basilius ego sum

the god damn plane has crashed into the building

both ends

network effects, a friendster autopsy

House on the Hill live

religion

Newsbites

as good to watch as to hear

Titanic II

is the christian legacy worth fighting for?

Liberty or death

Phil has made it to Brazil! He has sailed from Belgium to Portugal to Spain to Morocco to the Canary Islands to Cape Verde and finally Recife.

The thoughtful thief

Bruce Reynolds, the brains behind the great train robbery and a fan of Jean Genet apparently has died. He reflected on his motivation, "We wanted to draw our line in the sand. I was quite young at the time and I liked the challenge. I wanted to move in those circles. It's insanity, of course, and we knew that we would be in the frame as soon as the robbery happened but it's the same madness, I suppose, that drives people to bivouac on the north face of the Eiger." His son was/is in the bank Alabama 3 of Soprano's theme tune fame.

Eco on the importance of lists

Geoff Dyer: Reader’s Block

From Stu

The morality of climate change

Unilateral redefined

From a few weeks back. Unilateral now means "on your 'own' (with the rest of the world but crucially except the US/Israel)"

Be afraid, be very afraid

Mike took this one

Sanctions not working?

It at first you don't succeed....

Blessed are the pragmatists

Newsbites

John Cleese on the art of creativity

John Cleese - unsurprisingly an adept public speaker - tells what he has learn about being creative. He says that he has found the work of Donald MacKinnon accords with his experience. I think MacKinnon's early work features in an Adam Curtis doc, something regarding his work for the OSS in the war. If anyone could tell me more, that would be great.

Legalise It

A letter to bob ainsworth, former defence and home office minister, who called for a review of drug legalisation.




Mr. Ainsworth

I nearly chocked on my Crunchy Nut reading of an MP stating the obvious truth about the failure of drug policy and the need for legalisation.

Drug addiction is a public health problem not a criminal justice matter.

People like to get loaded - visit ANY UK town centre on a Saturday night - and alcohol, more than any other drug, fuels violence, accidents and health problems. Alcohol is more toxic than heroin. Fact. You go cold turkey on heroin, it won't kill you. Cold turkey on alcohol, the increase in brain activity can cause a seizure that will kill you.

Should alcohol be banned? No.

Do healthy people want to kill themselves with drugs? No. They want to be healthy.

Damn you Bob Ainsworth for being defence secretary and presiding over needless murder and bloodshed - as Dylan said of the Masters of War "even Jesus could never forgive what you do." Come out against the war and maybe I'll take a more charitable view. You gotta admit its as pointless as the war on drugs - be honest with me as well as with yourself!

History will certainly judge you, and maybe karma/god/whatever will judge you too. You feel happy about that, given your complicity?

Damn you too for saying nothing when you were at the Home Office (I appreciate it would have been career suicide but Prof Nutt had the balls and you didn't).

BUT thank you for having the courage to say something and add your voice, and bring some publicity, to ending this stupid and pointless 'war on drugs' - a war which people on drugs appear to be winning (cf. Bill Hicks).

Luke 15:7

"Don't give up (coz you have friends)" Kate Bush

In solidarity


P.S. Change your Twitter pic - it makes you look like Hitler. Either your staffers (hello) are incompetent or are taking the piss.

Pooh Behr

i didn't think much of an article by raphael behr so i wrote and told him why. judge for yourself.


Mr. Behr

Please find below an email I sent to two of my friends, a teacher and an academic (an educational theorist), critical of your piece (linked at top).

I would be interested to hear you respond to these criticisms.

You expect this sort of thing in the Daily Mail but not in The Guardian surely?

Perhaps you were ill that day/struggling to meet the deadline/some other excuse but it really is a shockingly bad piece of work (in my opinion at least).


Mr. Behr's article can be found here.


"One history teacher explained to me how she had met her citizenship obligations by placing al-Qaida terrorism in the context of CIA support for Afghan mujahideen during the cold war. A 14-year-old pupil proved he had internalised this long view by explaining that, while the 9/11 and 7/7 terrorist attacks were bad, they were also, in a sense, "payback". A statutory duty to inculcate civic mindedness had somehow equipped British teenagers with a pseudo-jihadi notion of terrorist murder as historical quid pro quo."

This is hardly a controversial viewpoint. See here and here for instance.

The American helicopters that get shot down are being shot down with US manufactured missiles, given them by the CIA in order to to shoot down Soviet choppers during the Soviet occupation. The Afghan's don't have the capability to make such missiles!

Afghan resistance to US occupation is "terrorist murder" apparently, whilst drone attacks on wedding parties etc is "collateral damage" - based on "pseudo-imperialist notions", to borrow the author's idiom.

Both instances are "terrorist murder" or neither are - our author is, it appears, as ideological blinkered and idiotic (and fundamentalist) as the jihadis.

"our classrooms have become inadvertent laboratories in queasy liberal social engineering. Teachers are also supposed to instil such useful attributes as environmental consciousness, emotional candour and respect for racial and cultural diversity. Some of these goals are made explicit in the curriculum for children as young as two."

would be more accurately rendered as "our classrooms have become [actually remain] sterile laboratories involved in class reproduction, drilling students in passivity and quiescence in an effort to maintain the status quo, with a one-size-fits all curriculum - as if pupils were merely empty vessels into which 'facts' can be poured or drilled into bored students, in an effort to halt the fecundity of original thought, creativity and the pupils' natural curiousity that should make learning a joy for pupil and teacher."

He mocks the notions that "environmental consciousness, emotional candour and respect for racial and cultural diversity" are "useful attributes". Would he therefore prefer their opposites, "environmental contempt, the stiff upper lip and to consider darkies from the perspective of the 'white man's burden'"?

Nor can our over opinionated, intellectually flabby edu-kash-un correspondent spell "instill".

"Obesity epidemic? Teach children about healthy eating. Too much teenage pregnancy? More sex education." Encouraging the Billy Bunter generation to eat better (I can hear Jamie Oliver's sobbing anguish!) and perhaps exercise is clearly an insane Trotskyist proposal! Keeping children ignorant of sexual health matters, contraception etc IS the reason we have the highest teen pregnancy rate in the EU. Unlike the less prudish Dutch and Swedes for instance. It is a well documented fact that female education in the third world is THE most significant factor in reducing fertility rates - educated women have less children. This is also true in the UK (the number of births per mother in social-economic group A is lower than that in D and E).

"equipping children with "skills to learn" - what a ridiculous idea!

Reminds me of Gradgrind in Hard Times, "“NOW, what I want is, Facts. Teach these boys and girls nothing but Facts. Facts alone are wanted in life. Plant nothing else, and root out everything else. You can only form the minds of reasoning animals upon Facts: nothing else will ever be of any service to them. This is the principle on which I bring up my own children, and this is the principle on which I bring up these children. Stick to Facts, sir!”"

"Whatever adults know is old-fashioned, prejudiced and a barrier to learning instead of a precious commodity to be passed on." he says, setting up yet another absurd caricature - a straw man - that he can then knock down with a flourish of his vacuous erudition.

As Freire said -

"language is never neutral" - even the language of facts (a point particle physics agrees on - their are facts observation, no observation without an observer, no observer without a subjective factor. In this vein, Freire also talks about the importance of "naming the world" for oneself - since we cannot name the world (i.e. voice the facts as we see them) without saying something about how we wish and feel that the world should be.

Or, as the Bard put it, "Tis nothing good nor bad but thinking makes it so."

Also note that he regards knowledge as a "commodity" (precious or otherwise). A fetishistic attitude. If I were to be charitable in my interpretation of that last quote of his (allow me to try), I would guess that he is trying to say that "the thoughts and experiences of previous generations are surely of value to the next generation" - a statement that despite its transparent obviousness he is incapable of expressing clearly. "Commodity"! As if knowledge were to be bought or sold, merely water to be poured into an empty vessel.

Pot kettle black (what chutzpah!) -

"Frustratingly, he tends to give credence to anecdote and sensational news stories that support his account, but not to data"

There is not one piece of data in this article.

From the same author's review of Bush's new autobiography "Short-sighted and lacking any real depth or analysis [...] Bush portrays his decision-making as studiously pragmatic." Physician heal thyself!

It is a miracle that this man is able to find employment of any kind, let alone have a position as a critic whose flaccid opinion is distributed to some half a million of our better educated compatriots everyday.

Strangely his name is an anagram of "far abler he" - a piece of data I think we can dismiss.

As to whether Furedi's book consists of (anagram) "rare duff ink", in fairness to Furedi, it would be virtually impossible (and certainly unfair) to judge his book on the basis of this thoughtless drivel.

Our education system may well be, in the opinion of Furedi, Behr and myself (to use that foul phrase that is the parlance of our age) "not fit for purpose" (as does the OECD - despite ten years of increased spending) but this analysis takes us not one nano-step closer to understanding why or what might be done about it.

Unlike Senor Freire, who I think is nearer the mark with -

"Education either functions as an instrument which is used to facilitate integration of the younger generation into the logic of the present system and bring about conformity or it becomes the practice of freedom, the means by which men and women deal critically and creatively with reality and discover how to participate in the transformation of their world."

That's better! I've limbered up the writing muscle and got that off my chest. I just thought the link would be of interest to you but when I examined it closely, the sheer horror it induced needed to be exorcised.

I think I'll send this to him actually - an act of friendship, the giving of the truth. I want to hear him defend himself against these charges. It's not the man that offends me, simply what he says.

I think this is probably the most thoughtless article I've ever read in the Guardian. How he had the temerity (presumably) to accept payment for it I'll never know.

Mordechai Vanunu

Vanunu revealed details of his detention by writing on his hand: "Vanunu M was hijacked in Rome. ITL. 30.9.86, 21:00. Came to Rome by fly BA504."

Below is a letter I sent to the ever helpful Mike Fitzpatrick, the best constituency MP I've ever had:-

In summary, the man's detention was not via formal extradition (putting it more politely than the facts merit). He acted consciously and not for personal gain. He has served 18 years in prison, including 11 in solitary confinement. The court did not allow even censored extracts from the transcript of proceedings to be issued until 11 years after his 1988 conviction. The then head of Mossad, Shabtai Shavit, told ABC Australia's AM program that his murder had been actively contemplated.

Israel is not a signatory of the NPT but has nevertheless not been honest about its nuclear arsenal; despite Vanunu's revelations and former Prime Minister Olmert's tactit TV admission. This admission should be a bar to US financial assistance, as there is a Congressional bar on supporting countries who possess weapons of mass destruction (according to the bbc article linked above). This is of course not a matter for HMG itself but is nonetheless significant.

There is also evidence of Israel's involvement of WMD proliferation - an American academic claims to have classified documents showing that Israel tried to sell nuclear weapons to apartheid South Africa and may have been involved in that country's eventual production of nuclear weapons.

Ironically, in the same week Vanunu was jailed again, israel had the audacity to question Judge Goldstone's (of UN Gaza War report fame) apartheid record, despite their own complicity with the racist republic.

Vanunu's selflessness in speaking out, and the dogged determination he has shown in refusing to be silenced or to repent (as surely would you or I, if we are honest, simply to save our skins), make him one of the most outstanding men of conscious ever to have walked this earth. And like all other outstanding men of conscious (Jesus, Gandhi, Mandela etc) the temporal community has persecuted him but since it has not yet killed him, there is the chance for us to redeem ourselves by showing him some mercy, having already ruined his life.

Considering Israel's contempt for the international community, given both in its failure to sign the NPT and its possession of nuclear weapons nonetheless, as well as its forging of UK passports for its assassins in Dubai; it seems that HMG should not restrain itself in its criticism of the conditions under which Vanunu is restrained (upon his forthcoming release for breaching those same illegitimate release conditions). I note that the Scottish Government of Alex Salmond supports the lifting of his restrictions.

Like Mandela, Vanunu could have a lot to offer Israel and the world in promoting nuclear disarmament (South Africa remained the only country to have unilaterally disarmed - an example to Israel, the UK and all nuclear states - the NPT signatories amongst which have already agreed to Article VI's "good faith" efforts to this end).

This is clearly an unambiguously, common sense desirable situation for the world to be in. I don't want to see Israel or anywhere else threatening to use or being threatened by the use of nuclear weapons. Vanunu is not only an exemplary citizen of the world he is a loyal and patriotic Israeli; since Israel's interests, like those of all nations whatever they may think realpolitik dictates, lie not in war but in peace.

Mr. Fitzpatrick, I have been following your activities in Parliament and you are to be commended for your work on council housing and housing benefit (of particular interest to most of my fellow constituents) and also on TN (I was sorry to read of your condition) and the Ian Tomlinson debacle.

I hope you will also be able to assist with this matter. In an ideal world the FCO would grant him asylum and a passport, although I understand there are often legal issues with granting asylum to claimants outside the UK. There is good reason to believe that, were the travel restrictions on Vanunu lifted, a number of countries would grant him asylum on arrival.

Fraternal regards

"no connection between having a gun and shooting someone and not having a gun and not shooting someone"