Raus' in big letters on a few walls. I don't know where I got this phrase from, probably the television, but I knew it was German & meant 'jews go home'. I wrote it on the wall of the local church, & in the biggest letters on both sides of the school gates. I got into serious trouble over this. My Father was sent for. I was given a bucket of water & a scrubbing brush & had to wash it off all the walls. Then I had to go & apologise to the headmaster of the school, Mr Abrahamson.

Just after leaving school at fifteen I joined the Labour Party Young Socialists, which at that time was run by Trotskists. My antisemitism gradually evaporated as I read the books & pamphlets the older comrades gave me. Many of the heroes of the Bolshevik Revolution were jews, including Leon Trotsky, Lenin's true sucessor & architecht of the Glorious Red Army. I read about the Holocaust, & was shocked & angry that the Nazi bastards could do these things to people.

My Grandfather must have known about all this. I never saw him with a book in his hands, but he must have seen the cinema newsreels after the war showing the liberation of Auschwitz, Buchenwald, Dachau. I remember as a very young child being taken out of the room when scenes of skeletal corpses being bulldozed into pits were shown on television.

I know that between the wars antisemitism was a common currency, & explains why German jews escaping Nazi persecution got short shrift from the rest of Europe,including Britain, who for the most part refused them sancuary. A proud exception was the Dutch Communist Party, whose members, under Nazi occupation, risked their lives organising strikes to protect Dutch jews from deportation. But it seems my Grandfather, admirer of the Worker's State & fighter for his class, had swallowed a version of Hitler's poison about a conspiracy of war-mongering jewish capitalists bent on world domination. And he passed it on to me.

So for most of my life I've had sensitive anntenae for antisemitism in all its forms. (Incidentally, I have black hair & dark skin, & have been taken for a jew in both Europe & the Middle East, a few times experiencing racist abuse.) Of course it persists, though in different forms & in different places than in the 1930s.

When I was learning Arabic, my Yemeni teacher couldn't mention jews without making a sly remark. When I tried to make the distinctions between jewish people, the religion, & the ideology of Zionism, he'd grin at me as though I'd just told him a funny story. Most of the young Muslim men who came to the classes could be heard parotting the same toxic lies as I had done as a ten year old.

Over at the apalling rense.com, where you can get your barmy rightwing conspiracy theories while picking up your miracle health supplements & magnetic resonance penis rings, I came across what was to me a new version of the old antisemitic shite. It seems now that it's all down to the Khazars.

This much of it has some factual basis; the Khazar Empire flourished sometime between the tenth & the twelfth centuries, in the area beween the Caspian & the Black Sea, the Caucasus. Not much is known about them, but the Khazars seem to have been a Turkic people from Central Asia, who had migrated to the Caucasus & at some point converted to Judaism. (for more see http://www.khazaria.com). A Jewish empire in the Caucasus! How amazing, & how topical! Just the kind of thing for conspiracy headbangers to latch onto. According to them, the decendants of the Khazars are still around, & they want their empire back. They've wormed their way into the corporate, military & political establishments of the US & Europe, & as we speak are plotting wars to bring them World domination. (Sound familiar?). As the Khazar watchers point out, this is in no way antisemitic. They've nothing against Ashkenazi or Sephardic jews. It's the Khazars, they're 'fake' jews, who pretend to be jews to advance their evil designs. How far this bollocks will spread is anyones guess, but I'm sure the Nazis at the BNP will just love this fable.

I met Mick Jagger around 1967

2008-08-30T18:25:00.000+01:00

There were about twenty people sitting in a circle in a big room in a squat in Powis Square, not far from where some of the scenes from 'Performance' were filmed. Shabby room, swathes of damp green wallpaper hung from the walls. Orange boxes or milkcrates to sit on. Music banged out, Hendrix say, or maybe Soft Machine. A couple of dealers sat crosslegged on cushions rolling long elaborate joints. One skinned up Kashmir & passed the joints one way, the other built up Blonde Lebanese & passed them the other. After a while I noticed that the joints that made their way to Jagger got no further. He was sucking on them like they were glued to his rubber lips. After every big toke he'd take lots of fierce little hits, hissing jerks of air through his teeth. He was blatantly bogarting, & the people to one side of him were ending up with cows-arsed roach ends. Proper freaks didn't behave like this.

I spoke in a broad Yorkshire accent at the time. A lot of Londoners assumed that Northerners were congenital imbeciles - with the exception of Scousers, who were all theives. Jagger was sitting just across from me, & I said to him quietly, 'Mick, do you pass joints, or what?'

He didn't look up at me, but after a minute or so I could see the hair covering the side of his face begin to shake. 'Why don't you just fack off you cant', he said quite loudly in a drawn out Essex. Some people nearby stopped talking & looked over.

I said to him in a calm & measured voice, so he'd understand, 'Oo you callin a cunt. I'll kick yer fucking poncey ed in.'

Sitting next to me was my mate from Sheffield, Jimmy Bradshaw. Unlike anyone else in the room he had short hair & lots of prison tatoos on his thick hairy arms. Some big booted Australian in an army shirt & beggars beads called over to Jagger, 'Hey Mick, do you require any assistance?' Jimmy Bradshaw gave a menacing snigger.

Jagger shook his head, 'Nah man. We're all cool ere.'

After about ten minutes he got up & left. Course, I couln't be sure it was him. Certainly looked the part from the back.