Loose change goes a long way

Shock horror George there's a 9-11 conspiracy theory film!

George Monbiot and the Guardian have covered this debate in a way which is predictable, consistent with other commentators such as Medialens and less critical outlets, and probably right... however most of us were having this discussion six months ago.

Another theme that is constantly revisited by political commentators of the left and right, those blessed with a brain and those not, is of course, Islam and 'multiculturalism', subjects with which I seem to spend an inordinate ammount of my time.

Anyway a centre right think tank released this report a few days ago, detailing the radicalisation of British muslim ideas and generally critiquing the goverment's confused post-modern, liberal, 'multicultural' policies.

Today, prominent scholars on multiculturalism and racism in britain savaged the report in a letter to the Guardian...

I think i can diplomatically intervene here to inform you that the government's 'multicultural' policies do seem to be contradictory and creating segregated communities (to agree with the authour's of the report and Nick Cohen) but that the report does seem to be making some heavy assertations and wading into a debate where telephone interviews and quantitative research techniques on these tricky issues perhaps don't hold enough weight to add more than an annoyance to the debate...

one bag of mcscience with freedom fries

Scientists and economists have been offered $10 000 each by a lobby group funded by one of the world's largest oil companies to undermine a major climate change report due to be published on Friday.

Letters sent by the American Enterprise Institute (AEI), an ExxonMobil-funded think tank with close links to the Bush administration, offered the payments for articles that emphasise the shortcomings of a report from the United Nation's Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC).

bullshit is cheap

dazzling profits

fuckem

e-schmemocracy in action

john howard is my mate

democracy now

"When Adam delved and Eve span, Who was then the gentleman? From the beginning all men by nature were created alike, and our bondage or servitude came in by the unjust oppression of naughty men. For if God would have had any bondmen from the beginning, he would have appointed who should be bond, and who free. And therefore I exhort you to consider that now the time is come, appointed to us by God, in which ye may ( if ye will ) cast off the yoke of bondage, and recover liberty."

behind bars

Rap legend Slick Rick spent his 41st birthday,
January 14th, incarcerated in a Florida
immigration detention centre. Back in the
80s Rick was in the charts with Doug E Fresh
with The Show but now Rick's fighting deportation
to Britain, his birthplace, from where his
family emigrated in 1975.

Rick aka Richard Walters's career collapsed
in the 1990s when he shot his pregnant cousin
and her boyfriend in an argument where Walters
alleged they were trying to extort money. He
served five years and 12 days in jail then
saw his comeback album, featuring a who's
who of hip-hop inc Nas, Snoop Dogg, Outkast
and Wu-Tang Clan, bomb.

In June 2002, after performing on a Caribbean
cruise ship, Rick was arrested in Florida for
"deporting himself" and "illegally re-entering
the country". A new 9/11 inspired-law allowed
all felons with five years jail time not
born in USA to be deported. Walters spent 17
months in jail before being released then was
re-incarcerated last year, when the Department
of Homeland Security took up the case again.
Two months ago a US district court judge
ruled that he should not be deported but
Rick remains in the detention centre with
no official release date.

The US government must think terrorism
issues are now so minor that it wants to
spend so much time and energy on the security
threat posed by an aging black rapper.

also - believe it or don't

idiot culture of the week alert

Brian Haw Art War

The artist has meticulously recreated peace campaigner Brian Haw's extraordinary array of protest banners, placards, posters, flags, teddy bears in peace T-shirts, mutilated dolls and heavily annotated curling press cuttings. This howl of outrage against the war in Iraq stretched right across one side of Parliament Square, opposite the Palace of Westminster, until the police arrived in the small hours of May 23 last year, citing the new Serious Organised Crime and Police Act, and confiscated all but a three-metre section.

Guardian Review

Slideshow

Exhibition Site for this exhibition at the Tate Britain

Wallinger's only real intervention is the line of black tape, which marks the radius of the one-kilometre exclusion zone from the centre of Parliament Square, within which the draconian provisions of the act apply. Two thirds of the exhibition falls within the danger zone, including the horrific array of photographs of children born with grotesque mutilations blamed on the use of spent uranium in bombs. The line then continues through other galleries, through Sir Godfrey Kneller's towering portrait of Speaker John Smith in 1707, proudly brandishing a copy of the new Act of Union, before finally running into George Stubbs' happy, spotlessly clean haymakers, politely chatting with the farm manager on horseback - a painting that is either a celebration of rural life or which "robs the workers of their individuality and denies the harsh realities of their work for sentimental effect," as the caption puts it.

clever beard

I went to this seminar the other day... very interesting star studded line up including Stiglitz, Amartya Sen, Meghnad Desai, Manmohan Singh and Kamal Nath the Commerce and industry minister.

Very interesting debate and discussion, Stiglitz in particular was storming, I'd like to get hold of his new book. Interesting point about liberalisation of labour markets having a greater effect on economies than liberalising capital markets.

"Prof Stiglitz's stress on movement of labour was endorsed by Prime Minister Manmohan Singh who observed that developing economies were becoming more restrictive with respect to immigration and the movement of labour. "Even economic theory has largely focused on merchandise trade and captial flows, paying little attention to the economics and politics of migration in the modern world," he said."

bishop tired and emotional

The bishop came out fighting yesterday, insisting he had probably been mugged and was having tests for amnesia - in spite of the presence of witnesses who claimed they had found him drunk in the back of their car, throwing their kids' toys out of the window and shouting: "I'm the Bishop of Southwark. It's what I do."

right to protest?

Law Lords uphold the right to protest... well that's jolly nice of them.

Fairford Coach Action

Schnews on the Fairford Protests from 2003

the age of the beard

Depp - cool

Th Guardian has just caught on to what some of us have known for years, Beards are now officially cool.


Jesus - groovy


Rasputin - full of ecstasy and fire


Che - guapissimo


Marx - still cool after all these years


we've all Bin there

revealed: ex-president turned anti-semite terror-lover

"a sick phenomenon"

Iraq Study Group Report - deride and conquer

Our embassy (in Baghdad) of 1,000 has 33 Arabic speakers, just six of whom are at the level of fluency.

Summary if you can't be bothered to read it: stupidity beyond belief

skills to pay the bills

i got an email from michael albert himself telling me off for changing my card number and not telling him so he couldn't collect his sub off me which led me to think about how the poor sod prob has to spend an enormous amount of time chasing dentists for a few bucks to keep the show on the road so i thought i'd remind everyone to give, give, give to this, prob the most informative site there is.

if you do they send you a daily email which is wicked. so you get more than just a sense of smug self-satisfaction. donations start at $3 a quarter so don't be tight, have charity in your hearts.

i wonder how the lawn is today....

in spite of the weather..

"The fundamental problem with the Labour Party is that they always believed that capitalism was progressive and that they could re-distribute the crumbs that fell off the table more equitably. This was always the reality of the Labour Party."

shockmenot- it's a socialist..

daily mail reading of the meter: scandalous! hallmark of true quality i suppose..



sympathetic look at the spanish revolution

I perceived an uninterrupted stream of fantastic pictures, extraordinary shapes with intense, kaleidoscopic play of colors

The first account of testing LSD by Albert Hoffman. Since then it has been tested and used by intelligence agencies for multiple purposes, varying from a truth serum to chemical warfare

It seems that in the war on terror detainees have been "given a 'truth serum' of an lsd like chemical".

This information comes from lawyers reperesnting U.S. national, Jose Padilla in his fourth year of detention and only now facing trial on charges of conspiring to commit terrorist bombings. Not only is he the first U.S. national to be arrested and detainbed for being an enemy combatant on American soil he has been in solitary confinement for three years of his detention.

The case is seen as one of the main pillars in the fight against the erosion of rights that has been perpetrated by the current administartion. In this case detention without trial and an extremely dubious interpretation of legal speak to claim that a national on home soil could be an enemy combatant as opposed to a criminal terrorist, a postion which merits at least a trial.

Poirot vs. Bond

Litvinenko, Goldfarb, Scaramella, Hijo de Putin, Pollonium 210, sushi, acronyms, acrimonious, is this for real?

"A new 'soft' cold war"

the it was Israel brigade
Yukos, IAEA, Nevzlin etc.

"can only be obtained from a limited number of state run laboratories"
Buy polonium 210 online, $65

Poisoned umbrellas, Ricin, Bulgarian secret service, KGB, Georgi Markov "a spherical metal pellet the size of a pin-head embedded in Markov's calf"

dollar dollar bill y'all

Welcome to the jungle
We got fun 'n' games
We got everything you want
Honey we know the names
We are the people that can find
Whatever you may need
If you got the money honey
We got your disease

meanwhile in blighty nothing of the sort is going on...

On a scale of one to terrorist......

U.S. security agencies have developed another 'great' Orewellian system. This time ominously called the Automatic targetting system; innocent civilians will be here by given a terrorist score on entering the United States. The score will be devised by a computer based on a number of factors invasively gleaned from a variety of sources. This includes the airline informing them what the potential terrorist ate on the flight. When a host of factors are compared the computer then alerts Homeland security about individuals with 'suspicious or unatural behaviour'
I would love to know what a suspicious meal on a flight is: 'would you like the chicken or the veg sir? I'm sorry we've run out of the Jihadi feast'........

british democracy

Date: Wed, 29 Nov 2006 20:23:03 +0000 (GMT)
From: "PETER FAINTON"
Subject: Cash for peerages - Newsnight
To: peter.barron@bbc.co.uk

Dear Peter,
last night's Newsnight programme investigated new details surrounding the cash-for-peerages scandal - in which it's alleged that Blair traded peerages to secure funding for his election campaign. I'm surprised that you felt that you could cover this subject, and the £60 million in undisclosed loans by the "main" political parties, without identifying to your viewers what the money was needed for in the "free and fair" elections of British "democracy."

You also managed to overlook the fact that the "main" political parties are already subsidised to the tune of over £30 million of taxpayers' cash, through Cranborne money and Short money, and the fact that they're facing bankruptcy because they lack popular support; combined, the three "main" parties have less than a million members from a voting population of over 42 million people.

Speaking to the Institute of Directors in 1998, Peter Mandelson clarifies why such huge amounts of money are needed to buy power in British "democracy": "It had been the job of New Labour’s architects to translate their understanding of the customer into offerings he or she was willing to pay for. And then, and only then, to convey to potential customers the attributes of that offering through all the different components that make up a successful brand – product positioning, packaging, advertising and communications."[1]

According to Peter Oborne the main parties used the same American software programme 'mosaic' to target those few hundred thousand swing voters in "key" marginals with surgical precision. Our political system is so moribund that only the key marginals are likely to change hands at election time. Through "focus groups" the parties identify what the voters in each key marginal like then offer them six "key pledges," which are somewhat anodyne that nobody would object to, in an effort to galvanise the vote in these key seats. These "local inducements" in the form of key pledges were considered necessary because, as Oborne noted, all three main parties' policies on several key issues - taxation, law and order, health, education - were so similar as to render any concept of "democratic choice" meaningless.

Party leaders and other senior politicians did their best to avoid the public, concentrating on stage-managed private rallies, photo sessions and events. This kind of posturing in front of adulating supporters is thought to provide a more positive "media image" and has been commonplace in America for some time. It's also quite expensive. Oborne noted that with an ever higher number of ideologically bereft 'career politicians' and dwindling grass-roots party membership, presentation is content. Policies are product lines, voters are sized up by the latest marketing methods, resulting in policies of "stupefying banality."

As Jeremy Paxman discovered during BBC election coverage New Labour also conducted trend analysis on actual postal ballot votes, before the main ballot, and altered their key propaganda messages based on this information. Even after this hugely expensive stage-managed media "campaign" and public relations exercise they still only managed to secure twenty percent of the popular vote - the lowest level of support since the 1832 parliament Act, in fact, the lowest level ever in a British election.

Don't you think you should have brought some of your more obvious related factual omissions to the attention of your viewers?

Yours sincerely,

Peter Fainton

[1] Market Driven Politics, by Colin Leys, p.68

peter Fainton's blog generally interested in british democracy...

"Well, I guess we can close the file on that one."

The US military also announced that two American soldiers died from their injuries in separate incidents in Iraq on Tuesday.

separate incidents!!

related news:

"They say that the killings and kidnappings are being carried out by men in police uniforms and with police vehicles," the Iraqi Foreign Minister Hoshyar Zebari said to me with a despairing laugh this summer. "But everybody in Baghdad knows that the killers and kidnappers are real policemen."

Everything in Iraq is dominated by what in Belfast we used to call "the politics of the last atrocity".

mysteriously kids think violence legitimate tool to 'get what you want'

...be it the greatest material prize in history or simply the wallet of a plump recalcitrant turkey of a local.

'in a shocking development today it was announced that it is not just the uk govt who pose the direct major threat to the british public, and select foreign nationals, but that they also have also colluded in the creation of a society so jaded and hopeless as to have little more sensible to do with themselves than thrill seeking attacks motivated more by a desire to foster hard core street cred than actually produce useful material advantage.'

Chomsky: There's a name for that in the international affairs literature; its called maintaining credibility. You have to carry out violent acts to maintain credibility, even if the issue is insignificant.

where are these crazy kids getting these wacky ideas from?