No news day

"We are doomed," one senior Labour figure told the Guardian."

Why is it all so awful?

Capitalism, of course. But even then, there should be seething resentment and social unrest, social unrest in our favour. The current quietism is deadening. That is what is so awful. Imagine an eternal capitalism where the elites gradually wore everything and everyone else down into fine, fine dust...

Just press the button

The worse the better

"It said an extra 53 million people are at risk of extreme poverty. "

The World Bank fears social unrest. Here's hoping.

North Korea and the bomb

Most of the people in the REL offices were once in CND. We are that old. The Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament. Another successful movement we were part of when young...sigh. There are still thousands of them all poied to destroy the world several times over and are still in the hands of dangerous, unsable meglomaniacs. The latest trmor n the nuclear world, then, of course, is naughty North Korea that has flown in the face of the nuclear free peaceful world and detonated a hiroshima size bomb underground. The response has been predictable. But a quick glance through the history of the stationing of nuclear weapons in the Korean peninsular shows that there were nuclear weapons placed in South Korea from the 50's until 1992 and that today, the US has enough submarines in the area to wipe the north of the map. So given that CND was wasting its (and our) time in the interests of deterrence let the North have its bomb - haven't we all supposed to have learned how to love it and live with it?

Or are our great leaders protesting in the name of peace and a nuclear free world?

Poor List - Information Dump

Studds nodded at the chairwoman and began,
'The events of 19/11 and its aftermath have changed the country. Before that date, we knew pretty much where we where. [laughter] In the months that have followed, we have to say that Britain, to say the least, has become a different, less hospitable, less secure place. It was the largest and most significant disaster in Britain’s history. The death toll, initially 65, is still rising. The nature of the train’s cargo, the contents of which are still ‘shrouded in mystery’, have elongated the drama. The government and private companies involved have been and remain reluctant to release any information about what freight the 23.50 Birmingham/London express was pulling on that fateful night, citing reasons of national security and ‘prevention of further chaos’. As we are well aware, the public reaction culminated in major disturbances in urban centres as far away as Stoke and Bromich. Disaster management teams, security divisions, state investigators and media are still in the area. Conflicting accounts of the disaster exist. Racially motivated reprisals were reported all over the country and the government, under previously secretly implemented legislation, has introduced a raft of security measures under the all embracing name ‘Sate of Exception’ and called in emergency powers to pacify the effected regions. The transport bombings a few years before have had few real consequences, in comparison. There has been, of course, hundreds of round ups.

The focus of my paper, though, is the interpretation of evidential aspects of the incident. My provsional argument is that the traces of the disaster have a ideologically intensifying effect. But, later. [laughter].
Film of the crash, from the driver’s point of view and from the CCTV from the camera at junction Bm16 shows nothing conclusive to substantiate either the official account or the account sceptical of the official view of the trigger for ‘December occurrences’. The edited footage from the first perspective showed thirty seconds of dimly lit track hurtling under the snout of the specially adapted 47’ diesel. (Other footage, since redacted, showed earlier events inter-weaved with sections from the later offical evidence). The narrative is stark. The tunnel, the cutting then the jolt and the lean to the left, and then a brief final glimpse of slewed track and overhead line as the train ploughs into aggregate, gravel and soil at just over 150mph, and, after a burst of static and colour, the final frozen frame of an estate topped embankment as the train totally derails, all merge into one in an abrupt intensity. Then blankness.
The soundtrack has been just as inconclusive. It is a very postmdern disaster. There are a few dicipherable words the background engine noise and the hiss of the wheels on the track drown out the cabin crew's words. Would we want to hear the last thoughts of a suicide bomber? If that's what it is. We hear the replacemrnt driver, give a time and a speed, figures that corresponded to the CCTV motion drags, and says something that sounds like the final location of the train. Is this piece of phsycogeographical hauntology an insignificant coincidence or luminous clue? After that there are the cries of alarm and panic. The, as I'm sure you don't need reminding, just before the tunnel, is the, that chant. The particular clip has been played and played on thousands of police and public computers, played on hosted sites, web pages, and the like, analysed in syllable fragments and forensically scrubbed, slowed down, and translated but still emerges indiscernible.

It has split the country in two. The biggest man made disaster since Chernobyl.'

He had those academic bastards by their glands.

Money Money Money

Interesting post . John Quiggin on the credit rating agencies. We didn't know the credit rating people were private firms. If we'd thought about it at all, we'd have guessed they were some university like economic board of boffins looking at mounds of data. Instead, they're a load of private corrupty pigs like the rest of the putrid system...