Has somebody died?

There mut be millions of words being written about Michael Jackson right now. This is the most ridicluous I've read so far. From k-punk, who we can forgive almost anything, but even so : "And if you asked me to choose between Off The Wall and the entire back catalogue of the Sex Pistols and the Beatles, there would be no contest."
!!. The argument being that The Beatles were like passé by the early eighties. And Michael Jackson, the vampire's vampire!

How wrong we were

We said the Iraq war was mainly about oil. They said WMD and democracy. Here's what the NYT says in an article that appeared on Friday. Under the headline, “Warily Moving Ahead on Oil Contracts,” a Times correspondent reports from Baghdad: “When Iraq puts development rights to some of its largest oilfields up for auction to foreign companies on Monday, the bidding will be a watershed moment, representing the first chance for petroleum giants like ExxonMobil to tap the resources of a country they were kicked out of almost 40 years ago.”

The Iranian diversion

Anything to take people's minds of the horror perpetuated in our names. Sixty people were obliterated by another drone attack in Pakistan and nobody in the West really gives a flying f*ck, diverted as they are by some stooge rallies in Tehran. What does Zizek have to say I wonder? Not that you'd really bother reading what that fraud has to say!

This is why events unnerve me

This on youtube - that deathly archive - a video someone took driving through Manchester in the early 1980's interspliced with other evocative shots to New Order's 'Ceremony'. The time that has past since...

Better news

With current events in Iran only splitting (what's left of) the left further (see the response to Zizek's awful letter on the subject, for instance) it's good to see there is life in the class war in Britain. Seumas Milne's article in The Guardian argues that when workers stand up to their employers, they tend to win and that passivity and inaction lead to wage cuts and redundancies.
He writes "It's now become obvious that only by defying or ignoring the anti-democratic legislation bequeathed by Margaret Thatcher – which outlaws, for example, all solidarity action – will there ever be the political will to ditch or replace it with something more reasonable."

It's about time someone in the MSM said as much.

Meanwhile the war goes on

Whatever the outcome of the Iranian elections (REL prediction - the story will fizzle out this week) the military encirclement of Iran tightens. The British army has just launched a raid "on a Taliban stronghold in southern Afghanistan." Cheer on those brave troops.

Keep Britain wanking

Sorry, but, well - it really does deserve that -http://www.keepbritainworking.com/supporters.aspx

The website has that Ikea Orwellian feel to it. The TUC, the LibDems and Boris Johnson all say how important the site is to battling the country through the slump. There's even some 'propaganda' [sic] postcards for sale...slogans taken from the second world war. Not 'chilling' just sad, really really sad.