Mega-rich Formula One showman Bernie Ecclestone is describing the situation in Bahrain as peaceful ahead of the forthcoming F1 race there.

Earlier today BBC security correspondent Frank Gardner reported on what appears to be disturbing new footage of Bahraini police targeting and ransacking a Shia-owned shop.

Perhaps Bernie should read this report from Physicians for Human Rights, which documents '34 reported tear-gas-related deaths in Bahrain since the uprising began a year ago.'

He is 100% right in one important sense, of course.

But what he elides in his remarks are a universe of human suffering and voices.

There can be no friendship between the brave and the effeminate. We are regarded as a cowardly people. If we want to become free from that reproach, we should learn the use of arms.

- Gandhi, 1918

I believe that it could be cut through and made into an island in two days. I do not think this is necessary, however, for these people are very unskilled in arms.

- Christoffa Corombo, son of a weaver from Genoa

The politicians want us to live in 1992, but I don't want to live in 1992.

'Bosnian war 20 years on: peace holds but conflict continues to haunt'

As one respondent put it, 'You have to be twice as good as the men.'

- Gill Dunne, 1996

We do know, finally, what "water-boarding" is, though it is not clear what version of this torture the Americans are applying. There is, for example, the version French policemen and soldiers used on prisoners during the Algerian War, as in this account from Bechir Boumaza, a thirty-one-year-old Algerian interrogated in Paris in 1958:

I was taken off the bar [on which he had been hung and subjected to electric torture] and my guards started their football again [beating and kicking him], perhaps for a quarter hour. Then they led me, still naked and blindfolded, into a neighbouring room on the same floor. I heard: "We'll have to kill him, the bastard." ...dirty water and urine, probably...
From time to time one of them would sit on my back and bear down on my thighs. I could hear the water I threw up fall back into the basin.

[...]

The Latin American version, called el submarino, uses a wooden table, an oil drum filled with water, and a set of hooks...as a Uruguayan army interrogator put it, "There is something more terrifying than pain, and that is the inability to breathe."

- Mark Danner, 2004

i really like how David Wearing nails Vince Cable in this tweet here.

The chutzpah of Cable. Supports most regressive economic policies in decades, then poses as voice of enlightened reason

“If you keep teaching here, you are going to die and we won’t be responsible for your death.”

All nationalisms are gendered, all are invented, and all are dangerous - dangerous, not in Eric Hobsbawm's sense as having to be opposed, but in the sense of representing relations to political power and to the technologies of violence.

- Anne McClintock

Why don’t you tackle directly the excessive rents being charged by private landlords rather than making tenants the victim?

- Tony Blair MP, 1995

There’s a building in the Cayman Islands that houses supposedly 12,000 US corporations. That’s either the biggest building in the world or the biggest tax scam in the world.

- Barack Obama

The field of vision has always seemed to me comparable to the ground of an archaeological excavation.

- Paul Virilio

Mr Jozef Smole, the head of the Slovene Socialist Alliance, accused Mr Milosevic of 'pouring manure' on Slovenia in a speech that portended a Serbian 'crusade' against the northern republic, widely viewed as the most liberal part of the country. 'I am deeply offended,' said Mr Smole. 'One would not expect the president of Serbia to lower himself to such slander.'

- Ian Traynor from Vienna, in The Guardian, 25th May, 1989

'Out of Afghanistan: incredible stories of the boys who walked to Europe'

devastating - here

It is undeniable, however, that foreign influence in the forms of militarism and tourism has played a very prominent role during the past few decades in making prostitution a prominent industry in Thailand.

- Sinith Sittirak

---

"It's the last place in the world where you can still be a white man"

(German bar owner resident in Thailand.)

Mr Corbett disclaimed having started anything new. The sanctuary movement had been around for more than 3,000 years, he said, strengthening or fading according to the demands of the time. As the countries south of the United States border have become less brutal, the movement has faded. In Europe, the widespread hostility to those seeking asylum from countries as far away as China and Afghanistan has touched some consciences, perhaps presaging another sanctuary movement. But a new Jim Corbett has yet to emerge to speak of the unity of humanity and such unpopular themes.

(via and).

Gëzuar Ditëlindjen!

now you are four

Class war in Britain, 2012.

To live in Westminster is a privilege, not a right

(via CH.)

Evening 11th April, 2003:

a pair of RAF CH47 Chinook helicopters swept over Iraq's western desert towards a remote rendezvous point beside Route 10, the highway that begins life on the outskirts of Baghdad before running for mile after mile towards the border with Jordan...The helicopter crews had been told that a number of detainees were under armed guard at the side of the highway. They were to pick them up after dark and take them to a prison camp. What followed was far from routine: before the night was out, one man had died on board one of the helicopters, allegedly beaten to death by RAF personnel.

[...]

By the time the helicopters had reached their destination, two of the prisoners "were found to be unresponsive", according to the squadron leader, while "there was some commotion at the front of the aircraft" because a third prisoner, a disabled man, had somehow parted company with both his prosthetic legs.

here.

Once upon a time there was a river which flowed into another river which one day men would call the Rhine. But in those days there were no men, no names and no North Sea and no island called Great Britain and the only beings who knew this river which flowed into the nameless Rhine were the fishes which swam up and down it

- Graham Swift, 15. About the Ouse, 'Waterland'

The last speaker of an ancient language in India's Andaman Islands has died at the age of about 85, a leading linguist has told the BBC.
The death of the woman, Boa Senior, was highly significant because one of the world's oldest languages, Bo, had come to an end, Professor Anvita Abbi said.
She said that India had lost an irreplaceable part of its heritage.

about two years gone

chasing the wrong priority

Back to front: Jennifer Rubin in the WaPo with her appending of Polisario and Western Sahara to a laundry list of Islamist grievance.

obviously, what else should we expect from Rubin? fair rejoinder. i have no answer.

a quote from her own column, though, lights the way.

i mean, really.

He warns: “No. 1 is the humanitarian issue.And No. 2 is the national security issue,”

here we are.

He warns: “No. 1 is the humanitarian issue.And No. 2 is the national security issue,”

fixed that for ya.

also: Polisario bundled with AQIM.

yeah?

i mean.

Andrew Lebovich: "Ask yourself why only b-siders and Rubin talk so much abt the Polisario and terrorism in North Africa"

harsh employer employee relations (coercion, punitive) in the informal economy

in the wider setting of racialised structural inequality *

(see chapter 4 of Sen's Development as Freedom for discussion of the higher death rates for African-Americans over white Americans, adjusted for income factors, and certainly not just in the category of violent deaths of young males, but all men and women, "more explanation is needed than violent deaths can provide".)

great scene



technical side-note: in the question of British and Irish actors enjoying major roles in The Wire the American accent that Idris Elba (above) takes off is some way better than that of Dominic West's plod McNulty, or Aidan Gillen's city pol Tommy Carcetti

* this would be news to Newt Gingrich, who completely elides structural racialised inequality and deprivation in his native USA in his analyses of individuals and the market

one current obsession. (appropriate to pathologise ardent pre-occupations with 'obsessive'? flip side: aged 32, grow up and find that measured middle ground? flip flip side: stop constructing deliberate binaries you cheap cunt, the stock-in-trade of the water cooler pseud. this all in inverted commas, right?)

anyway.

opening 40 seconds or so of this track from the American band Tennis (in particular, though the song in general hits me in the mush), from their 2011 album Cape Dory; this is the title track.

pregnant possibility, wonderful guitar lines of Patrick Riley augmenting Alaina Moore's language of promise and intent, anchoring everything as she forms worlds, then along comes James Barone, fuller this time, to his kit, love it love it love it.

Wiki: (with bibliography)

King Philip's War, sometimes called the First Indian War, Metacom's War, Metacomet's War, or Metacom's Rebellion, was an armed conflict between Native American inhabitants of present-day southern New England and English colonists and their Native American allies in 1675–76. The war is named after the main leader of the Native American side, Metacomet, known to the English as "King Philip"

[...]

According to a combined estimate of loss of life in Schultz and Tougias' King Philip's War, The History and Legacy of America's Forgotten Conflict (based on sources from the Department of Defense, the Bureau of Census, and the work of colonial historian Francis Jennings), 600 out of the about 80,000 English colonists (1.5%) and 3,000 out of 10,000 Native Americans (30%) lost their lives due to the war.

There was a little city, and few men within it; and there came a great king against it, and besieged it, and built great bulwarks against it;

Now there was found in it a poor wise man, and he by his wisdom delivered the city; yet no man remembered that same poor man. Then said I, Wisdom is better than strength: nevertheless the poor man's wisdom is despised, and his words are not heard.

- Ecclesiastes 9: 14-16

The settler's town is a strongly-built town, all made of stone and steel. It is a brightly-lit town; the streets are covered with asphalt, and the garbage-cans swallow all the leavings, unseen, unknown and hardly thought about.
The settler's feet are never visible, except perhaps in the sea; but there you've never close enough to see them. His feet are protected by strong shoes although the streets of his town are clean and even, with no holes or stones.
The settler's town is a well-fed town, an easy-going town; its belly is always full of good things. The settler's town is a town of white people, of foreigners.

The town belonging to the colonized people, or at least the native town, the Negro village, the medina, the reservation, is a place of ill fame, peopled by men of evil repute. They are born there, it matters little where or how; they die there, it matters not where, nor how. It is a world without spaciousness; men live there on top of each other, and their huts are built one on top of the other.
The native town is a hungry town, starved of bread, of meat, of shoes, of coal, of light. The native town is a crouching village, a town on its knees, a town wallowing in the mire. It is a town of n*****s and dirty arabs.

- Frantz Fanon, 1961

whatever happens, we have got
the Maxim gun, and they have not

We have left undone those things which we ought to have done,
And we have done those things which we ought not to have done,
And there is no health in us.

- The Book of Common Prayer

Fishing Season
1st February - 30th September
Temporary start 1st March

River Dee known for its quantity of fish, not necessarily for their size

The River Dee rises in the Cairngorms, it has a catchment area of 825 sq miles,
is 90 miles in length which makes it the 6th largest river in Scotland

What the eye does not see, the heart does not grieve about

River Tweed is the second largest river in Scotland.

It has a drainage area of 1,925 square miles, and a course of nearly 100 miles.

Fishing Season
1st February - 30th November

FROM THE MOMENT I HEARD about Bidder #70 raising his paddle inside a BLM auction to outbid oil and gas companies in the leasing of Utah’s public lands, I recognized Tim DeChristopher as a brave, creative citizen-activist. That was on December 19, 2008, in Salt Lake City. Since that moment, Tim has become a thoughtful, dynamic leader of his generation in the climate change movement. While many of us talk about the importance of democracy, Tim has put his body on the line and is now paying the consequences.

here

(via.)

General Suharto and his successors built fortunes from West Papuan rainforest timber concessions and mineral resource wealth, operating a network of enterprises of no benefit to the local population. The security forces justify their presence, and benefit financially, from a continuation of hostilities.

re-up and a broadcast over a year old now, but the Radio 4 programme Cambodia: Country for Sale is apposite listening set alongside the post here yesterday

The Ethiopian government under its “villagization” program is forcibly relocating approximately 70,000 indigenous people from the western Gambella region to new villages that lack adequate food, farmland, healthcare, and educational facilities...State security forces have repeatedly threatened, assaulted, and arbitrarily arrested villagers who resist the transfers.

[...]

The villagization program is taking place in areas where significant land investment is planned or occurring. The Ethiopian government has consistently denied that the resettlement of people in Gambella is connected to the leasing of large areas of land for commercial agriculture, but villagers have been told by government officials that this is an underlying reason for their displacement. Former local government officials confirmed these allegations to Human Rights Watch.

One farmer told Human Rights Watch that during the government’s initial meeting with his village, government officials told them: “We will invite investors who will grow cash crops. You do not use the land well. It is lying idle.”

[...]

From 2008 through January 2011, Ethiopia leased out at least 3.6 million hectares of land, an area the size of the Netherlands. An additional 2.1 million hectares of land is available through the federal government’s land bank for agricultural investment. In Gambella, 42 percent of the total land area is either being marketed for lease to investors or has already been awarded to investors, according to government figures. Many of the areas that have been moved for villagization are within areas slated for commercial agricultural investment.

“The government is killing our people through starvation and hunger. It is better to attack us in one place than just waiting here together to die. If you attack us, some of us could run, and some could survive. But this, we are dying here with our children. Government workers get this salary, but we are just waiting here for death.”
–Elder in recently relocated village, Abobo woreda, May 2011

“There is a psychological impact on children. No learning is happening. There was a school in the old village, here there is none. No one is going to school now, as they are afraid. Who will protect them going to the old village? Even the children themselves are refusing to go.”
–Anuak woman from new village discussing the lack of promised school in Abobo woreda, May 2011

---

(re: land, see also)

Stop and search 'racial profiling' by police on the increase, claims study
Analysis shows that black people are now 30 times more likely to be stopped by the police than white people























Police perform a stop and search procedure on a group of young people in London.
Photograph: Jason Alden / Rex Features

fucking days

you know when you realise about something?

and someone points that out, and then you realise?

yeah, that.

they stopped it

since he has been in power in Rwanda, Kagame has been responsible for many abuses.

that is fact.

(Rwanda may actually even be responsible for genocide - or crimes approaching the threshold of genocide - in the neighbouring DRC.)

however, none of this changes the central fact of the genocide in Rwanda in 1994, and who is to blame for the genocide; granted, you do get fruitloops attempting to totally invert what happened there, usually for their own agenda, which has nothing to do with the people of Rwanda.

referencing the latest report into the matter (there have been others), earlier today Oliver tweeted a very, very important point to remember.

Remember: the genocide was a Hutu Power plot and the RPF did not start it, they stopped it, and no one else was going to do that.

"they stopped it, and no else was going to do that".

that is the central point.

it is how the Rwandan genocide was stopped when it was stopped, instead of continuing until it stopped.

this is the central point.

it is the only point.

and no else was going to do that

A further 800,000 homes will be put out of reach of people on housing benefit because of government welfare cuts – leaving low income families the choice of cutting spending on food to pay the rent or moving out, according to a study by housing experts.

[...]

It is unlikely that the poor will be able migrate to cheaper parts of the capital: in Newham, east London, there will be twice as many claimants as there are low-cost homes. In Croydon, 17,000 people will be chasing 10,000 properties.

The effect will be felt not just in south-east England. Before today, Birmingham had more than 37,000 homes with rents affordable on welfare. Now 34,500 housing benefit claimants will be chasing 23,000 low-cost houses, according to the analysis, carried out for the Guardian. On the Mersey, 21,000 people collecting local housing allowance will only be able to afford 12,000 homes in Liverpool.

Because welfare is set at Westminster, the cuts will also be felt in Scotland. In Glasgow there will be a thousand more benefit recipients than there are properties which can be rented with the government's reduced housing subsidy.

Class war in Britain in 2012.

The World Bank's annual development reports are marked with much media hoopla, but have no direct policy implications.

- David Moore, 1999

'Bahrain Special: Identifying The Tear Gas Companies Who Profit While Bahrainis Suffer and Die'

(via and.)

The Elizabethan legislation was intended to help the 'settled' poor who found themselves out of work (for example) because of illness, or during a hard winter or a trade depression. It was assumed that these people would accept whatever work or relief the parish offered, whether that was indoor or outdoor relief. Neither method of assistance was seen as punitive or harsh. It was intended to deter or deal with the 'sturdy beggars' who were roaming the roads, robbing travellers and generally posing a threat to civil order. The increase in the numbers of beggars was probably the historical background to the nursery rhyme

Hark! Hark! The dogs do bark!
The beggars are coming to town:
Some in rags, some in tags
And one in a velvet gown

The 1601 Elizabethan Poor Law

2011





- I Know Something About Love :
group show with Shirin Neshat, Christodoulos Panayiotou, Yinka Shonibare and Yang Fudong,
Parasol unit

- L and i had problems with how in Neshat's video on forbidden love (snatched glances across Iranian prayer rooms, women firmly in a post-Revolution cage) the woman was fairly heavily made up beneath her cloths, and the bloke was a bit of a conventional oil painting, foregrounded in a sea of anonymous, unadorned faces *, but the cumulative effect of that, of Yang's inquiring video as young Chinese brazenly discuss their relationships, of Shonibare's (admittedly well-worked, if one-trick **) texture-heavy riff on Rococo France that had you scampering around a delicious trellis maze, all the while as elsewhere the slow dance marathon Cypriots in Panayiotou's video charmed pants off bemused viewers, was certainly enough.

(incidentally - the garden and pond at the back of Parasol Unit lovely.)

* is this a 'correct' response? who knows?

** this was more of a problem for the experienced L than myself, given i was popping my Shonibare cherry







Anselm Kiefer: Des Meeres und der Liebe Wellen, White Cube Hoxton Square - signature gigantic seascapes (everything comes from there) that battered faculties into submission; could have stayed beaten for days







- Chantal Joffe, Victoria Miro - portraits to push it forward

- Richard Long and Giuseppe Penone, Haunch of Venison - the complementarity of both (love 'em both, never seen 'em together before)

- Twombly and Poussin: Arcadian Painters, Dulwich Picture Gallery - all of this made sense



Look11 Photography Festival (website), Liverpool, various venues

(including that fabulous resource the Contemporary Urban Centre on Greenland Street, and the splendid Blue Coat School)

- what to mention in scraps? Paul Graham's portraits of Thatcherite dole offices, Mohamed Bourouissa's staged neo-classical-like banlieue series Peripheriques, the group show Collateral Damage, with the likes of Tim Hetherington (RIP), horribly clear-eyed in Sierra Leone, the bedrooms of young American soldiers KIA, preserved in time by grieving parents, documents of American bases worldwide, dry schematic presentations, Edmund Clark's incredibly distressing series from Gitmo, Dornith Doherty photographing seed banks, Juergen Chill’s mundane German prisons: lots and lots of containerisation, confinement benign and otherwise

(quite literally for attendants of the off-off site installations of TRANSITION: fine work - Ciara Leeming on representations and "what it means to be a Gypsy/Traveller in the UK in the 21st century", or listen to Gary Tack here This piece is a kind of photo essay of my old city's attempt at transition architecturally, socially and economically with this theme running throughout the image. It is a reminder to the viewer that Liverpool was and remains, fundamentally, a working class city that is now dysfunctional. It’s original reasons for existence have been lost and the still extant historical attitudes of its mainly working class inhabitants remain despite their urban identity being lost because of the changes forced upon them - pasted on to shipping containers; being locked inside those not something to be forgotten in a hurry)

- Bridget Riley: Paintings and Related Work, National Gallery's Sunley Room - fundamental

(the work displayed from when she was a teen - her van Eyck copy of his Man in a Red Turban, which was news to me - felt like being on the precipice of a paradigm shift, but then you realised it already happened; does this hymning mean genius > scenius? hrm. wind-flecked Cornish coastal grasses, Egyptian blue, Ad Reinhardt, you know ALL THAT CROWD)

- Eyewitness: Hungarian Photography in the 20th Century, Royal Academy - it will suffice to list names: Brassaï, Capa, Kertész, Moholy-Nagy, Munkácsi.

"Others, such as Károly Escher, Rudolf Balogh and Jószef Pécsi".

peerless.



- Modern British Sculpture, Royal Academy - the curating was deliberately all over the shop; hence i thought 'fucking brilliant'

Mr Stewart says the project is largely designed to bring scripture alive, but it also has another important function - to rescue patois from its second-class status in Jamaica and to enshrine it as a national language.

---

their verbal communication is demeaned as vernacular chatter on this side but elevated as linguistic discourse on the other

- Mamdani, 1996.

wow.

that's quite the headline from the London Daily Mail.

Can movement be captured in art?

Deborah Bull: For a dancer to look at a picture of a dancer is to experience the sensation of movement

What can we learn from the changing physique of the dancer since Degas' time?

DB: Dancers tend to reflect the ideal of womanhood of the times.

and in some of my other favourites from this year, Mike Skinner's mix for FACT (link) has cracking selections all the way through, but i especially appreciate at the end a jungle do-over of Bjork that finishes beautifully, bringing the melancholic 4am come down to you, switching into the shimmering, gorgeous build-up of corking Canadian prog house, that and perhaps how he goes into Jean Jacques Smoothie near the start

here's Natalie Shaw's tracks of 2011 (Spotify link)

The approach of entitlements used in this work is very general and - I would argue - quite inescapable in analysing starvation and poverty. If, nevertheless, it appears odd and unusual, this can be because of the hold of the tradition of thinking in terms of what exists rather than in terms of who can command what. The mesmering simplicity of focusing on the ratio of food to population has persistently played an obscuring role over centuries, and continues to plague policy discussions today much as it has deranged anti-famine policies in the past.

- Amartya Sen, 1982

Royal Dutch Shell wishes the Niger Delta Merry Christmas in their own inimitable way

Egyptians raise their voices

(photo: Mohamed Omar for epa)

HRW: 'This 52-page report documents the effect of the Beason-Hammon Alabama Taxpayer Citizen and Protection Act, commonly known as HB 56, on unauthorized immigrants and their families, as well as the larger Alabama communities in which they live. It is based in part on first-hand accounts by 57 Alabama residents, including citizens and permanent residents, who reported abuse or discrimination under the law.'

a real fucking cunt of a bill.

from the courageous and invaluable Bahrain Center for Human Rights

Police in Bahrain on Sunday fired tear gas at thousands of demonstrators chanting anti-government slogans after the funeral of an elderly man who witnesses say died from tear gas inhalation.

The unrest Sunday is the fourth straight day of clashes between opposition supporters and security forces along a main highway west of the Bahraini capital Manama. At least 40 people have been killed since February, when Bahrain's Shiite majority started campaigning for more rights from Sunni rulers in the Gulf kingdom that is the home of the U.S. Navy's 5th Fleet.

Amir al-Mouali said his 73-year-old neighbor, Abdulali Ali Ahmed, was taken to a hospital Saturday morning after struggling to breath during a night of heavy clashes near his home along the Budaiya highway, which connects a string of Shiite villages west of Manama. Al-Mouali said Ahmed died Saturday evening.

In a statement Sunday, Bahrain's Interior Ministry said Ahmed died of natural causes.

- AP.

Bahraini security forces use tear gas made in the USA, France and Brazil.

can you have a dialogue with tear gas?

Where does this road begin? Where does it end? [Dhorai] doesn't know. Perhaps no one knows.
Some of the carts are loaded with maize, others bring plaintiffs to the district court, still others carry patients to the hospital.

- 'Dhorai charitmanas', Satinath Bhaduri

London schoolchildren among those taking to the streets to protest the likely rigged election in the DRC and general lack of outside interest in Congolese woes (this precisely aligns with the international community's systematic plundering of Congolese treasure, naturally),

earlier this month.

i hadn't followed what UK press coverage of these hugely under-reported protests there has been, but apparently what few items have tended to crop up in the UK media have focused on London tourists being inconvenienced (maybe some Christmas shoppers too, i daresay! heavens), which is both absolutely sickening and, of course, not a surprise in the slightest when you take into account the (for the most part) ridiculous shower that passes for an enquiring press in the UK

networks

neoliberalism

neoliberal networks

Intensive globalization has been created largely by law firms and more specialised financial services. As a process it can be interpreted as indicating globalization's origins in mid-twentieth century Americanization. As an outcome it can be interpreted as a continuing core of the globalization process.

Extensive globalization has been created largely by accountancy and advertising firms. As a process it can be interpreted as the diffusion of globalization from its Americanization origins. As an outcome it can be interpreted as the worldwide incorporation of cities into globalization.

see

Hitchens concludes the essay with the observation that even as he was writing the article, he noticed a full-page advertisement from CAMERA [Committee for Accuracy in Middle East Reporting in America], which said:

In 1948, on the day of the proclamation of the State of Israel, five Arab armies invaded the new country from all sides. In frightful radio broadcasts, they urged the Arabs living there to leave, so that the invading armies could operate without interference.

Hitchens says he wrote to CAMERA on 20 February 1987, asking for an authenticated case of such a broadcast. He did not receive any reply. And he concludes with a prediction:

Even though nobody has ever testified to having heard them, and even though no record of their transmission has ever been found, we shall hear of these orders and broadcasts again and again.

Reynolds on the maximal nation - for Pitchfork no less

Barbed wire and burnt-out vehicles, trucks laden with logs splayed across the roads, stone-throwing mobs and panicking international peacekeepers cowering behind their riot shields. The Balkan checkpoint, wearily familiar from the Yugoslav wars of the 1990s, is back.

In an attempt to keep a little swath of Kosovo Serbian, Serbs have cut roads, blocked passages and erected checkpoints at a score of locations across the north of Kosovo bordering Serbia since the summer.

oh dear.

Europe and Serbia are engaged in a risky game of brinkmanship. On the dusty blocked roads of northern Kosovo, Serbia's future is at stake.

Average pay in the City of London has jumped by 12% to £83,000 in the last year, with managing directors enjoying a 21% increase to £237,000, a new report said today.

source: London Evening Standard, Monday 21st November 2011

‘The question is,’ said Alice, ‘whether you can make words mean so many different things.’

‘The question is,’ said Humpty Dumpty, ‘which is to be master – that's all.’

Who is going to say anything? The international community? Fuck them!

UK backs bid to overturn ban on cluster bombs

So when US analysts or European journalists or World Bank bureaucrats ruminate about "when will there be a Palestinian spring?", it's generally because they have no historical context, no idea that Palestine's first intifada spring in many ways set the stage for this Arab spring more than two decades later.

here

speaking of the arts, gutted to miss - in my beloved Birmingham to boot

south London dwelling scouser, charting courses through grime, house, UK funky, keeping it on the floor whilst moving forward (not that the two should ever be regarded as usually mutually exclusive), this, fucking remarkable.

love it (dropped a year ago - yes, i live in the back)

Jesus entered the temple area and drove out all who were buying and selling there. He overturned the tables of the money changers and the benches of those selling doves.

- Matthew 21:12

‘When I use a word,’ Humpty Dumpty said, in a rather scornful tone, ‘it means just what I choose it to mean, neither more nor less.’

Eustace Clarence liked animals, especially beetles, if they were dead and pinned on a card. He liked books if they were books of information and had pictures of grain elevators or of fat foreign children doing exercises in model schools.

Winnie-the-Pooh sat down at the foot of the tree, put his head between his paws, and began to think. First of all he said to himself: ‘That buzzing noise means something. You don't get a buzzing noise like that, just buzzing and buzzing, without its meaning something.’

The NHS will not exist within five years of a Conservative victory

- Oliver Letwin, MP, 2009

whether there are tasks the army could undertake that would free up more police for the front line

- David Cameron, 2011

"It would be a sorry day if we had to have an army on the streets on the mainland of Britain"

- Willie Whitelaw, 1981

one of the great blogs is no more.

cheers Graeme.

i'm going to re-up a David Harvey quote this blog has borrowed once before, first from Graeme's site; it seems appropriate.

My view is that [neoliberalism] refers to a class project that coalesced in the crisis of the 1970s. Masked by a lot of rhetoric about individual freedom, liberty, personal responsibility and the virtues of privatisation, the free market and free trade, it legitimised draconian policies designed to restore and consolidate capitalist class power. This project has been successful, judging by the incredible centralisation of wealth and power observable in all those countries that took the neoliberal road. And there is no evidence that it is dead.

- The Enigma of Capital and the Crises of Capitalism

Return of the Rajavi Cult

Oliver Craner on the Mujahedin-e Khalq

Tom Hardy, i like this boy, i have a man crush on him. i like his line about dreaming a little bigger, darling (or however it goes) in the Nolan film Inception.

and i also like how Leonardo DiCaprio is growing into some modern weary/driven Robert Mitchum, looks wise, these days, bulking up after a fresh-faced adolescence courting the likes of Claire Danes.

and i particularly like the still, centered quality that Joseph Gordon-Levitt - DiCaprio's foil - brought to same movie. i liked the cast. (Memento by a country mile remains the fave Nolan but here we go.)

clip below.



this post is all about Tom Hardy.

George Osborne's austerity programme will cut the living standards of Britain's families by more than 10% over the next three years as those on the lowest incomes suffer most from the tax increases and spending cuts designed to reduce the budget deficit.

A study from the Institute for Fiscal Studies, the UK's leading experts on the public finances, concludes that the chancellor's strategy will result in greater inequality and rising child poverty, throwing into reverse progress made in the final years of the last Labour government.

I have seen many country of origin information (COI) reports in my time, and I am generally a big fan of them, but the current UK Border Agency one on Sri Lanka is genuinely shocking.

[...]

The UK Border Agency are now relying on war criminals as a source of evidence. It gives a new meaning to the phrase blame the victim.

'Britain's public snubbing of the court emboldens Moscow, Ankara and other governments who would prefer to ignore its rulings'

What Cameron and other government ministers before him who renounce the "perversion" of human rights really seem to object to is judges making decisions that the government dislikes. Witness the attacks on "unelected" British judges and the European court of human rights over rulings on torture, immigration, prisoner voting and a host of other political hot potatoes.

Strip away the high rhetoric from these attacks and they amount to a rejection of government being subject to the rule of law along with everyone else, and the fact that in a system with checks and balances the executive doesn't always get its way.

[...]

Scapegoating human rights, judges and the European court may be effective politics in the eyes of some in government, but it corrodes respect for human rights and the rule of law. That is surely not the outcome the prime minister wants.

OPPORTUNISTIC LOOTING

'some were so brazen they made no attempt to disguise their appearance'

playing this atm. really like it.

(via Yatesy.)

cannot articulate what UK garage means to me

looting scum, send him down

A college student with no criminal record was jailed for six months on Thursday for stealing a £3.50 case of bottled water during a night of rioting.

Nicolas Robinson, 23, of Borough, south-east London, carried out the “opportunistic” theft at a Lidl supermarket in Brixton as he walked home from his girlfriend’s house.

Robinson threw away the water and ran when he was confronted by police but was arrested and quickly admitted what he had done.

His solicitor told Camberwell Magistrates’ Court [Robinson] had “got caught up in the moment” and was “incredibly ashamed”.

above the door of the Walworth clinic on the Walworth Road in southeast London, a stone is inscribed with a Cicero quotation, The health of the people is the highest law.

this lets me inelegantly segue into observing that nurses, physiotherapists and foot doctors are being used by an increasingly cash-strapped NHS to screen general practitioner referrals back to those same GPs who had sent patients off for extra care in the first place, and no doubt there'll be more like this as funding cuts bite.

elsewhere, we have David Cameron responding to the looting and violence that has recently convulsed urban England (tragically, three young men died defending their neighbourhood in Birmingham, there has been at least one fatality amid the violence in London, and more Londoners made homeless, whilst jobs and livelihoods have been wrecked or affected in more than one city), by promising a fightback of ordinary Britain against the rioters and looters.

you can't blame Cameron for using the language of fightback, but it is a kick in the teeth for him to re-appropriate the term, given in recent months some in Britain's beleaguered public services sector were using it as a rallying point to argue against the Tory-led coalition government's small state hollowing out of the support struts for some of the country's poorest and most vulnerable quarters.

i think Mary Riddell (in the Telegraph, of all places) had a point recently when she wrote "nor, as Adam Smith recognised, can a well-ordered society ever develop when a sizeable number of its members are miserable and, as a consequence, dangerous. This is not a gospel of determinism, for poverty does not ordain lawlessness. Nor, however, is it sufficient to heap contempt on the rioters as if they are a pariah caste".
(Kenan Malik is also worth reading.)

i hope Cameron heeds Riddell.

i'm not sure he will.

very sadly, not really a surprise

All of the bells in a city or town rung as quickly and as loudly as possible for three minutes.

In a sense, one might define the contemporary poor in the United States as those who, for reasons beyond their control, cannot help themselves. All the most decisive factors making for opportunity and advance are against them. They are born going downward, and most of them stay down. They are victims whose lives are endlessly blown round and round the other America.

- Michael Harrington, 1962

THIS >

Gerhard Richter: Panorama

Oct 6-Jan 8 2012 Tate Modern

pierogi

Charity is no substitute for justice withheld

- Augustine

just in

'AFP: Activist says at least 45 civilians killed by Syrian forces in tank assault on city of Hama'

not even amongst the greatest set of men

Yes, we back Sure Start. It's a disgrace that Gordon Brown has been trying to frighten people about this.

- David Cameron, 5 May 2010.

it turns out funding for Sure Start centres (one of the crowning glories of the New Labour years, a programme of community outreach for childcare, early years learning and such) was not ring fenced - contrary to what Cameron implied would happen, whilst on record last year - and so twenty of them have closed across the country to date (with possibly more getting effectively mothballed), and overall government cuts in early years, youth and child services programmes will disproportionately affect poor areas to boot in "an act of reverse redistribution", as the below shows.

desperately sad.

ford to city: drop dead

how long? not long