Christianity on Trial

In a few minutes, Kenny McAskill, the justice secretary for Scotland. will be bullied into backtracking on the act of forthright Christianity he took in releasing the dying Lockerbie bomber, Al Megrahi.
The advice of all true Christians would be to not give an inch. The Old Testament vengeance demanded by the mass media and the incoherent Mrs Clinton is not appropriate or productive in dealing with crime or terrorism in the C21st century.
As the BBC Scotland poll revealed today, ordinary people are nicer than their leaders. And in spite of its antiquated nationalism, the Scottish justice system has almost conformed to stereotype in its blunt application of christian principles to politics. The fact that the USA and the gutter media demand gratification for un-Christian appetites is their problem, not Scotland's.
The irony of this affair is that it outrages those who should be most welcoming of it, namely, the most vocal Christians. It reveals how little Christianity has actually penetrated in 2,000 years, as most of those who call themselves Christians, and demand its inviolable status as the national British religion, are still behaving according to Leviticus not the Sermon on the Mount.
Al McGrachie is about to suffer a painful death, much to the gratification of some, it seems. It would have been even more amusing to them to think of him in pain and in prison, and being denied that pleasure is painful to them, but that just reveals their depraved lack of Christian charity, I would have thought - speaking as someone who doesn't have an imaginary friend at all, let alone one shared with millions of others.
This is another example of PR Politics Gone Mad. Brown, loathe him or hate him, is being judged on how long it takes to give an opinion which, politically, isn't his to give.
And the line that McAskill's decision outraged some 'silent majority' isn't born out by the response of Scots on BBC Radio Scotland.

"Caller after caller supported MacAskill and were scathing of both the American intervention and the behaviour of the likes of Iain Gray and Jack McConnell."

Which makes this 'scandal' another shameful fabrication built on the commercial need to generate hate over compassion, and nothing to do with offering any kind of support to those who suffered as a result of the Lockerbie bombing. In fact, it is a cynical exploitation of their pain. In spite of this, the Lockerbie families are still able to display a level of humanity beyond the understanding of most polticians and commentators:

But, in fact, many Lockerbie families believe that Megrahi was wrongly convicted. Martin Cadman, who lost a son in the disaster, said the trial was “a farce” and that the release of Megrahi was “just righting a wrong.” Jim Swire, who lost a daughter, said, “As time goes by it will become clear that he had nothing to do with it.”

This hysteria is another triumph for PR politics, hand in hand with the commercial need to generate hate before compassion.
The point of compassion is that you don't demand anything in return, and that if you only extend it to the Mother Teresa of this world, it isn't compassion at all but tax-deductable guilt-relief. So the world of those who cannot understand this New Testament decision is one in which compassion always has a price-tag. One in which the sucker is never given an even break. The kind of world which has created an intractible war in which innocent travellers are blown from the sky, and peasant families disintegrated from 10,000 feet by laser guided bombs powerful enough to have destroyed Jericho in one hit.

* The Scotsman

Afghanistan. The Children's Crusade

There are chilling similarities between the death of Princess Diana and the latest grief campaign by those who support the idea of sending children to die in Afghanistan for the political causes of the old and cynical. In both cases, the mourners abetted the deaths they are celebrating. Diana Spencer was elevated above her capacity to live a normal life by the market for cheap celebrity magazines. Squaddies fresh from the dole queues on their way to squalid roadside deaths in Afghanistan are partly encouraged by the reception their dead colleagues are getting every day. Both sects need the deaths of others for some strange emotional reasons of their own, but the obvious nett effect of all the enforced solemnity and hymn-singing to lowered union jacks is the glorification of war, and more confused, jobless, macho-struck teenagers sent to their graves.
Every day this week, British TV has been draped in the images of dead soldiers, and processions and church services in their memory. The youngest to die, out of the ten who have been sacrificed in the last ten days, was 18 years old. Hardly old enough to vote, yet apparently old enough to have a knowledge of global politics mature enough to make the informed decision to lay down his life for Gordon Brown. No 18 year old can be allowed to make that decision, no matter who is the leader, or how much poverty the potential recruit is escaping from.
If children were prevented, rather than actively encouraged, from making this decision until they were old enough to know what they were doing, wars would be much harder to fight. Whether that would stop them buying the ultimate con of God & Country, only time will tell. But creating a semi-divine Warrior Caste to be worshipped by all in the name of God and Country will only inflame their adolescent glory-seeking, and make war even more like one of the extreme sports teenagers love so much.

Raining Gold.

During the worst bombing of Vietnam, one folk-tale was that a commander of the Vietcong had told a western reporter that if the Americans had bombed with fridges and TVs they would have won the war.
It was obvious from the launch of the first $30 million Cruise missile in Afghanistan that the best way to eradicate the Taliban was to load a single transporter with especially minted gold coins, and parachute them over the entire country. For the cost of one or two cruise attacks, the entire country could have been carpeted in gold like a scene from tale by Scheherazade.
Apart from instantly destroying the currency system of the taliban state, the massive injection of spending power would instantly elevate may labouring peasants to the level of the aspiring middle class, with hopes which did not need the taliban and their goats and Kalashnikovs. It is hard to imagine mothers and fathers in such a fairytale wanting to send their children to die for the benefit of a few rich and powerful men. Just as it is hard to imagine any but a few slaves in the Alabama cottonfields in 1850 believing that their freedom was anything but a fairytale.
Fairytales sometimes come true.

Wapping-gate Day 2. The Andrew Neil Red Plot

Like the bankers last year, and the politicians last month, News International is today peddling the Rotten Apple theory, but most industry insiders, including Andrew Neil, think it's inconceivable that only a few rogue hacks were involved.
Those with a lot to lose, like Kelvin MacKenzie, think former Sunday Times editor Andrew Neil is at the heart of a dastardly commie plot. Which only goes to show the decrepit state of the former Sun editor's political compass, and how little attention we should therefore pay to his ravings. He thinks everything is a red plot.
Meanwhile, the expected legal action is brewing. The News of the World has spent a long time making and selling enemies. Hard, professional fighters like Vanessa Phelps and Max Clifford. I can't see mercy in their eyes, only the greed and vengeance which is at the heart of the Sun's value-system. Those who live by the sword.... etc etc
The Sun's messageboards does not seem to allow a dedicated thread on the subject. As predicted by other posters, mine was removed at some point before or after the long shut down of the site, which opened again today.
'Wapping-gate Day 2' is now running as a condensed version of this post (nothing blue) on Sun Online. But for how long only the teenagers moderating the board know.

SUN COLLAPSES UNDER WAPPING GATE SCANDAL

Try to have your say about WappingGate on your favourite fabulous soaraway Currant Bun website, and all you get are the words:

SORRY!

MY Sun is temporarily unavailable

We monitor the site 24/7 and an engineer has already been called.

We should be back very shortly.

Thank you for your patience,

No doubt Sun readers overwhelmed the site with their support.

GOTCHA!

'Murdoch Papers Use Criminal Methods to Get Stories'

'Murdoch Papers Use Criminal Methods to Get Stories'

Shame that it won't be Jon Gaunt or Murdoch going to jail. Still, it's a start.
After the bankers and politicians, now it's the the turn of the press to get knocked off its high horse. And who would complain about those tax-avoiding, expenses-inflating fatsos getting a kicking?
As that agent of the Devil, the Guardian reports:

"The evidence also poses difficult questions for:
• David Cameron's director of communications, Andy Coulson, who was deputy editor and then editor of the News of the World when, the suppressed evidence shows, journalists for whom he was responsible were engaging in hundreds of apparently illegal acts
• Murdoch executives who, albeit in good faith, have misled a parliamentary select committee, the Press Complaints Commission and the public
• The Metropolitan police, who did not alert all those whose phones were targeted, and the Crown Prosecution Service, which did not pursue all possible charges against News Group personnel"

There will be a flood of legal action by the likes of John Prescott, who was allegedly spied on for years. This is good news. Not because Murdoch and his Empire of Lies deserve to be torched with lasers and the ground beneath drenched in Nitric acid to prevent any vestiges of its spoor from surviving. And not even because it buys some breathing space for the BBC in its constant battle for civilised decency against the barbarians of Wapping, Teacosy England and the Mary Whitehouse Memorial Society. But because it is the first step in debunking the so-called Fourth Estate. The professional lie machine which has been riding its moral horse pretty high for a long time and which is as much to blame for the mess we're now in as anyone - including bankers and politicians.
The Wapping Spin Machine has to make money. And the way to make money in this primitive competitive economic system we endure is at the expense of others. Greed is good, but not practicable without liberal doses of hate. Too little hate would make us share too much, and there would not be enough greed at work either to run a newspaper like the Sun, or for its relentless message of conflict to be marketable. So it is also in the interest of the gutter press to make us hate each other as much as possible. Naturally, we find it easier to trample on colleagues we dislike than those we feel natural human sympathy for. Hate is a skill which needs constant practice. So every piece of dirt the News of the world and the Daily Mail can unearth, by whatever methods, and use to exercise the hate glands of the nation, is just money in the bank. If their proprietors weren't such gigantic hypocrites, every redtop masthead would brag about how it supplies the capitalist system with the anger and confusion it needs to keep going.
The allegations made yesterday involve thousands of victims. As even Homer Simpson would say; I'm no fancy city lawyer, but that suggests a class action to me.
I wish I was on the News of the World's hack-list, I could do with a cool million or two. But more significantly, in the interest of being 'Fair and Balanced' I would like to know the nett political effect of the entire alleged operation. If the political smears which eventually emerged are all lined up against the stories which were supressed, which side comes out least effected (I wonder)?
In other words, if these allegations are proven, which they will be, just how much do Rupert Murdoch's mouthpieces manipulate the British political system, and just how illegal are their methods? More illegal than the 'scandals' of the politicians on the redtop hitlists, with their scandalous expenses claims for toilet seats and taxi rides? Probably. Which raises the entire question again of the hidden Wapping archive.
If the gutter press has a right (in the public interest) to spy on elected politicians, supermodels and drunken musicians, why shouldn't the nation have a right to know what information Wapping holds on all of us? And to know (in our interest) which information finds its way onto the front pages and which is swiftly hidden in the lead-lined vaults under Fortress Wapping, never to be seen again.
Since media corporations have become unelected fiefdoms with laws of their own, which exert huge political and economic power, and now, it emerges, have the capacity to spy on all of us, it is time they came under the same sort of scrutiny and regulation which other bodies of the same power and influence have to endure. In practise this might well mean disclosing all hidden archives of images and other data under amended Freedom of Information law. Then we might discover how many stories the media have suppressed over the years, what their political implications might have been, and even who killed Blair Peach. 'Public interest' my arse.
Then we would know how 'Fair and Balanced' they have been, and even why.
The price might well be to discover just how widespread this abuse of power has become - because if the hacks at the News of the World can do it, there is no reason why their counterparts in other newspapers can't. We might have to face the systemic sleaze of a profit-driven media market, which will not be a pretty sight. But that would be a price most decent people would be prepared to pay.

He Was Not The Messiah, He Was a Very Troubled Boy

Not only was he not Divine, Michael Jackson was not the most talented, influential, brilliant, amazing, innovative, fantastic, amazing genius of all time. While an impressive singer, he was no great songwriter, composer, choreographer or a musician of anything but his own voice - and we can all sing and all have our own unique voice.
He wasn't Stevie Wonder, who is a real musician. He did not 'get the world dancing' or 'provide the soundtrack to the generation' - much of the British audience preferring to confront the harsh world of the 1980's through Two-tone and the whole independent music approach rather than surrender to the updated escapist Busby Berkeley antics of Jacko and his capital investment portfolio. It is an insult to the artists of the time that Jackson's narcissism should be celebrated above more honest, rewarding talent. To many at the time, Jackson was seriously uncool, even with the genius of Quincy Jones (and Rod Temperton) behind him, and Killer had nothing to say about the problems we faced or the world we lived in. Hence the infamous Jarvis Cocker arse-waving incedent. Why has he not been interviewed yet?

Neither were his shows anything new - enormous production values in popular entertainment go back to Nero, where Jackson would have felt at home. he did not invent the circus, sorry, but it's true.
Neither did he 'invent' the music video, as is being claimed. Apparently, MTV wouldn't exist without Michael Jackson. Which means that MTV in effect owes its existence to Joe Jackson's childcare methods. And in any case, The Beatles, for one, had come up with the pop video with Penny Lane/Strawberry Fields almost a decade before Jackson's record company rode the new medium of video to promote their new star. Given this promotional tool, it would have been bizarre if the three Quincy Jones albums had not sold vast amounts. It is tempting to wonder how Miles Davis would have used video to promote 'Bitches Brew' if it had been around at the time. The point being that Jackson had nothing to do with the development of the pop video. It was not his idea - as many celebrity numbskulls have been claiming over the weekend.
In fact, it isn't easy to find many musical or artistic ideas which are attributable to Jackson himself, as opposed to his writers, choreographers, producers, accountants, directors, doctors, life-coaches, plastic surgeons, or chimpanzees.
And after those 3 albums were over, how far did Michael Jackson progress artistically? The truth is that this child star hit puberty, and the company which owned him cashed in on the classic early period of youthful energy when artists are at their most open and exciting, then tossed him and his scary personal problems aside, into the care of the usual queue of 'doctors' willing to prescribe 'painkillers' to the celebrity 'patient'. He progressed no further than his teenage persona with its particularly infantile brand of camp-gothic, and yet the mass media hysterics like Pete Waterman are still laying on the hyperbole with a giant chrome trowel.
The first response of any member of the public which I heard was on the morning after the announcement of the death, in a cafe in Sydenham. .
customer:

customer 1:
'You have to be careful crossing that road, Pat, you don't want to end up like Jacko.
waitress:
'Don't be awful.'
customer 2 (interjecting loudly):
'Well I never liked him, the nonce. That's all he was a fucking nonce. And yeah, allright, he was a showman, but I never liked him. You don't like someone, it doesn't matter how talented they are.'

All of which is the part of the genuine catastrophe which was Michael Jackson's life, as it was with Fatty Arbuckle, whose career was also ruined by accusations rather than evidence. And every other fragile soul demanding attention and a shortcut to financial security which bypasses any political thinking or action.
The grieving multitudes may not believe it but indifference bordering on cynicism is the reaction of many people, not the newspaper-selling brew of rose petals mulled in tears. However, the standard for callousness was not set by a south London wideboy with a big mouth, but (not surprisingly perhaps) by Michael Jackson's dear father, who used the opportunity of his first statement about his son's untimely death to plug his new record label. He didn't say how much of the profits he will be tything to the Jehovah's Witnesses. The Jehovah's Witnesses have not issued any statement on their policy towards child brutality and abuse. Joe Jackson obviously feels no responsibility for his son's fate, but sees it as just another promotional tool. Another idea Michael Jackson didn't have.
Michael Jackson is merely the latest in a long line of damaged human beings who have been the raw material of the entertainment business, especially since the advent of recording, which entailed vast amounts of capital investment in plant and personnel, and a corresponding amount of artistic compromise to cater to the accountancy department. And with artistic compromise comes a further denial of the already fragile sense of personal identity and worth, and such a mind is the natural environment for a self-destructive viscous circle. Which, if tangible on stage, can make for a very compelling performance, but not for a long or happy life in the performer.
Of course, now that artists don't have to rely on vast corporations to distribute their work, the age of the celebrity casualty is, in theory, over. As is the age of the STAR, a label which was merely a way of recovering an investment. There is no reason now why artists of all kinds, but especially performers, shouldn't be perfectly sensible, healthy people who happen to have a talent to entertain, and a story to tell. A career in music no longer demands the traditional showbusiness gamble of an ordinary life on the chance of stardom, fame and fortune. The individual can now do everything which the bankrolled corporations of the past could, and thereby escape the deadening demands of industrialised entertainment. The returns will not buy many Ferraris, but the genuine artist will not care about that.
The neurotic exhibitionists, with their self-obsessed drivellings, are welcome to the wealth and 'pain-killers' and bling. Art is not, no matter what Pete Waterman thinks, a matter of money and 'hugeness'. But the truth is that Waterman knows as much about art as Lady Diana - or Michael Jackson, if his lifetime achievement is viewed objectively, and not as an excuse for middle aged columnists to wallow in their own adolescence for a while. This morbid vice is a harmless enough in moderation, but very unhealthy as a permanent state, as with Michael Jackson, who was so traumatised by his own childhood, or lack of it, that he spent the rest of his life trying to reclaim it, for the amusement (and profit) of others.
Those who once used the entertainment industry as an escape from poverty can take comfort from the fact that their new powers of publishing and distribution will at least keep them fed, if they have any talent. And that if they do not have anything to say, they will not be forced to perform merely in order to repay a bank. And that from now on, their work need cater less for the commercial demands of corporations, and more for their own artistic and personal identity, and the concerns of their audience, however small.
The musical 'stars' of the C20th were the product of a time during which two major motivations for success were hunger and the need for affection. The list is very long of local boys and girls who made it to the top at disastrous personal cost. So the pleasure we get from watching and hearing them is partly that of observing suffering and deprivation through the filter of what we called 'talent'. This isn't that different from watching gladiators in the arena. Both depend on real suffering to exist. And the corporation contract, with its clause requiring creativity on demand, only served to destabilise already wobbly personalities, and guarantee a continued supply of inner turmoil. Now that artists don't need the corporations, maybe we can move to forms of performance and production which don't rely on the worst of motives to exist. And performers can do what they do best, not what they are told to do.
And now Jacko is a god, apparently. The God of Pop. And this time, a lot of people seem to mean it, the family and managers especially. Some of whom are licking their lips at the prospect of the Michael Jackson Memorial Tour, and the Michael Jackson Memorial albums, videos, T-Shirts and dancing singing dolls. The Japanese will naturally supply the range of Robo-Jackos as soon as they can perfect the robo-moonwalk.
The annual Michael Jackson Memorial Day will repeat the roadshow, with variations to cash in on whatever famine or disaster is happening at the time, giving the whole circus the mask of charity and avoiding vast amounts of tax in the process.
Like most show-business martyrs, Jackson is worth more dead than alive.

Now it's National

Until now, most states have been able to sit back and shrug their shoulders to the Iranian government and let the BBC and Gordon Brown take all the blame:

'We'd love to help, but what can we do? Those pesky global Twitterers and hackers. You think they don't cause us all sorts of trouble? We appreciate your problem, but we can't do what you do and shut down the internet, even if we could, or lock up all the troublemakers. We'd love to oblige but, sorry, you see our position."

But it could hardly rest there, and the logical response was always going to be

'Not your problem? We'll make it your problem. We're not bad at the old cyber-terrorism, and our mates the Chinese are real experts. We'll get them to lend a hand, and then we'll see who's got problems.
We do envy you in the west your computerised health and energy systems. It would be a great shame if they should get all frozen up and useless one day...'

The hope was that the Iranian power struggle could be between an alliance of the Iranian people and the online global community against the antiquated Iranian elite clinging to power. And that primitive twentieth century national politics could be sidelined for almost the first time in history. It seems we are not quite at that phase yet, which is hardly surprising. The discredited Iranian elite has every motive to strike back in any way which will drag the battle back to a ground it is familiar with and an enemy it can touch and use as a scapegoat, or whose embassy it can beseige - or whose dipomats it can hold to ransom.. And by threatening to launch hacking expeditions against, say, the British health service database, the Iranian government would be seeking to gain the initiative and bolster its own image. A bit like Krushev putting nuclear missiles in Cuba. And like Krushev's USSR at the time, Iran is also far behind in this particular arms race. In spite of its Chinese big brother. Not only does it have to face up to the combined expertise of the western cyber-powers, but also the infuriatingly evasive geekocracy, who would be given complete licence to kill. An army of James Bonds sliding in through the airconditioning and crawling out of every manhole. The role every geek would love to play, and who would now get the chance. In effect they would be rallying to Kitchener's call:
Your Country Needs You!
But safe in the knowledge that they wouldn't risk getting killed, maimed or poisoned.
However, neither shoplifting nor insurance fraud are victimless crimes, and the same goes for war. How many Iranian hospitals would the freelance commandos of the Global Iranian People's Liberation Support Network (GIPLSN) be prepared to close if the Iranian government began executing leading dissenters? Would the GIPLSN take its instructions from the Iranian people, and if so, how? What consensus should it recognise, and from which source? Or are we seeing something more subtle at work? A form of collective, self policing morality, responding organically to the situation, and tending to deliver an appropriate response. A self-resolving chaos in which every butterfly's wings really do make a difference.
Viewed as a brain, the internet is in its infant, amoral stage. Its neural pathways are still untrained and feral. Given enough exercises in decision-making and storytelling and role-playing, like the Iranian revolution, and the internet could develop into a healthy, upstanding, happy adult, ready and willing to enjoy life and the company of others.
Censored into a cupboard, and fed a diet of kill-games and porn, and only allowed the barest scraps of information from the outside world, the child's morality doesn't advance much more than that of the average rat.
So unless the internet is due to be univented or totally quashed, the outlook is still hopeful. And the enemies of progress everywhere are still just trying to paint over the ageing process, only succeeding in making themselves look less human with every brushstroke.
--------------
And when oh when oh when will the BBC stop being the 'Mind-Control Centre' of the western conspiracy to broadcast inconveniently true images and stories to the world?
Not as long as it's a uniquely funded organisation, to judge from its privileged position (along with Voice of America) as almost the sole target of the Iranian propaganda machine.
How satisfying to see dear Old Auntie bouncing her brolly off the bonce of the mullahs in finest Margaret Rutherford fashion. They Do Not Like It Up 'Em.
The Iranian vilification of the BBC is worth the licence fee alone. Of course, the Daily Mail knew all along what the mullahs have just discovered. Perhaps they should get together to try to destroy it. Mediocre minds think alike, if at all.
The absence of any commercial news outlets from attack by the Iranian regime is not just embarassing, its shameful. And those who ever demanded a surrender to commercial versions of truth should also be ashamed of themselves. But if that ever happened, Mullahs would fly and the tabloid journalism would be a footnote in history.
As I try to publish this, Twitter tells me that GCHQ is recruiting hackers from the naughty classes in much the same way that the novels tell us James Bond was:

" ...the government had recruited a team of former hackers for its new Cyber Security Operations Centre, based at the government's secret listening post GCHQ, in Cheltenham, to help it fight back.They had not employed any "ultra, ultra criminals" but needed the expertise of former "naughty boys," he added."You need youngsters who are deep into this stuff... If they have been slightly naughty boys, very often they really enjoy stopping other naughty boys," he said."

What more could a geek want? Except that being under the wing of MI6 means adopting their morality and serving their power base. In effect, telling lies. So as always, the real struggle is not between nebulous notions of Right and Wrong, but good old truth and lies, which may never be absolutes, but which are far more definable.

No Vote - No Work

"SPREAD THE WORD IN IRAN,STOP paying your bills (water, gas, electricty), STOP paying taxes. It worked in '79.RT Please #iranelection"

Says one Iranian Twitterer. And if there was ever a perfect time to organise mass civil disobedience, it is now. The list of pranks which the Iranian people could play on their government, and which could be disemminated online, is almost inexhaustible.
But the uiltimate weapon is still, as always, withdrawal of labour. No Vote. No Work. Can't Vote - Won't Work.
The opposition have already begin the process of reclaiming Islam from the sect which has defined it for twenty years, and possibly begun remodelling it to suit a modern world. If they can do that to a religion, they should manage the relatively humdrum task of remodelling a country. Especially one which for twenty years has been the puppet of the same faith now being shouted from the rooftops every night in defiance of the Mullahs . And there's not a thing the Revolutionary Guard or the secret police can do about it.

140 Characters In Search of A Revolution

[Play muted for best effect]
The cringeing cowards are out in force. It seems that Twitter is being used as a tool by the dastardly CIA. And according to a recent Harvard study, most social website users don't play with their toys much after Christmas Day, and therefore Twitter is nothing but the plaything of the idle western consumer, and not to be taken seriously. Or it is just a rumourmill, seething with as many lies as the Daily Star or Newsweek, or FoxNews and easily dismissed by print diehards.
It's all in the choice of the word 'rumour' instead of 'lead'. Twitter is, initially, providing leads. Old fashioned confirmation always provides stories. And what about the images and videos, how many of those are just 'rumours'?
Whatever bored consumers use it or don't use it for, it has been proved to be a valuable tool for people organising against suppressive or fraudulant regimes. Yesterday and today requests have been made for ideas. What kinds of collective actions could be taken to paralyse the state machine? What is the best remedy for tear gas and pepper spray? What are the safest ways of posting images and video? What kind of retaliation can be expected in this very Persian game of political chess. How can the Basij be identified and even targeted..?
The other argument is that the internet as a tool of change simply doesn't work because it can be turned off at will. This is patently not true, as the masses of footage emerging over the last week has shown, and it is an insult to the craft of the Iranian commentators, who know their business just as well as any Wapping hack knows how to bloat his expenses. And it also ignores the fact that for several days, the conventional media have been turned off entirely and have to rely on the civilians at trheir laptops. The shooting of Neda Agha Soltan on Saturday was news which was reported on Twitter several hours before it appeared on the BBC. Without Twitter, it may never have emerged at all.
Like many other aspects of the internet, personal publication does represent a massive shift of power, as proved by the Iranian regime's actions against it - actions made largely futile by the counter-actions of the global hacker community, garnered partly via Twitter and Facebook.
The sneering has to stop at some point. It seems that the left has to re-learn its own lesson, that the production, distribution and exchange of a commodity is inherently empowering. So when that commodity is information in an Information Age, is it any wonder that tyrannies begin to tremble?

The following Twitter users don't count, it seems.. or the use itself.
crisisintehran TODAY 4pm - Haft Tir Sq - Meydan 7 Tir - Tehran - in memory of our martyrs - Karoubi said hes coming(on his facebook)


stevemahfouz Please be very careful about what information you share on Twitter. The Iranian government monitors Twitter closely #iranelection #gr88


silentherotx #IranElection To deal with tear gas soak a bandana or paper towel in lemon juice or cider vinegar can breath a few minutes, also buy goggles


TGskills NAMES AND NUMBERS OF BASIJ AND OTHER ITELAGENCE AGENTS http://www.goftaniha.org/ #iranelection #iran #persiankiwi #mousavi1388 #twitpersia

etc etc etc. All useful to those concerned, and when the spooks do manage to work their wicked wiles, no doubt we'll find out about it. Until then, they have their hands full trying to stem the flood of unsuitable information leaving Iran. And it is a battle they are losing because of Twitter, Facebook, YouTube, Picasa, and other weapons which the Medieval minds of he mullahs still don't understand. Those using the internet to tell their story are way ahead of the defeatists.
Iran is the most sophisticated blogging community in the world, and the second biggest. They are the ideal people to test the new politics of personal publishing. And they have the sympathy of the freelance global hackers, who quite fancy the idea of making trouble for dictatorships from their bedrooms and garden sheds.
The argument against Twitter is the same one which discredits the Gutenberg press for culminating in Rupert Murdoch. In fact, what Twitter does is it give too much power to those awful ordinary people with their seditious, rabble-rousing pamphlets. Good.
Iran represents a definiing moment in the clash between medievalism and modernity, and modernity will win because the medieval mind does not understand the technology being used against it.
It is in the dilemma of needing the internet to survive in the modern global economy, while trying to deny it from the most sophisticated online community in the world. It will lose because it is not only trying to suppress its own people, but the aspirations of a global community.

REDACT ALL ABOUT IT!

MP.'s Expenses in Full.

R.Hon. member for Bogmouth on Sylt.
period

Recieved with thanks the honourable member for with a melon.
All claims presented to the committee between and subject to Freedom of Act.
As Follows.

Plus further monthly increments of
credited to offshore companies in

Principal residence plus brother in law.
Following sale of
Other addresses

in the event of the death of the goat.

Evil Gordon Brown to Blame Says Supreme Leader

'The most evil of them is the British government'.

... What did we do? Or is the Supreme Leader now a leader writer for the Daily Mail? It's hard to tell. Does this give Gordon Brown another shot of global street cred?
The reality is that any credit the british government gets from this bizarre attack by an obvious rambling loony, comes courtesy of the BBC, which is the real target for relaying the information provided by the Iranian people - via Twitter and the other internet tools which are still obviously beyond the comprehension of the mullahs - not being mentioned in today's address from the Supreme Leader's Fortress of Righteous Justice. Either he knows enough not to mention a battle which he lost when trying to rally his troops, or he simply does not understand that the real war is also also all but lost. That access to global communications changed everything as radically as did the discovery of agriculture or the printing press or algebra, and that by threatening a bloodbath, he is only delaying the inevitable as horribly as possible.
So Gordon Brown and David Milliband take the blame for the BBC acting as delivery boy for the Iranian people. Whoever said politics was fair?
Khameini's used this opportunity to declare that the government is approved by god, and that therefore those who have no faith in the government have no religious faith. They therefore must 'take the consequences', meaning brutal repression, especially at the hands of government loyalist vigilantes, who were directly put on alert by this speech.
The gloves are definitely off, and the bravery of the opposition is exceptional. But given the attitide of the Twitter posts leaving Iran, it seems violence is now far more likely after today's address from the holy men than before, which is historically typical.

Live To Fight Another Way

For the opposition to hold their demonstration tomorrow and openly defy Khameini is to risk a bloodbath. The comparisons with Tianmen Square are obvious. But in this game of image and face, the streets are not the real battleground. It would deliver a far more powerful message if the expected confrontation were not to happen, just as the silent march a few days ago was more impressive than than occupying the streets and burning a few cars. It would represent a far more sophisticated display of concerted action if the crowd were merely to stay home and hang a green flag from their windows, thereby overcoming international reporting restrictions at a stroke. The means of organising it would also represent the new politics of communication, rubbing the noses of the government in its greatest blindspot. Mobbing is surely a much more effective form of action than the mass bloodshed which could well follow a confrontation tomorrow.
Turning on all the electrical appliances on full for an hour would play havoc with Iran's national grid, possibly. Mass journeys at the 'wrong' times of day, causing congestion and leaderless chaos. The ways in which concerted mass actions can be used to disrupt the state without bloodshed, or leaders to be put on trial, are only limited by the imagination of the people.

Images.

More Images From Yesterday's Protests

Orwell Demolition Tools (‘There Are No New Ideas’)

Why so many trees have to die defending progress from the defeatism and misogyny of reactionaries is a mystery. One volume of Orwell essays, and they are exposed again as the Paper Tigers they are.

TRIBUNE.February 25, 1944
Looking through Chesterton's Introduction to Hard Times in the Everyman Edition (incidentally, Chesterton's Introductions to Dickens are about the best thing he ever wrote) , I note the typically sweeping statement:
‘There are no new ideas.’
Chesterton is here claiming that the ideas which animated the French Revolution were not new ones but simply a revival of doctrines which had flourished earlier and then had been abandoned. But the claim that ‘there is nothing new under the sun’ is one of the stock arguments of intelligent reactionaries. Catholic apologists, in particular, use it almost automatically. Everything that you can say or think has been said or thought before. Every political theory from Liberalism to Trotskyism can be shown to be a development of some heresy in the early Church. Every system of philosophy springs ultimately from the Greeks. Every scientific theory (if we are to believe the popular Catholic press) was anticipated by Roger Bacon and others in the thirteenth century. Some Hindu thinkers go even further and claim that not merely the scientific theories, but the products of applied science as well, aeroplanes, radio and the whole bag of tricks, were known to the ancient Hindus, who afterward dropped them as being unworthy of their attention.

It is not very difficult to see that this idea is rooted in the fear of progress. If there is nothing new under the sun, if the past in some shape or another always returns, then the future when it comes will be something familiar. At any rate what will never come — since it has never come before — is that hated, dreaded thing, a world of free and equal human beings. Particularly comforting to reactionary thinkers is the idea of a cyclical universe, in which the same chain of events happens over and over again. In such a universe every seeming advance towards democracy simply means that the coming age of tyranny and privilege is a little bit nearer. This belief, obviously superstitious though it is, is widely held nowadays, and is common among Fascists and near-Fascists.

In fact, there are new ideas. The idea that an advanced civilization need not rest on slavery is a relatively new idea, for instance; it is a good deal younger than the Christian religion. But even if Chesterton's dictum were true, it would only be true in the sense that a statue is contained in every block of stone. Ideas may not change, but emphasis shifts constantly. It could be claimed, for example, that the most important part of Marx's theory is contained in the saying:
‘Where your treasure is, there will your heart be also.’
But before Marx developed it, what force had that saying had? Who had paid any attention to it? Who had inferred from it — what it certainly implies — that laws, religions and moral codes are all a superstructure built over existing property relations? It was Christ, according to the Gospel, who uttered the text, but it was Marx who brought it to life. And ever since he did so the motives of politicians, priests, judges, moralists and millionaires have been under the deepest suspicion — which, of course, is why they hate him so much.

When will those who despise and fear progress learn to live without it, and return to their roundhouses bearskins and rickets? That's what I'd like to know.

Ethnic Cleansing Ulster Style

Old habits die hard, it seems. There will be NO Surrender! to Roma.. And now many of them have been hounded out by classic Ulster redneck thuggery in the finest traditions of the province. It was interesting to hear the Belfast police trying to reassure the public by saying that 'paramilitaries were not involved' in terrifying dozens of Rumanian families from their homes, if not out of the country. As if it were a matter of some pride that this hatred did not need agitators but sprang naturally from the local culture.
The organised Ulster Loyalist groupings (who are still armed to the teeth four years after IRA decommissioning) have a sad history of links with the nazi nutter-sects across Europe and America. Now we are told that this poisonous ideology does not need organisation in Belfast, but is completely natural. And if it is 'natural' in Belfast, then it must be equally natural to scapegoat Rumanians in every other capital city of the European Union. Racism and thuggery are natural human qualities, not manageable, preventable consequences of economic desperation and ignorance. So there's nothing we can ever do about racism, it is here forever because we are inherently Evil.
The police should be more careful what they say they are grateful for, especially on TV.

Twitterized Mullahs

How they all laughed at Twitter. Well, they're not laughing now. It will be interesting to see with just how much relish the sniggering classes eat their words. The Supreme Leaders of Iran can tell them just how wrong they were to write off an instant, open-ended means of communication. The nature of the current anniversary coverage of Tiananmen Square might be very different if the people had access then to similar ways of co-ordinating action and of broadcasting their own story to the world. Since the advent of the cameraphone, the question has been 'Who Spies on the Spies'? and the answer is US. As both the London G20 demonstrations and the recent expenses scandal showed, public surveillance of authority is now almost as much of a civic duty as paying taxes or driving on the correct side of the road or ensuring that a child does not stand too near to an open fire.

The Iranian ruling elite is in the dilemma of depending for its economic and military power on the same technology which will undermine it. So they can't un-invent the internet (in order to suppress organised dissent) because this is the modern world, and they need their email addresses and online banking systems and commodity exchanges as much as every other regime. Unless, of course, they choose total Talibanisation, and a return to the C13th, which the Iranian people simply do not want. Not for Osama and All His Goats. And what's good enough for the people of Iran is good enough for people living under any other dictatorship, China included.

Whatever the result of the election MIGHT have been, or how indistinguishable the policies of the two main parties, and however hamstrung Iranian democracy might be by Medievalism, the fact is that the djinn of freedom has been let of the bottle by the actions of the tyrants themselves. A few weeks ago, most Iranians might well have been prepared to give Mahmoud Ahmadinejad the benefit of the doubt, but since the shootings and internet shutdowns, and arrests and open disrespect of the increasingly aspirational educated masses, the theocratic regime has partly replaced the West and its sanctions as a demon. The betrayal of the government and the mullahs has driven the wedge of outraged personal self-esteem into the face of theocracy. Apart from anything else, surely modern technology and religious fundamentalism are incompatible. The Quran may not proscribe computers and iPods by name, but it is nevertheless undermined in people's minds by such innovations, just as the invention of agriculture freed us from Animism and the printing press destroyed the monopoly of Papal power.
So the political choices now are very different from the ones the Iranian people once thought were on offer two weeks ago. The internet has helped reveal the unthinkable in Iran.
In Orwell's 1984, the 'proles' are pessimistically generally ruled out as agents of change, 'Goldstein's Book' within the book also dismisses any hope in the masses with one proviso:

"They (the proletarians) could only become dangerous if the advance of industrial technique made it necessary to educate them more highly..."

The internet is the ultimate educational technology, which expands to fill the use and curiousity available, and is now invaluable to the efficient management of the modern state. And any attempts to limit it to the elite are futile. Even the best efforts of Mahmoud Ahmadinejad's cyber-agents could not stop the flood of information from the people this week, and furthermore, the global hackocracy rallied to the defence of the Iranian people and mounted attacks of their own against state departments.
It would seem that global ignorance is less of an excuse for tyranny then ever.

Cyber War Guide for Iran Elections
http://www.daneshjooyan.org/english/
http://www.picasaweb.google.com/bahramks/RiotsInTehran#
http://www.daneshjooyan.org/english/article/100705a.html
http://www.twitter.com/persiankiwi
http://www.worker-communistpartyofiran.blogspot.com/2009/06/iran-protests-go-beyond-regimes.html

Choice for Idiots

At its forthcoming conference, the B.M.A. is to debate the motion that children who have not been vaccinated against measles should not be allowed to attend schools and risk the lives of other children. No jab, no school.
This has naturally provoked the rearguard of the anti-MMR lobby, but also raised the predictable outcry that this sanction would limit something called 'parental choice'.
The moral choice facing the parent is depicted as being one of individual freedom versus subservience to the 'greater good' - to which all vaccinated children are offered as a statistical sacrifice. This is an entirely fake distinction. A polarisation contructed to paralyse collective instincts and blind us to the fact that they generally act in the interest of the individual, not some abstract impersonal entity called the state.
The actual choice facing parents is whether to send their children unprotected into an environment in which it could contract a possibly deady disease. Statistically, an unvaccinated child is far more likely to be permanently harmed by a measles epidemic than by the MMR vaccine. And the more children who go unvaccinated, the more likely such an epidemic becomes. So for the responsible intelligent parent, there is no choice. It is not a choice between the good of The State and the good of the child, but only of the good of the child. An objectively selfish decision, as most co-operative decisions tend to be.
'Choice', as in so many misuses of the word, is purely for idiots. And as idiots, their statistical children would possibly not benefit from any schooling they would be forced to miss.

Lens Life

people and places

Political Reform - The Red Tape Revolution

More committees and a cull of MP's. That'll solve the problem, according to the politicians and Esther Rantzen. Plus of course a routine moral regeneration resulting in everyone becoming nice and responsible and decent and dutiful overnight. Happens all the time.
Naturally, a recession mentality is different, being forged by deprivation rather than gluttony. And the culture it creates may well deliver more status for social duty than before, when those not lining their pockets were merely a bunch of suckers and losers. But for as long as the profit motive rules, politicians will be bent, and the public will have to judge as best they can.
Individuals now have more power of information than ever. The concept of counter-veillance is here, as seen in the G20 protests. And the steam train is no longer the fastest means of communication. So we do not need the same forms of political representation we did when most people still lived a days trainride from delivering a petition to anyone who could make a difference. We don't need the same form of delegated politician, we need more access to the decision-making process itself.
For the time being, we have the technology and the infrastructure to restore an element of the community camp-fire to politics and economics. And restore some of the trust between people which has now almost completely vanished. And save the planet a bit.
If that technology can put the first black man in the White House, it can surely help restore the balance in favour of those deserving community interests hitherto out-priced and out-lobbied from power by vast commercial interests. We are facing a deep ideological choice between the politics of the last 200 years, and a politics which can see us through the next 200 years.

As the socialist George Orwell said:

"I suggest that the real objective of Socialism is not happiness. Happiness hitherto has been a by-product, and for all we know it may always remain so. The real objective of Socialism is human brotherhood. This is widely felt to be the case, though it is not usually said, or not said loudly enough. Men use up their lives in heart-breaking political struggles, or get themselves killed in civil wars, or tortured in the secret prisons of the Gestapo, not in order to establish some central-heated, air-conditioned, strip-lighted Paradise, but because they want a world in which human beings love one another instead of swindling and murdering one another. And they want that world as a first step. Where they go from there is not so certain, and the attempt to foresee it in detail merely confuses the issue."

The Clingon Expenses Scandal

If indeed it is inevitable that Labour will lose the next election then it has to get rid of Gordon Brown now. By doing so, it might at least cut the size of the landslide to come, and some Labour MPs might save their jobs.
If the Labour party does not have the long-term political survival instincts to see this, it deserves to lose. By proving it does have them by choosing a new leader, whatever his or her merits, it might just stand a chance of reclaiming some public credibility and at least be able to mount some form of effective opposition to the crippled meanderings of Cameron and his Etonian mates.
Gordon Brown will naturally cling on to power as long as possible, hoping to be rescued by his international prestige and his perceived role as the Action Man of the Crunch. But by doing so he is presenting the anti-political media with another year to undermine not only him, but the entire political class, recently resurgent after decades of inaction, but now cowering in the shadow of the next issue of the Daily Telegraph.
By staying, he is also risking the jobs of many of his colleagues, and is therefore in a very delicate political game which cannot be won by bullying. So he may not be granted the time for Barack and Angela and Silvio to make their decisive Facebook entries.
So with the bankers and politicians now discredited, the only thing to do is to invite fascists to have tea with the Queen. Obviously. Only a rank socialist would imagine any other solution.
People are right to be angry at the corruption and greed of the politiciuans they trusted with their vote. But methinks they do protest a teeny bit too much too. After all, they would never cheat the IRS. Just as journalists would never inflate their expenses, or their bosses hide their money in tax havens.
If they were sincere about democratic accountability, the media would be doing some accountancy, namely, by conspicuously balancing the numbers of offending MPs against the numbers of the innocent, giving a true picture of the problem. But the message blaring out is that all elected politicians are villains, which (conveniently) only leaves the press and Joanna Lumley as a source of honesty and decency. Plus of course the unelected politicians...
The obvious solution to this state of complete decadence would be for all the press to back the nutter party of their choice, and by empowering it, seek to then 'control' it.
The rest is history.

When the Harrumphing Had to Stop. From Dunkirk to D-Day.

High tory Sir Patrick Cormack baffled the house of commons and the daytime TV audience at Mick Martin's Last Shamble on monday by comparing the disintegration of British political credibility with the Norway Debate of 1940, now remembered as the moment Neville Chamberlain was forced to resign as leader and make way for Winston Churchill.
To sum everything up in the same vein, today is being portrayed more and more as parliament's Dunkirk, a British disaster which turns the tide, leading presumably to a D-Day assault on the real den of democratic corruption, the frightful European Parliament gravy train, which we will all be voting about next month, and which the fascists and Little Englanders are hoping to join.
Parties are striving to outdo each other as reformers, some going as far as to demand elections to select those to be elected, which will mean a logarithmic rise in election expenses to be paid by the taxpayer. But in another way, this repersents a welcome show of Obaman co-operation in the face of an agreed threat, and a move away from the negative competition usual between British political parties. And why shouldn't they co-operate more? They don't have many ideological differences to fight over since the Labour party signed up to the capitalist consensus in about 1926.
The British people are somehow shocked by the fact that MP's fiddle their expenses as diligently as journalists, or anyone else who feels they are not paid enough. They are shocked by the fact that their MP's are just like them.
The big question is why, after everything they have been told about politicians and bankers and businessmen and the police, are they only outraged now? Why has it taken them so long to wake up to the emasculation of politics by the same culture of consumerist greed which they have enjoyed for ten years, and which was ushered in by their idol, Margaret Thatcher - who, incedentally, also introduced the very expenses system now being dismantled.
More mischief from the grave, which a chastened generation has to now undo.
As for Martin himself, his position was made clear by handling of the illegal police raid on tory shadow minister Damien Green's office months ago. As Nye Bevan put it as prosecution counsel in the case of The People Versus Anthony Eden:
'If he knew that the police were going to raid without a warrant, he is complicit in an illegal action, and should resign. If he did not know, he is too stupid to be speaker.'

The popular accusation is that MPs have undermined of democracy. Also that they have no morals, conscience or backbone. This was exactly the kind of politician needed to allow mad 90's marketonomics free rein. And the same people who demanded this race of eunuchs in parliament are now outraged to discover they have no balls. The generation of politicans which made Roy Hattersley look like a Trotskyite was bred in the kennel of reaganomics and monetarism, and reared in the dreamworld of global digital consumerism. What do the British middle classes expect? A breed of Aneurin Bevans?

G20 Agents Provocateurs

The Metropolitan Police have been very quick to deny accusations by Liberal Democrat MP Tom Brake that there were plain clothes officers urging the crowd to violence at the G20 protests on April 1st. Apparently 'a spokesman' has said that they would never 'deploy officers in this way or condone such behaviour.'
Brake will present evidence tomorrow to the parliamentary joint committe on human rights that one individual who was noisily inciting the crowd inside the kettle was suspected by the crowd of being a police plant, and on displaying a form of I.D. was allowed out. Brake and others are assuming this person was a police officer in plain clothes, or more likely, in some form of crusty costume deemed appropriate for the day. This may well be a reasonable assumption. But it ignores the fact that the other kind of person generally allowed through police lines are journalists, who would have much more to gain from a violent crowd than the police.
The police are generally only obeying orders from their superiors, and the rewards are meagre. Journalists are generally obeying the orders of the market for sensationalist copy, and the rewards, at least for the tabloid owners, are enormous, especially at a time when newspaper sales are crumbling.

The Joanna Lumley Mercenary Agency

Joanna Lumley's emotional need to repay her debt to the Gurkhas is understandable, if a little spooky in its father-worship. But the delights of her public therapy session should not prevent us asking the serious question of why Britain is still hiring mercenaries from the poorest parts of the world. We should be fighting our own wars, not siphoning the most able young men from a tiny state which needs their energies much more than we do.
As usual, Nick Clegg hit the nail on the thumb when he said that those prepared to fight for this country should be allowed to live here. The truth is the reverse, that only the British should be asked to lay down their lives in defence of Britain. Poor countries should not be treated as pools of cheap hired killers doing the dirty work of much richer and more powerful countries.
The current contract granted a pension on return home which enables Gurkhas to take a leading part in Nepalese society, providing whatever skills and experience they might have acquired. Now, not only will Nepal be drained of even more manpower, but once they are gone, they will be unlikely to return. What we will gain on the fast food counters, Nepal will lose in its community councils and education system.
The khukris are out for the government, and this affair provides another hapless cabinet lamb for the block. But it is a triumph of jingoism over sense, and histrionics over government.
La Lumley's populist campaign has given the tabloids another chance to wave the flag and revel in war fever, thereby selling more papers. These are the same tabloids which daily demand British Jobs for British Workers. They are able to simultaneously push the BNP line while also supporting British Military Jobs for Foreign Mercenaries, which is a phenomenal act of mental contortionism. But then, the tabloids are produced by highly trained minds, able to jump through all kinds of intellectual hoops on command. Oxbridge trained minds, in some cases. Some of whom even went to Westminster School and studied anthropology at Cambridge University. ...

Police Medic YR394 on Duty at G20

Threadneedle Street, April 1st 2009. Approximately 1pm.

An unprovoked attack by a police medic standing behind the safety of two rows of colleagues. He cannot know who he is attacking, and is in no danger himself. Another of his colleagues seeks to restrain him and only succeeds in knocking his hat off.

Violence by police medics surely breaches the Red Cross code, by which medics are allowed free passage because they do not bear arms, and thereby endangers other officers in the future.

Meanwhile, officers walked around with their numbers concealed:

The branch of the RBS on Threadneedle Street was surrendered by the police with surprisingly little resistance. As one officer near me explained:

"We'll let them let off steam for a bit."

In other words, RBS was the sacrificial lamb in this game of crowd control.

[Police escorting tents and protesters into RBS]

And given the hate campaign of the right wing press against bankers as a race, and the RBS in particular, it was obviously the easiest sacrifice to sell to middle England. A similar kind of thing happened in the famous trashing of the Whitehall MCDonalds on Mayday 2000, when police just stood back and watched. And then 'kettled' the crowd in Trafalgar Square for four hours.

While Daily Mail readers didn't hate McDonalds at all in 2000, they now hate Fred McShred and his ilk like poison, or so they say. So where were they on April 1st? And how can the Daily Mail and Telegraph and Times run the disgraceful character assassinations of Ian Tomlinson that they did?

It is as if the mainstream press is being torn between two neuroses. The automatic reflex to find a scapegoat for its own follies and vices, and the badly weaned infants' need to love and trust without question the nearest parental substitute, traditionally the police. Which is a familiar trait of the threatened middle classes throughout history. The middle classes (as represented in the pages of the newspapers they buy most) seem on the brink of demanding that bankers have large yellow dollar signs stitched prominently on their suits for all to see, while at the same time frothing at any practical demonstration of the anger they feel at their global, financial betrayal, and excusing any means of suppressing it. A crazy mixed-up social class to be sure. But none the less dangerous for that, as those falsely imprisoned in the city Kettle discovered.

Every time this tactic is used, more people will decide not to demonstrate, they will, in effect, revoke their right to protest, and so opposition is suppressed and a basic human right is debased. The clear intention of kettling is to polarise opposition and reduce demontrations to the so-called 'hard-core'. This frees the police to use more brutal tactics, as nobody loves the 'hard-core', and at the same time invite them to devise a counter-tactic to the kettle, which is not likely to be very peaceful. The result will be more violence and less protest.

The trouble is, that there is as much futile scapegoating by the 'hard-core' as in the pages of the Daily Mail. The hated bankers were simply obeying the laws of the market. If they hadn't grasped the short-term opportunities offered by the alchemy of risk management, with its claim to have discovered the financial elixir of eternal profit, then their competitors would have, and they would be out of a job. They are personally no more to blame than the famous 'Jewish Banking Conspiracy' of Nazi mythology was to blame for the depression of the 1930's. They really were only obeying orders. And furthemore, orders which the consumerist readers of the Daily Mail sanctioned with every purchase on their credit card and every repayment of their tracker mortgage. There were no complaints from them when the value of the houses they occupied rose, just as there were no complaints from the masses of Americans who inflated the 1920's share bubble, while it lasted.

Now that the property market is exposed for the updated sharecropping it is, people are naturally angry. But without property, what are they? When a culture in which identity is defined by property, wealth and power fails, a lot of people are left looking for an alternative source of status and being.

Some will naturally seek a semi-divine embodiment of uncompromising power, who will impose some idealised state of order and deliver a sense of dignity to those willing to follow. Others will reject the entire social project altogether and take to the woods. Others, hopefully the majority, will appreciate that we do now have the technology to do without competition as a way of feeding the world and delivering a reasonable standard of life. And that the anachronistic level of competition still in the system is more of a hindrance than the driver of innovation it once was when it was inventing the steam engine and requiring a more literate workforce and thereby making them aware enough of their rights to demand them.

So is the man who was in town on April Fool's Day, and who talked so enthuisiastically about the need for co-operation, able to satisfy both extremes? Or was that speech his April Fool's joke? After all, Obama is a nice middle class boy too.

In my experience, the level of police violence at Meltdown was not significantly different from anything experienced over the last twenty years, but only now is it causing any widespread outrage - now that professional journalists no longer have a monopoly on the evidence, and their proprietors no longer have a monopoly over distribution.

What does that say about their level of commitment to the truth in the past, given that they must have witnessed and photographed (and suppressed) much worse than what we've seen from Operation Glencoe? For all we know, there may be mouldering images in a draw in Wapping of Blair Peach being murdered.

And what do the lies told about Ian Tomlinson have in common with the lies told about the victims of Hillsborough, who were remembered yesterday? Initially, both sets of lies were told to cover up a breakdown of police tactics and discipline. Blaming the victim is a basic reflex of the British establishment.

During one of the more absurd police advances in Threadneedle Street, when we were yet again forced backwards into a mass of people, and against marble walls, I reminded one officer of the similarity with the tactics of Hillsborough. his response was a curt:

"Well stay at home then!".

That would solve everything, as far as he was concerned.
(http://www.iantomlinsonfamilycampaign.org.uk/).

A much better photograph.

YR394 FROM THE FRONT

PERSISTENCE OF VISION

Daily Mail Denies Right to Self Defence

David Cameron has not expressed support for the following declaration.
He is therefore unfit to be an MP.

8. 'The obligation of the British Nation to regard the sending of foreign warships into British waters, claiming to control the borders and prevent the import of arms to Britain, as a declaration of war, a new occupation, sinful aggression, and a clear violation of the sovereignty of the nation. This must be rejected and fought by all means and ways.'

Gaza is a sovereign state run by an elected government. It has a right to defend itself from attacks by a ruthless neighbour with no scruples about committing war crimes.
Whatever religious nuttery is promoted by this Istanbul Declaration, the assertion of the right to self-defence is something the Daily Mail, and everyone now calling for Daud Abdullah's head on a plate, would surely support - except in the case of one of Israel's victims, apparently.
Let's not forget what the Israeli navy can get up to given a free hand. Days before the onslaught against Lebanon, they were busy shelling Beirut beach parties, in heroic defence of their homeland.

Watching Jade Goody

Watching the ebb and flow of the Jade Goody story is like watching a society turning itself inside-out to try and find out why it hurts. As if watching the way she dies will teach us how to live. As if, in an age when information is power, everything must be scrutinised to make us feel we are alive, because power is life.
So in Goody, but also in the televised family histories of celebrities, and even in our growing need to discover more and more information about our own heritage, and in the entire cyberworld of facebook and Blogger and Twitter, we are involved in a world in which the more details we control and create, the more hits we have on our website, or the more we know about a specific person, the more a part of something we feel, rather than alone.
Jade Goody has provided a perfect story product for our time, massive content for the cyber-world, and as part of that g-g-generation, knew instinctively what to do with it. Where do morals come into it, really?
Maybe now Channel 4 will think about doing a Big Brother from a hospice.
It may happen.