Iran and that bomb

If I were the leader of Iran, though a member of CND, I would feel obliged to construct a nuclear missile or two - just to fit in with the neighbourhood...and when the expected regime change comes about, the Shah the second will be supplied with all the materials necessary to build a hundred, all courtesy of the International Community n'est pas.

Journalism at its best

OK, it's only from the Telegraph but the last sentence here is a jewel... "The Royal Household currently receives £15million a year to keep up the royal residences, including Buckingham Palace and Windsor Castle, but needs about an extra £4million a year for the next decade to cover essential works – a rise of almost 30 per cent.
The request for more money for the palaces is likely to be controversial at time of cutbacks in the public sector."

I wonder how long it took for the writer to work that out?

Fail-outs

The way the rich have money tied up and sussed out is quite sopmething to behold. For many of us, the lack of money might be felt as something of a personal failure. That somehow all these shody cheap goods I am surrounded by, the old clothes and scuffed worn out shoes are a manifestation of one's own personal lack of fit with the best of all possible worlds in which we are fortunate enough to live and breath...if not participate to an optimal degree.

Occassionally though, and more often of late, reality shatters these delusional modes of self-pitying false consciousness. Yesterday in the Observer, we read of tax breaks for rich people and their pensions. So that's where the money goes! Today we read that the Treasury is going to bail out tax haven 'countries' such as Jersey and the Caman Islands so these countries can carry on assisting people to commit fraus on the British tax payer of 25 BILLION pounds - the entire education budget. So we pay to get ripped off.

This whole money scam alone warrants rioting in the streets before one starts on any of the more gross injustices the bastard system revels in.

Racism in context

Everyone's heard of the argumentative technique of 'not taking things out of context', 'understand this in its context' and 'no context no understanding' etc. but in the end how much context do you need to understand something, and isn't there, sometimes, an extraordinary amount of context a priori in a situation that the rolling out of the context argument looks like you're apologizing and covering up for the deed in question?

Take Brice Hortefeux, the French Home Secretary, (please do he's a cadaverous creepy bastard you could use as a prop in some amateur dramatic thing) who has sparked off a huge row in France about some racist comments he made at the ruling party' (the UMP's) summer university festival.

The video is quite clear - he says of the gentleman of North African origin, as if the chap isn't there at all, 'This one's ok, it's when there's a lot of them that there's trouble.'
It's as blatant as that. Any form of racism is a punishable offence in France and Hortefeux's job is under threat from this revelation. I say revelation and not 'lapse', because this remark illustrates the crude racial thinking at the centre of the French ruling party. Hortefeux himself is a close friend of Sarkozy (there is no way he could have got so far politically without extensive support) and so far is being backed up by the little posionous bastard. Thus we can legitmately deduce that this 'thinking' is quietly shared, and often overtly applied, by the party itself.

Yet in the media, the context excuse is relied on to support the Interior minister. Usually, one uses this argument to understand an apparently crptic or ambiguous comment by a philosopher say. "What is known is not seen, what is seen is not known." is a strange sounding quote out of its context. If one says , "It's from The Republic." the phrase becomes less 'alien' and one can begin to say things about it. This Hortefeux remark - well, it's happening right now on screen - there is no context fromo which it is being taken and the remark itself is clear - he definitely meant 'Africans' or 'blacks' or some other rancid term that drifts about in the arid stink of his tiny mind.

Sometimes, you have to understand a little less and condemn a lot more with these people. The UMP types, obviously.

Disintegration

The political terminus in which New Labour is trapped and is slowly rotting away, is the direct summation of all it stood for. The heady days of 1997, which no one really believed in, were a play people joined in with, a collective concealment of what Blairism actuall meant, an unstated anxiety (for those who felt they were on the 'winning side') that nothing was really going to change. The deal Blair struck with the party - I'll win you power, you accept what I say - was always a fool's bargain. By 97 anyone would have defeated the Tories - even Kinnock - and the time since has been a vast wasted opportunity. Maybe that was the point - to show that even after the dreadful Major years that political optimism must be recrushed. That nothing must disturb the 1979 settlement, even when its political dynamic closes down, as it did 12 years ago, and even now, as its economic underpinnings fall apart.
The 2010 general election is already a pointless foregone conclusion. The system will be fortunate to emerge from the debacle looking just hopelessly out of touch with the British electorate. Chances are, the Tories will win a big majority, but with less votes than they received in the 1997 anihilation. How long a political system function in such a context? How long before politics returns...

Relapse

News that the 'recovery' is an illusion got relegated pretty quick.

Is the Guardian a secret admirer of the BNP?

"Two people have been charged with leaking the names and details of the entire British National party membership.
The list, which identified thousands of people linked to the far-right party, was posted on the web in November 2008. Information included addresses and other contact information such as mobile phone numbers and the names and ages of children in a family membership.
Dyfed-Powys police said a 27-year-old man and 30-year-old woman were charged under the Data Protection Act after a joint investigation with the Information Commissioner's Office. The pair lived in the Nottingham area at the time of the leak.
The fallout included the outing of police, lawyers, teachers and church figures as BNP members, with some complaining the leak exposed them to the risk of dismissal or disciplinary action. Some included on the list, which ran to 13,000 names, complained they had been mistakenly included after only asking for information on the party. Others said they were no longer members.
In one entry of a woman believed to be a serving police officer from Wirral was the note "Discretion required re employment concerns – police officer", along with the names and ages of her children.
The BNP leader, Nick Griffin, claimed at the time to know the identity of a person who had leaked the information, calling them a hardline senior employee who disagreed with the direction of the party and left the party in 2007. The party called in the police and obtained a high court injunction to stop the list being published but was forced to admit it was relying on the Human Rights Act, which it opposes, to protect members' privacy.
The party said the leak was "malevolent and spiteful" but the list was not up to date and only included names of members up to 2007.
The BNP goes to considerable lengths to conceal the identities of members, including dividing lists between different people and encrypting and password-protecting email attachments.
The two people charged are due to appear in Nottingham magistrates court on 1 September."

It's not just me - this report is too sympathetic to the boneheads. Take the bit about the list not being up to date. It's as if the writer wants to illict feelings of sympathy for the goons on the list. It's been like a lot of other reports from the paper that treat the organisation as if it deserves being treated seriously.