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.