Tariq Ali Joins the Stampede

Tariq Ali has joined the stampede of dinosaurs over the cliff with his latest piece in the Guardian.  Yet another dead Denialist history lesson dripping with contempt for the people and their sacrifices. And typically economical with the sequence of events and causality.

"The so-called pre-empting of a massacre has led to the killing of hundreds of soldiers, many of whom were fighting under duress, and permitted the ghastly Muammar Gaddafi to masquerade as an anti-imperialist. Here one has to say that whatever the final outcome, the Libyan people have lost. The country will either be partitioned into a Gaddafi state and a squalid pro-west protectorate led by selected businessmen, or the west will take out Gaddafi and control the whole of Libya and its huge oil reserves."

Let's deal with the twin piece to this as well (Libya is another case of selective US vigilantism).
The sheer pettifogging defeatism is breathtaking. Not to mention the mindless petty points scoring.
"The US-Nato intervention in Libya, with United Nations security council cover, is part of an orchestrated response to show support for the movement against one dictator in particular and by so doing to bring the Arab rebellions to an end by asserting western control, confiscating their impetus and spontaneity and trying to restore the status quo ante."

And how will they seize power from a Libyan people now more class-conscious and unafraid than any revolutionaries in history? Tariq Ali is guaranteeing that battle will be lost before it has a chance to be fought. A dead revolutionary is no revolutionary at all.
Get rid of Gadaffi first, by any means, then deal with anyone else who wants to try their luck.
Why are the pseudo-intellectual pacifist left so determined to sneer at the resolution of the Libyan people, and to treat them like children who need guidance from Hampstead?

"It is absurd to think that the reasons for bombing Tripoli or for the turkey shoot outside Benghazi are designed to protect civilians."
It is despicable to throw Bengazi and Misuratah to the wolves. And death to the revolution. And as it happens, the strikes on Gadaffi murder-weapons are protecting civilians, by definition. What sources in Libya does Ali cite? None. He doesn't seem to have any friends among the Libyan revolution either.
And what is his solution? Nothing. In fact the only 'point' peeking through the rhetoric is that acting in Libya is somehow illegitimate while there is no action in Bahrain. So Ali's great insight is that Two Wrongs Do make a right. We shouldn't do anything in Libya or Bahrain, or anywhere else we suppleid with weapons to suppress the people. In fact, we should do nothing at all but watch the blood flowing in the gutters. It's as if the Denialists are in league with the arms dealers.

Gadaffi. Only Three Days Ammo Left

Last night, Moamar Gadaffi gave the clearest sign yet that he will be gone very soon. His threats of 'Total Force' against Misuratah in three days are empty and more divorced from reality than usual. The reality, as has been obvious all along, is that he is simply running out of munitions.

WillenKate Wedding

For all republicans watching on TV, this was a great chance to see a mighty machine (Westminster Abbey) performing at 100% capacity, doing what it was designed to, which is always fascinating, but in the case of the abbey will definitely highlight the attempt by the architect to recreate the sense of one-ness with nature so crucial to religious propaganda.
Some staunch republicans will even feel a reluctant catch in the throat at some stage. Do not worry, you are not losing your convictions, you are watching a movie. Given the same treatment, any wedding would be as moving, even without the mass hysteria on the streets.
And for the secularists, some of the camerawork will almost recreate what it would have been like to be a medieval serf subjected to the full cathedral treatment. A bit of modern archeology, if you like. I look forward to seeing the old place deal with a coronation. The grandest exhibition of The Nanny State in town. 
Then there will be issues like why aren't there girls in church choirs? The little things to make up for having vomited at the sound of the fashion correspondent swooning with ecstasy.
And then there is the fascinating game of Spot The Peace Camp. In none of the footage from the BBC / Sky / CNN has the sight of Brian Haw been allowed to ruin the day for the adoring billions. How pathetic is that? More or less pathetic than the arrest of a theatre group for planning to perform a mock decapitation of a head of state? A Channel 4 camera crew was also held in custody in the free country in which the royalty has no power at all.. no none at all.
Compared with the average gypsy wedding, this was fairly lavish. And hopefully, Willenkate will have a better reception than the gypsies we recently saw on TV, who seem to have lost their ability to party altogether. But the royal pair can hardly expect less media harassment than gypsies. Whatever the media say now, there will be a papparazi around every corner. And the adoring mob now baying for gratification will feed the media frenzy, buying anything with their images on. And so the market in Willenkate content will boom. And in the way of this kind of goldrush, tend to destroy the commodity it is based on.
Therefore the only way to escape this attention is to become unmarketable. To become normal, as the European bike-riding bank-clerk royal families seem to have managed. They are not hounded by media or worshipped as demigods. But then, they do not have the powers the Queen does, whether used or not. And they are generally not very rich. Certainly not as rich as the British royalty. Wealth and power are media catnip, and are enough to guarantee attention for life. But the pageantry makes things much worse, creating the enduring mythology, which is still one of Prince Charming and the Beautiful Princess. Exactly the poisonous formula which ultimately killed Diana Spencer.
It seems that none of the lessons of 1997 have been learned; that the job of royalty isn't to learn from its mistakes, but to be able to recreate them precisely and on command. The apologists and drivel-mongers are already at it. Some quotes at random from a popular forum: 
'Like it or not, people need celebrities.'
'Celebrities make us feel that we are part of something. They bring meaning to otherwise empty lives.'
'They feed our fantasies and provide an outlet for our need to empathise with others. '
And then we kill them. People do not need celebrities. People do not lead empty lives. What they need is a society which does not block every attempt to express their natural empathy. They do not glossy fairytales in Hello magazine. Celebrities are empathy porn, not the real thing. 
The people who sell celebrity need celebrities, which is why they also need our natural instincts to be as suppressed as possible. Which is why we live in a squalid, degraded society which despises the poor and weak, and only respects power, perfection and ruthlessness. Today's level of Olympian elitism is vital to the workings of the Exclusive Society. How else can we be made to detest and fight each other if the Shiny Things are accessible to all?
It is also partly why Britain is the basket-case it is. As yesterday's economic figures showed, Willenkate-obilia is the only thing keeping us out of recession.To paraphrase Mel Brooks:
How humiliating.
The British Empire.
You know who we used to be?
The Empire on which the sun never set..
Herds of elephants sent as gifts to Queen Victoria by adoring potentates and moguls.
The workshop of the world.
 Two World wars, one World Cup.
The masters of popular music.
Thousands of investors begging to invest in British wars and slave plantations.
Look at us now. Look at us now!
Selling balloons on the street. To Korean tourists..
Importing printed paper plates from China to keep the country out of the workhouse.
...We have one wedding to turn global pity into enormous respect.All satellite channels to GO.
But the overriding, Blazing Hypocrisy of this charade is that all the morons organising 'street parties' and being pillars of the community for a day will be back in their  hermetically sealed anti-social housing units tomorrow, as they will have been for the last ten years while society crumbled around them. And today will leave nothing behind but stale sausage rolls and grubby madeleine bunting.The highlight of the day came during the Bishop of Lambeth's little lecture to the bride'n'groom to be, and was probably the first ever public sighting of the best quote in Chaucer.
'Whan Maistrye comth, the God of Love anon
Beteth his lite wynges and Farwel!
He is gone.'
When a religion with 2000 years of ordering people about resorts to hippie ideology, you know it has its back to the wall. The good Bishop also reminded that today is the saint's day of Catherine of Sienna, who is supposed to have drunk a bowl of pus to prove her indifference to earthly matters. I doubt if that item was on the literal or metaphorical menus of either the Bullingdon Club or the officers mess in Sandhurst. 

Royal Wedding Dress Designer Revelation by Brian Haw

The revelation is that if you care about royal dresses, royal weddings or royalty in any manifestation, you're very sad and irrelevant and life is passing you by. So let's ditch the shmutter yak.
The only real question worth an answer is How will the TV coverage censor out Brian Haw? Even if the Golden Fertility Carriage doesn't pass the Peace Camp, the world will be expecting comprehensive shots of the billions swarming the streets, and right in the middle, heroically planted before the statue of Oliver Cromwell, 100 yards from the Abbey, is Brian Haw and his legal, honourable, decorative appeal to stop death parting other married couples all over the world. How embarrassing. So how will they erase Haw from history? Anyone who spots him in the TV coverage please report back.

The crazed delusion seems to be that once The Big Day is over, Middlebrow'n'Windsor will be allowed to walk their dogs on Anglesey in windswept peace and tranquillity. She's a nice girl. The press would never make 'the same mistake' again.

This is to pretend that Willenkate are something other than a vast feeding trough for the media. A key source of cash in a time when property advertising is still slow. 

Cameras are now much more advanced than in the 1990's. And the means of image-distribution in another dimension. So to expect the media to ignore this Royal pot of gold and respect the privacy of the newly-weds is insanity. And if there are assurances of 'self-regulation' and 'restraint', then why doesn't the England football captain (say) deserve the same respect as the descendant of a robber-baron? Why does it take a corrupt piece of improvised law to cater for Commoners, but merely a nod and a wink to pander to the needs of Royalty?

The AV Lie

The AV delusion is bad enough, but even worse is the plan to slash the number of MP's thereby reducing the amount of political representation for each constituent, thereby devaluing the vote. If we're serious about more democracy and accountability and involvement, there should be ten times the number of MP's in more and smaller constituencies, not more centralisation and bigger workloads for MPs resulting in longer waits at surgeries and increased admin costs.
Here's an idea, why not hire a private company to do all the admin, and even tell the MP who are the most deserving constituents? Privatisation of democracy. What could possibly go wrong?
Certainly nothing more disastrous than the reversal of political supply and demand represented by AV.
In a field of 10 candidates, the winner with 11% of the poll is just as democratically elected as the winner with 51%. And if there is a mass of unrepresented voters, as Paddy Ashdown claims, it is the duty of the political parties to cater for them in their policies, or make way for new parties which do so. It is not the duty of the electoral system to cater for the existing, conventional political blocks, or to delude the losers into believing that they have somehow won.
Cash buys votes. That's what stinks about the British electoral system, not 1 man 1 vote.

"If you want to surrender, then surrender. If you want to die, then die."

According to today's Observer, the inevitable is happening. A government tank commander being treated by rebel doctors in Misrata reported that

'His unit had been running out of food and ammunition for four days and were cut off from resupply.'

'He received an order...that sounded like an admission that the soldiers were now on their own.' "They said if you want to surrender, then surrender. If you want to die, then die."

Gadaffi will be gone in weeks, possible even days, as long as he is not resupplied, and the insane squeals for mercy from both Gadaffi and the Hampstead milksops of the Stop The War Coalition are ignored. Everyone's a winner except those with dead ideologies and the politically blind. History is littered with such losers.

If Gadaffi really has been driven out of Misratah, his convoys and encampments are now sitting ducks for allied airstrikes, and have no alternative but to scuttle back to Tripoli with their tails between their legs - if they get that far. And when the battle for the corridor to the Tunisian border is won, Tripoli will be evacuated enough to minimise civilian casualties from airstrikes on any remaining utilities useful to the regime. But by then, the ammunition stocks of the regime will be so low that finding a bullet for the Honorable Thing will be difficult. So the lawyers may well have their day in the Hague after all.
The future of Libya is not Quantum Diplomacy, as played by pathetic specimens from Glenn Beck to Jeremy Corbyn. It is simple primary skool arithmetic. The same simple equation that reduced Kaiser Bill's all conquering military machine to its knees. No Ammo = Defeat.

The Libyan Peace Formula

Strangely, the formula for peace in Libya is real mathematical formula.
It is simply a function of three factors. 

1. The ammunition remaining in Gadaffi’s arsenal (X)

2. Its rate of use and destruction (Y) and

3. The resolution of the forces of freedom (F). 

The answer being the period of time (T) before Gadaffi has to go. The actual figures should be quite easy to find in the sales books of British companies.

I think the formula might look like this but I could be wrong as I am almost enumerate.

T=  X - F

       Y     

which could be tomorrow for all we know. 

I’m not a mathematician, but I know that unless Gadaffi is being secretly restocked, his end gets nearer with every shot his troops fire. So him and his appalling sons can stuff all their offers. He is the one under siege in his bunker, not the Libyan people.

Why is the simple truth that artillery shells do not grow on palm trees too difficult for so many highly trained analysts and commentators to understand?

Washing Away Protest - Damian Thompson, Neo-Fascist Christian

The Toffocracy's Event of the Year approaches, and with it demands for the 'exhilarating sight' of 'anarchists being blasted out of their pigsties by water cannon.' Or the right to free speech blasted away in the interests of tidiness and sadism. The 'anarchist' in question being the lovely Brian Haw and his epic anti-war camp outside Westminster Abbey. The squalid little fascist calling for this crime being one 'Damian Thompson', who is some kind of overpaid apologist for God, apparently. And they talk about waste in the NHS. From the delirious rambles on his blog, it is obvious that here is Father Seamus Fitzpatrick made flesh. Or 'incarnate', as he would prefer. 
From the Queen's point of view, of course, nothing could be less British than the use of force against unarmed innocent protestors. In fact, the presence of Brian Haw's peace tableaux will be the crowning glory of the day, as far as the image of Britain abroad is concerned. And the only worry for Haw himself might be that his protest is actually exploited by the government to endorse the intervention in Libya on behalf of the same rights Haw is demanding.
Either way, the best photographic angle will be the one which includes both Haw and the wedding coach leaving the abbey, if it goes that route.
Perhaps someone should ask Kate Middlebrow and Prince Whatsisname whether they would like their bridal path to be cleansed of legendary British tolerance by an act of cynical brutality, and whether this is the omen they want to invoke at the start of their Journey Together Through Life. That when someone disagrees with you, you just say "Free speech be damned" and blast them away. Might is Right.

Wanted - Spirituality. Best Prices Paid

So the best price for a year's worth of Spirituality is a million splonkers. Not bad. Not bad. How many poems does that come to, or hours gazing at the wonder of the Milky Way? Can I do it all in one go, or do I have to spread my spiritualisifying out across 12 months? I'll need to know to sort out the extra income with my accountant. What column would 'spirituality' come under? Is it deductable as a charitable donation?
The Templeton Prize (it says) 'celebrates no particular faith tradition or notion of God, but rather the quest for progress in humanity’s efforts to comprehend the many and diverse manifestations of the Divine.'
I can do that. Gizza million quid. 

It seems that the million quid is vital as the 'cornerstone of the John Templeton Foundation’s international efforts to serve as a philanthropic catalyst for discovery in areas engaging life's biggest questions, ranging from explorations into the laws of nature and the universe to questions on love, gratitude, forgiveness, and creativity.
The monetary value of the prize is set always to exceed the Nobel Prizes to underscore Templeton's belief that benefits from discoveries that illuminate spiritual questions can be quantifiably more vast than those from other worthy human endeavors'.

That's a lot of quantifying. Is there a chart?

Nominations are now open for the 2012 cash...