WaPo on Murtha's airport

Hoare on the AKP

a sensible David Clark article

caught on yer bones

if you don't know the context i admit this will mean nowt, but this one gets me every time.

i love Dutch.

Oliver Kamm appropriately rubbishes Edward Herman's latest daft intervention into your cornflakes.

incidentally, one need hardly add, on the subject of the Rwandan genocide, Herman is a total disgrace.

call me on your way back home

Ryan Adams

god damn

high-powered Japanese business-person.

48.

married.

odd.

they don't seem to realise the seriousness of their position.

you want to kiss her, don't you?

punch him in the stomach.

if you get jammed up in the back, out there, you are in trouble

they will send bombs over

the children are in the fields

this woman is at the Lebanese Embassy.

she is in her 40s.

you are doing a stupid thing.

you are drunk.

you are putting your four comrades under enormous pressure.

think about what you are doing, son.

give it up

otherwise this will go badly for you

you have no choice

Those who ‘abjure’ violence can only do so because others are committing violence on their behalf

ABC (not) in Fiji: "total censorship"

Vim on Solzhenitsyn

stab at it with fingers

sent home from work sick, walking down Oxford Road in central Manchester once, a sozzled rough sleeper barged up to me and barged in to me, assuring me 'i'll have you, cunt'. (or such.)

this serves one right for killing that spider.

something is badly wrong here.

the people are here, and spirits are good.

the people are up in here.

Rome under Sulla was like a bus, with half the passengers trying to drive, and the rest trying to collect the fare.

- F E Adcock

do not speak of these things again.

Takashi Shimura (志村 喬) in Ikiru (生きる)

do not do that shower a favour again.

it is a sign of weakness.

they all despise us, anyway.

pink bedding plants.

Rüdiger Vogler and Hanns Zischler in Im Lauf der Zeit

looks like rain. miserable.

Bette Davis in The Letter

try not to cry.

Bruno Ganz in Der Amerikanische Freund

drink some water.

you know when you see an airplane sometimes - i don't mean any old airplane, i mean, you know, a passenger jet airliner - anyway, you see one, in the air, clearly having recently taken off from the angle it is curling up into the sky at.

well i don't mean now for any environmental reasons, i don't mean unease because you are - and you would be quite correct, good on you - concerned regarding the impact on the planet that this passenger jet airliner in your field of vision will have (if you have the ability of sight, to see is to have sight, by one reckoning, a common reckoning, and certainly correct), but for other reasons, well, say you see one, and you are near a fairly busy airport, so a minute or so later you might see another one, totally by accident, you just happen to look up at the right spot, you're not looking for them deliberately.

anyway, that happens sometimes, and sometimes it sends you under.

-

a link to an article at the Guardian website by Paul Collier dated Friday 3 April 2009, headed 'Beyond the begging bowl' and sub-headed 'Haiti need not be a failing state. Its problems are fixable if only the world community co-ordinates'

the almost flip manner, the cursory air, in which this blog describes crimes, violence, war, mangled body parts, tragedy, crimes, monstrous crimes, crimes at the behest of clean-shaved men in suits, or viciousness perpetrated at the behest of bearded men, bodies asunder, any rent, hellish crimes, all this blood, tragedies and errors, vile hell, the almost flip manner, the cursory air, must cease, or be modified.

When you see a swordsman, draw your sword. Do not recite poetry to one who is not a poet.

Chán proverb.

there was a letter to The Guardian a few weeks ago (here), from Marc Glendening, the campaign director at a body called ICCwatch.
the letter concerned the highly imperfect arrest warrant the International Criminal Court had issued for Sudanese president Omar al-Bashir, a warrant which certainly deserves criticism (though not on the grounds Glendening chose to pitch his tent).

ICCwatch state - on their website -

"ICCwatch exists to monitor and provide a critique of the International Criminal Court and the broader movement towards transnational governance.

The experience of the International Criminal Tribunal for Yugoslavia (ICTY), together with its Rwandan counterpart (ICTR), have left many real advocates of human rights, democracy and international peace extremely anxious concerning the activities of
the ICC."

the letter is of a piece with ICCwatch's raison d'être: fair play to them.

but contrast their approach with that of leading rights agency Human Rights Watch, who note - whilst acknowledging the many mistakes of the ICC to date, in a piece from last summer regarding the court's first five years - that "Since then, the ICC has made significant progress."

Glendening's letter (after some initial Westphalian guff that - completely inexcusably - totally neglects fundamental debates about the responsibility to protect) finishes with what is obviously supposed to be a stirring flourish, an at-first-glance-reasonable point regarding Robin Cook famously saying the court was not created to put powerful Anglo-American leaders in the dock.
(of course, given the UK is party to the court, it is possible a Prime Minister might one day be in the dock. pigs might fly, of course, but that is down to the fact there are many more worse leaderships - sadly - in the world than the British PM.)

there are important debates to be had about in particular the USA and international justice (they are not members of the ICC, for starters, and recall the disgraceful American carrying on after the ICJ's Nicaragua case, weakening the ICJ with their appalling antics), but to drag up a fairly useless aside about two other countries (and the USA is not party to the ICC, let's not forget; it should be, but it isn't at the moment) when the subject under discussion should be the Sudanese regime is disingenuous to say the least; does a discussion about Sudanese crimes not merit exclusivity?
(at this point Glendening should be congratulated for noting some of the other countries - including those paragons of virtue Russia and China - that, unfortunately, do not agree with the ICC.)

would a (hypothetical) indictment for the Chadian leadership on human rights abuse grounds need to be met with an ICCwatch letter to The Guardian about (the undoubted sins of) Françafrique?
a letter on the same subject, in the same link, from the Amnesty UK director, is entirely different in character, and all the better for it.

the truth of Glendening's project is laid bare in a shameful sentence in the middle of his letter: "It is revealing that the ICC does not list among its elastically drafted list of offences the supreme international crime of waging aggressive war."

no.

no, no, no.

this will not do.

the supreme (international) crime is, of course, genocide.

to state otherwise is a sin of omission, and a sin that needs to be loudly exposed and constantly rubbished for the muddle-headed cobblers it is.

(tbc, it should be added one can see what Glendening is getting at with his usage of "international" above - one state doing violence to another is deeply offensive to the order of state sovereignty, to say nothing more here - but the Westphalian underpinning of ICCwatch means that, for all sorts of implications that anybody sane should be able to work out for themselves, my characterisation stands as fair comment.)

Brian Barder helps to put a boot - i think deserved - in toward Dambisa Moyo.

(she has recently been in an interesting Standpoint piece with Richard Dowden.)

and more so

'ISAF Contributing Nations'

Kirsty Wark on BBC2's Newsnight - with reference to this awful law-in-waiting (a moral crime, because appalling outrage, in-waiting) - asking, if you scrape to the bones of her phrasing, does Afghanistan deserve the support (and, so, anyone living in Afghanistan) of other countries, and, so, thus unpicked, Kirsty Wark actually asking do the error-ridden efforts of ISAF and so on - with their often tragic blunders, but also fine successes worth lauding, and the names of each and every fallen human needing appropriate commemoration - need to be taken away because of this despicable law-in-waiting, Kirsty Wark - either devil's advocate or believing what she says - appearing to articulate that parts of Afghanistan be handed over, as it were, to some of the most extreme and barbarously reactionary forces on the planet because Kirsty Wark - yes, in common with anyone with a heart that functions correctly - is rightly disgusted with an ethical crime-in-waiting that is bad law.

(whilst acknowledging that food and pervasive, toxic corruption are fundamental issues.)

Joshua Foust.

"The crime here is not that a law is being passed to normalize a routine practice; it is that this was a routine practice and we chose not to care about it in the first place."

here in full.

about this time last year:

"Since the Taliban era, there are 8,000 more schools and 140,000 more teachers, he added.

About 70 percent of the girls and 97 percent of the boys in RC-East now have access to a state-sponsored education, as well as access to basic healthcare that has increased to nearly 80 percent, resulting in a 25 percent reduction in infant mortality, adding up to about 90,000 lives, Maj. Gen. Rodriguez said."

(source.)

presenter Seyi Rhodes went to Sierra Leone for series 2009 episode 4 of Unreported World to investigate the psychological after-effects of the war on some people.

Rhodes meets Patrick, who has memory problems.

the end credits rolled as the camera focused on a young person who had their head buried between their legs.
they were sat among some rocks.

jogging.

go jogging.

for this you need running shoes, trainers.

jogging.

going jogging.

buy some trainers.

go jogging.

The container carrying around 110 people, believed to be migrants, was found about 15 miles south of Quetta..."The death toll is 46," said a police official, Ghulam Dastagir.
:...
Survivor Nizar Ahmed, 15, told AFP from hospital that he came from...Paktia..."We have all come from Afghanistan and we were going to Iran," he said, without being able to explain why they were bound for the Islamic republic or when they left home.

-

I sit in the middle of them. Kune, to my right, speaks French. He speaks loudly and is keen on reporting his story. To my left, Bilal is whispering in English. He is shy and scared. When he finds out I am Italian, his face brightens and he starts naming the Italian soccer players he knows.

When Kune understands what Bilal is saying, he starts shaking his head and says: "les enfants…avec tous les problems il a, il pense au foot…"

systemic

fuck this for a laugh

How can I be sure that none of your jewelry contains conflict diamonds?

Do I know where the diamonds you sell come from?

Can I see a copy of your company's policy on conflict diamonds?

Can you show me a written guarantee from your diamond suppliers stating that your diamonds are conflict-free?

structural

the new

is

YOU ARE ALL FUCKERS

and to take this advice and learn to live with

the drinking of milk

DON'T be a crack addict

'for them to accuse is unthinkable'

get yer scrips

Ad Reinhardt - - > Bridget Riley

YOU KNOW, DON'T YOU, WE BELONG TO SOME FAMILY OF ARTISTS, SAME ONE, NOT CHINESE OR INDIAN OR JAPANESE OR ITALIAN, MAYBE MUSLIM, THAT NON-FIGURATIVE ARAB AND PERSIAN CROWD.

also to be clear

There! I have reverted to the Eliot lecture metaphor, but it seems peculiarly appropriate in this situation. Arendt jumps up and down on it at the safer edges of the pond. Kertész treads light where it is thinnest.

My Cousin went to a Walter Pater dinner party and all I got was this lousy 'Naomi Wolf LOLZ CATS' tee-shirt

When, as LS mentions, Virginia Woolf suggests in 1938 that it doesn't matter whether women support liberal democracy or fascism because middle class women like her are having such a dreadful time, I feel a rising hatred for her. Privileged and racist, I think. But then I reason she didn't know what was happening, how could she have known?

The fact is, I think the camps are now treated as an old horror story, something of a bore. Let us move on to other matters. By all means let us move on to other matters.

Arendt and Refugees.

In dealing a product of fine art we must become conscious that it is art rather than nature

- Kant

some highlights from the Mai '68 edition of Prospect (somedisco antecede)

Žižek
From the 1970s onwards, a new figure of the “spirit of capitalism” emerged: capitalism abandoned the hierarchical Fordist structure of the production process and developed a network-based form of organisation founded on employee initiative and autonomy in the workplace. Instead of the hierarchical chain of command, we get networks with a multitude of participants, organising work in the form of teams or projects, intent on customer satisfaction. In this way, capitalism is transformed into an egalitarian project

Astrid Proll (Baader-Meinhof)
We lived a kind of armed existentialism.

Rudi Bogni
1968 in Italy was more about hormonal growth than about politics. It brought us the Red Brigades, but not democratic maturity. I mistrusted from the outset a movement based on megaphones and one-liners.

P.J. O'Rourke
Mind-altering drugs were the best part of the 1960s.

"Defense officials said the Army troops inflicted heavy damages on the rebels as they put up resistance, adding that 19 bodies of LTTE fighters were found in subsequent search operations."

the poster who has put this up calls it One of the Greatest Scenes of The Sopranos.

damn right.

an instrumental of Xzibit's Paparazzi is the tune, and i must admit i was flashing on this when i saw Il Divo yesterday, which makes very effective usage of Fauré's Pavane at one stage

Bashar al-Assad.








































Il potere logora chi non ce l'ha.

- Giulio Andreotti

After supper she got out her book and learned me about Moses and the Bulrushers; and I was in a sweat to find out all about him; but by-and-by she let it out that Moses had been dead a considerable long time; so then I didn't care no more about him; because I don't take no stock in dead people.

happily, the following post at normblog mentions Richard Rorty, which immediately reminded me of Simon's post once on same and Manc outfit Raw-T.

unfortunately, the meat of the post is devoted to yet more parochial rubbish from another Simon, that man Jenkins.

this is President Obiang of Equatorial Guinea.

he is very good at his job.

his job is the projection and maintenance of power.

quivering with rage as one links to this, but over at the Swots Terry Glavin has found a bunch of extravagantly idiotic Fox News talking heads insulting the Canadian military, which just goes to show any amount of political abuse in the direction of Rupert Murdoch is entirely justified.

"Master Corporal Scott Francis Vernelli, 28, Corporal Tyler Crooks, 24, and an Afghan interpreter were killed and five others were injured as they walked through the dusty terrain. All of the Canadians were members of the same November Company.

The second blast occurred in the Shah Wali Kot district north of the city. Trooper Jack Bouthillier, 20, and Trooper Corey Joseph Hayes, 22, were killed when their vehicle struck an improvised explosive device. They were members of the Royal Canadian Dragoons."

odious garbage here.

truly superb Johann Hari article on Jade Goody

'Words of straightforward snobbish abuse – “chav” and “pikey” – were becoming acceptable again.'

A failed asylum-seeker who returned to Darfur under a government repatriation scheme has been murdered by Sudanese security officers after they followed him home from the airport in Khartoum, The Independent has learnt.

Adam Osman Mohammed, 32, was gunned down in his home in front of his wife and four-year-old son just days after arriving in his village in south Darfur.

The case is to be used by asylum campaigners to counter Home Office attempts to lift the ban on the removal and deportation to Sudan of failed asylum-seekers. Next month, government lawyers are expected to go to court to argue that it is safe to return as many as 3,000 people to Khartoum.

But lawyers for the campaigners will tell the Asylum and Immigration Tribunal that people who are returned to Sudan face imprisonment, torture and death. Mr Mohammed, a non-Arab Darfuri, came to Britain in 2005 seeking sanctuary from persecution in Sudan, where he said his life was in danger. The village where he was a farmer had been raided twice by the Janjaweed, the ethnic Arab militia, forcing him and his wife and child to flee their home.

His family in Britain told The Independent that Mr Mohammed witnessed many villagers being killed and became separated from his wife during a second attack on the village a few weeks later. He escaped to Chad before making his way to the UK in 2005.

But last year his appeal for asylum was finally turned down and he was told that he faced deportation. In August last year he was flown to Khartoum under the Home Office's assisted voluntary return programme, in which refugees are paid to go back to their country of origin. He stayed in Khartoum for a few months and then, when he believed it was safe, he travelled to Darfur to be reunited with his family.

Mohamed Elzaki Obubeker, Mr Mohammed's cousin and chairman of the Darfur Union in the UK, said: "The government security forces had followed him to another village, Calgoo, where his wife and child had sought help. They came to the village to find him and then targeted him. They shot him in front of his wife and son."

here in full.

a rare Australian bird

the actresses Alicia Witt (l) and Kelly Reilly (r)

"Moyles, for example, whose endless bloke-down-the-pub patter (and reluctance to play any actual music) normally irritates me no end, came across as genuinely funny and warmhearted, while Cheryl Cole continued her transition in the public's imagination from not-very-talented and quick-tempered reality show winner to beautiful-but-kindly big sister who can remain radiant at 15,000 feet. And who would have thought that 'our very own, the gorgeous Alesha Dixon' (copyright Brucie, 2008) had such a filthy cackle of a laugh?
...
At times, I wondered what had happened to the determination of those alternative comedians who set up Comic Relief, to do things differently: to raise money in a way that didn't objectify the recipients and instead saw them as active participants in achieving social justice."

Martin In The Margins on Comic Relief.

'Elders of Zion to Retire'

After a humiliating year left most of its financial holdings, as well as the entire civilized world, on the verge of collapse, the organization has re-defined its mission in terms of bridge games and making it to restaurants for the Early Bird Special.

here.

Hoare on Tudjman.

Magas on Tudjman.

If you look to the language in the above paragraph, you can see this same confusion continued and even extended, in that "insurgents" are described as more "sophisticated" because they get more vicious as the American presence becomes less noticeable. Wait: Wasn't the "insurgency" supposed to be a protest against occupation?

Hitchens with a point.

Mick Hartley: You Can't Just Hide a Million People

caught some of Party Animals again - been getting re-shown on the BBC, two years after they originally broadcast it - it's an 8 part drama serial focusing on a group of Labour and Tory researchers and prospective politicians, and two senior parliamentarians in Westminster.

(the cast includes Patrick Baladi as a senior Tory, Matt Smith as a Labour office assistant, and Shelley Conn as an ambitious young Tory.)

the end of the last episode had Stopfordian actor Andrew Buchan (he plays Smith's elder brother, he is a lobbyist) and the Geordie actress Andrea Riseborough (she is Smith's character's colleague, a Labour minister's intern; incidentally Riseborough is good in The Devil's Whore, Channel 4's atmospheric English Civil War drama) falling into bed together after doing coke in a pub bog, and there's a wonderful rather sexy moment as he's pumping away when she greedily sucks his thumb, telling him what they're doing is far better than their original idea for a nightcap (which was to go clubbing).

anyway Buchan meets his deceased father's mate, a seemingly principled (presumably Old, or Old-ish) Labour MP - we can reasonably infer this as the bloke is given a northern accent - in a pub and they are drinking pints (in fact Buchan drinks quite a lot of beer, both bottled and pint glasses) and have plates of what look like chips in front of them as they chew the fat.
later the MP tells Buchan his father would be ashamed that his son works as a lobbyist ("he would hang his head").
it's very realistic, i think, about evoking that particular element of that rather closed world of particular Westminster-area pubs where - among other denizens - bright young things drink beer that will surely one day enhance their waistline, and garble out fractured ideas at one another.

there's a section where Buchan's new client - a genuinely chilling Russian oligarch on the lam from Moscow - makes an implied threat to Buchan about something, and the lengths to which Buchan's character goes to watch his back are inventive, desperate, and all the while sound tracked by ale.

Buchan was in the ITV drama The Fixer (where he plays, er, a fixer) and from what i saw of that - less than a full episode, granted - he was convincing in it, and the show was decent.

"shot for going to work"

read this.

glad to see it provides a take-down of some disgracefully piss-poor Guardian journalism.

Osler on Scargill

Oliver Kamm re-iterates a very good, basic point in his final paragraph here

Karadzic not entering a plea is entirely expected.

One can not play games with entire regions and even with the world as a whole. I am abiding.

only when it involves the deliberate policy of massacring several thousand men and boys because you don't like them, eh Radovan.

open letter from Shalom Lappin to the Vice Chancellor of York University

"The BBC's Umaru Fofana at the court in Freetown said that as the verdicts were delivered, Sesay looked very serious and Kallon, clad in a smart light green suit, could have been mistaken for one of the lawyers, while Gbao buried his face in his hands and looked very dejected."

here.

the superb CAFÉ TURCO recently celebrated its first birthday, and yesterday there were these lovely pictures of cuties

Jim D has embedded an extraordinary 6 minute plus Youtube recorded on a phone at 5:30 am yesterday, Shift C, "yellow", from the BMW Mini Plant at Cowley.

his post has the apposite title of Agency workers treated like shit by BMW Oxford.

Workfare: Freud Flies Fast.

ModernityBlog has rounded up a couple of invaluable Guardian/Observer reports from northeastern Sri Lanka here.

the details are horrific.

i have been linking to normblog a lot of late but here's another one. whenever he mentions his mate Ian Holliday writing something, i always pay attention as Holliday talks sense.

it's going on about the Rohingya boat people, and the entire post is worth reading in full, not least because the final line from Geras himself is masterly in terms of controlled anger making a point far more impressively than any amount of swearing rants from pie-eyed pub tub-thumpers such as myself.

the latest from Hitchens (click here to visit) at Slate is about Zimbabwe - he is nothing if not a reactive writer in the best sense - and there's some reaching going on, but what i wanted to do is quote the final paragraph in full, as he makes a connection that i think one rarely sees from big name writers and journalists in the every day press.

I once spent some time with Sebastiao Salgado, the UNICEF special envoy for the eradication of polio. By 2001, when we visited Calcutta and other parts of Bengal, this horrible and preventable illness was well on its way to joining smallpox as a thing of the past. But if only a few pockets resist inoculation, the malady, which is almost insanely infectious, comes roaring back across wide swaths of neighboring territory. And in certain militant Muslim areas, where it is believed that the inoculation is a plot to make people sterile, the doctors and nurses of the campaign have been shot as imperialist intruders. As a result, polio is spreading again. Once more, it seems to me that this could qualify the Federally Administered Tribal Areas of Pakistan as having, to that extent, become an international responsibility rather than just the concern of Pakistan alone. The fact that the Taliban and al-Qaida spread from the same source may not be entirely coincidental, which is why I offer the thought that human rights and epidemiology may be natural partners [my emphasis] —and that Zimbabwe could make an excellent laboratory in which to test the proposition that the two kinds of health are related.

Hitchens is obviously correct and should be thanked for pointing out the fundamental link between epidemiology and the study of rights.

The analysis of famine as a social experience rather than a technical malfunction is the foundation of the case for politicizing famine.
- Alex de Waal, in the 2004 preface to that revised Famine that kills of his.

also in the preface, he references Nutrition matters: People, food and famine (Helen Young and Susanne Jaspars, 1995).

again, this is another paragraph worth quoting in full.

Famine that kills became perhaps best known for its strong claims about the epidemiology of excess mortality in famine. The finding that infectious diseases were the principal cause of famine mortality was nothing new, and in retrospect it is astonishing that such an elementary fact of disaster epidemiology should have caused such a stir. There is no doubt that the position that I argued is too strong. The striking and unexpected finding that socio-economic indicators had almost no correlation with mortality levels led me to search for an alternative explanation, which I duly found in the health crisis model. This residual hypothesis was then forwarded, perhaps not cautiously enough. There are so many intermediate variables between income and food access and the nutritional status of children that the inference that nutritional factors played almost no role cannot be sustained by the data. As Helen Young and Susanne Jaspars subsequently pointed out, nutrition matters (1995). For good measure, they derived their data from Darfur. I stand corrected. But my chief point, that food consumption failures cannot account for famine mortality in the absence of analysis of disease, is correct. And the practical recommendation that measles immunization, malaria control and clean water supplies are at least as important as emergency food relief, still stands.

the Tigers have now denied responsibility for the attack attributed to them on Monday, through TamilNet.

so after the alleged suicide bomb blast on Monday near Vishwamadu that was initially reported to have killed 28 people (though DefenceWire quoted an updated toll of 32 people by Monday night), Reuters is today reporting that Sri Lanka's Tamil Tigers on Wednesday denied gunning down civilians streaming out of the country's war zone, and the Red Cross said 16 patients had been killed in shelling.
(also, that Reuters article says 29 people were killed in the Monday attack.)

note, then, that the LTTE - through TamilNet - deny the death by shooting of 19 civilians.
the TamilNet response to Monday's alleged bomb blast was however, perhaps, not entirely believable.

as - it looks likely - the LTTE is staring a conventional military defeat in the face (the BBC is including that map in all its reports: there's a Red Cross spokesperson clip embedded there - nice to hear a union mentioned!), the grim assessment being made all over is that insurgency tactics (in the contemporary sense of that ugly word) are sure to increase.

from the view of the Tigers, who must have suffered many casualties in recent months, their storied martyrdom culture must be looking most attractive for a brush-off from the perspective of the leadership.

added to this a rigid, abusive govt. currently rejecting ceasefire calls ('must get the job done'), the immediate outlook seems as bad as it's been for a long time, in terms of the impact of this fighting on the people, the cruelty of the miserable, massive displacements, the shutting down of freedoms and active persecution from the govt. and the prospects for an upturn in those wicked martyr operations.

i was watching Masterchef earlier (one of my favourite telly) and there was a Metropolitan Police London Transport cop in one of the heats and he was a nervous guy when cooking, and he admitted he was getting a bit stressed.
the look on his face when he didn't make the cut, it really was heart-breaking, i felt so sorry for him.

(i mean, you always feel sorry for the people that don't make the cut i am sure, but this chap just looked so pained, i felt so sorry for him.)

some great food in tonight's show, as ever.

Q: Why is there so much ignorance and hatred in the world?

A: Because of the Jews.

nicked from swears from the Dissensus jokes thread

this all reminds me of an excellent post from Norm Geras a few years ago which he entitled Shoah business, taking aim at the stupid, monumentally wrong and pernicious idea that some fools like to peddle about the oppressive weight of that tedious 'Holocaust industry'.

you should really read it all by clicking here, but the concluding paragraph is entirely correct.

Yes, a people who lost a third of their number, and two-thirds of their number within Europe, have a certain understandable (remember that word?) preoccupation with the experience, and many minds, not all of them Jewish, have found in the experience matter meriting close study as well as other types of reflection. Much has been produced, much learned, a certain amount obfuscated; good work has stood alongside bad and indifferent work. That's all. 'Holocaust industry' is base mockery of a vast human tragedy and the response to it. It's worthy of Norman Finkelstein, and unworthy of Michael Burleigh.

the following really grabbed me from the start of that piece.

Among these is a Lefebvrist "bishop" named Richard Williamson, who doubts his own version of the facts of the Nazi Holocaust and who furthermore suspects the Bush administration of having orchestrated the events of September 11, 2001, in order to afford itself a pretext for war.

Richard Williamson, twice over.

politically speaking, i wish you extreme ill.

As with Cardinal Bernard Law, the enabler of child-molestation, who is now sheltered by Rome and who was able to vote in the election of Ratzinger as pope, so with those who slander the Jews with innuendo and worse, and who spread the vile libels that blame the democratic United States for the theocratic terrorist attacks upon it. One might think a responsible church would be indignantly arraigning and expelling such people rather than piously seeking reconciliation with them. Apparently, one would be wrong.

Hitchens.

in short, the Pope doesn't seem to have too much of an issue with homophobes and anti-semites.

Erwin James on a John Martyn prison gig.

(via the fabulous Shuggy.)

Dissent re. John Updike, here.

good words about the changing role of the public writer, criticism, and a nice finish about Rabbit, Everyman.

Of the Farm: like the sound of this "peerless novella"

the stuff about comfortable married sex reminded me of Ian McEwan who does a very fine job of evoking this, briefly, in Saturday.

Honesty is the best policy.

The Sri Lankan government has told civilians to leave an area where it is fighting Tamil Tiger rebels, saying it cannot guarantee their safety.

The shells, which fell into the pediatrics and women's wards other than a kitchen and a chapel, killed nine patients and wounded 20, Red Cross spokeswoman Sarasi Wijeratne said.