Tom Daley Vs The People's Republic of China & Primark

It seems that the Beijing Olympics will be one of the most tempestuous ever. We can't predict just what fancy dress interruptions might happen in the smog, and what banners are hung out of hotel windows, but this will not be an Olympics to miss. The political valves of this games will be throbbing red hot.
And in the midst of it all, for our personal British delectation and inspiration will be a tiny 14 year old boy standing high above a pool of water, waiting to throw himself in head first.
Little Tom Daley will be the big British story of the games, and an important antidote to the negative publicity being heaped on our gigantic commercial partner. The boy's story will, in effect, be a diversion from the growing pressure on the Chinese ruling dynasty to abandon the succesful political strategy of thousands of years and be more - well - British. Whether he will be aware of his role in this giant political game is hard to say. He is no Jesse Owens or John Carlos or Jack Johnson.
This exploitation of an innocent boy's sporting dreams is not going to be pretty to watch. But then, to be able to enjoy any true sport, the spectator must have a degree of faith in the integrity of the competition, which is why drugs are poisonous to sport. It's like watching a vicar give a sermon while scratching his arse, a politician shaking hands and looking at his watch.. It is a lie.
In the same way, for the Olympic Committee to expect the viewing billions to unremember the political context of the games is to turn 'suspension of disbelief' into an abandonment of critical faculties, and as such to insult the humanity of the spectatorship. All four billion of us, if some estimates are to be believed, and as such, is another nail in the coffin of anything which can be described as sport.
It might be said that the spectacle of this boy striving for pure personal achievement is a form of heroism. A poetic undermining of the vanity and inhumanity of the stampeding politicians and businessmen all around him. An oasis of calm in a storm of opportunism and that. No doubt the handsomely paid columnists in both the liberal guilt-sheets and gutter tabloids will peddle that line, but they will be paid by a media corporation which is making billions from promoting the Beijing Olympics, and from exploiting a child as cynically as any gang master or the shareholders of Primark.
Other hacks will be peddling the line that It's Only A Game. That sport and politics are 'not the same thing'. That we should just settle down for two weeks of branded running jumping and throwing at the corporation's quadrennial Summer Fete, and that should be good enough for us.
But what does that mean? Wallowing in the spectacle of the sleek Uber-mensch competitive ethic? Turning our brains off and blanking out the context of the event?
The truth is more that by becoming a huge cash cow, with a huge vested interest in attracting the advertising budgets of the nastiest political entities on earth - the global corporations, and keeping them in their place at the top of the power structure, sport has abandoned us. Professional sport is a contradiction in terms. Using it to promote classical, fascistic ideals of perfection and the superman is also death to the idea of human effort for its own sake. An act of worship to the thug who "solves everything with a sock on the jaw" as Orwell said of the gangster hero of American culture. And one using deadly combinations of robotising drugs to achieve its illusion. The fact that the Sydney Olympics is now a complete drug-re-written farce is all the evidence needed that the marketplace is just as tyrannical and cynical a coach as any East German sports commissar on a medals quota - or else.
The posturing between the US and China, with Tibet as the stamping ground, is quite natural for the great superpowers of any age. The disturbing question is whether these competing power blocs represent different ideologies, or just regional variations of the same cynical power politics, designed merely to preserve the status quo rather than improve life for the mass of people. "Is the CIA behind the "Free Tibet" campaign?"
Just a thought about the Chinese security guards who are protected the holy Olympic Flame as it passed through London.
Correct me if I'm wrong, but don't the Chinese specialise in dozens of different and superhuman martial arts techniques each guaranteeing the skilled master almost total invincibility against any enemy, no matter how large or vicious or determined?
You would have thought the Chinese government would have sent a few representatives of these noble 'arts' along to give an example of their sublime techniques where it mattered most. Instead we got the usual frantic western dust-up of flailing elbows and sudden trips, which is the reality of physical combat.
Another myth bites the dust. Alongside Sport, that is.

And how can this child of sport help being compared and contrasted with the millions of child labourers in India and other places, at the sweaty end of the Primark profit-chain? How can the sight of this child with the eyes of the world on him not remind us of the millions of lives which are destroyed each year so that we can cheer ourselves up cheaply with a new shirt or dress every week, so that consumerism can get its quick fix behind the bikesheds?

The answer to both questions must be because it must seem natural to us that these lives are destroyed. Otherwise, we would never shop again with confidence. Just as it seems natural and worthy that India is now a rich and powerful country, with a growing oligarchy of billionaires, and a market presence to be proud of. It is also natural that with access to such token wage bills, Indian entrepreneurs should attract manufacturing jobs away from the west, causing unempleyment, but at the same time, making unemployment more tolerable by reducing the cost of clothes in Primark. And naturally, unemployment is more tolerable in Britain than in India because we have a welfare state. So isn't it time India had one too? Now that she is an embryonic super power. In fact, isn't it time that the western business interestes started demanding that India bear its fair share of global poverty, and allow the jam ofmanufacturing employment to be spread a little thinner but a little wider. In other words, it is time that the CBI started lecturing India (and China) on social policies it would once have described as socialist.
This is assuming, of course, that the likes of the CBI do not relish the prospect of India sliding into a form of Neo-Feudalism, based essentially on slave labour - because if they are prepared to accept that political model in India, why should we assume they would be hostile to it in Britain? Especially as it seems to be so profitable. In fact, why should Digby Jones have any problems with the Chinese political model, given how stable and long-lasting it obviously is.
Whatever muffled outburts of defiance we get to see in the smoggy Peking august, it's safe to predict that there won't be many demands for fair housing benefit and access to universal trade union rights from many western media machines. And yet without this economic safety net, a system based on a vote every 5 years is a pale imitation of democracy, and as India - the biggest democracy of all - shows, can still run on slavery.

Beijing Olympics 2008

The Easter Message - School Passion Plays Banned!

Another triumph for the anti-christian hordes threatening British culture.
The traditional school Passion Play is now totally extinct, and with it one of the formative religious experiences of our culture.
The traditional school Passion, with the eagerness to know who would be the little boy nailed to the cross, and who would be the Roman guards whipping Him from station to station, and who would be the villainous Judas, who would deliver the final thrust of the sword - is now a thing of the dim and distant past.. The community involvement in making the scenery and props - and the blood substitute and scar tissue and crown of thorns - all gone. The competition among mothers to provide the Last Supper - all sacrificed in the name of namby-pamby secular political correctness.

Obviously the socialist spoilsports do not realise that the Christian Faith does not cause children to be upset by a touch of gore and agony, it protects them from it. While The Passion reveals the core message of Christianity, it also provides sanctuary from the threat of pain - in this life and the next. Children therefore benefit from being exposed to the glories of crucifixion as early as possible. This is what the social-workers and saboteurs of respectable society fail to understand, and why the relatively insignificant Nativity is still allowed, while the Passion is celebrated only ever paid lip-service, and involves no blood at all.

Bring back the school Passion Play in all its glory, I say.
What's the problem? The blood and gore? Why? Surely that's the point of christianity, to offer a salvation from pain and death. So by hiding our kiddiwinks from the realities of the Passion, we are creating a generation of heathens.
They get their Nativity play at Xmas, why not the true meaning of Christianity at Easter? Because nobody believes in it, that's why. If they did, the horror wouldn't be horrible but wonderful. And it simply isn't. If children were forced to confront the realities of crucifixion - even in the same saccharin way they mark the Nativity - they would be very upset indeed. The parents simply wouldn't allow it.
Christianity in modern Britain is a sham, if it wasn't, it would have died out when we stopped burning old women who knew the herbal cure for period pains.

Chip McCain Patronises Britain

In his speech after meeting Gordon Brown, the geriatric presidential candidate informed us that we could have our country back. That 'whatever Britain wanted to do with its troops was up to us'. Or words to that effect.
Gee Thanks. Who does this passed-over colonel think he is? This is a nice quiet town. We don't cotton to city slickers and their hifalutin ways telling us how to run our lives. Or do we?

Heather McCartney and other Media Victims

The media have to have flesh to feed on. Objects for their hatesheets. Whether it is this obviously unstable woman for being unstable. Or Fergie because she was ginger and a size 14. Or Jade Goody because she wasn't Jane Asher. Or Britney because she was ill. Or Bruno because he was ill. Or Gazza because he was ill...
Heather McCartney peddles the line that as an amputee she is persecuted because she is disabled. She is right but for the wrong reason. The mentally unstable are fair game in the media Hate Game.

CRAZY PERSON IS CRAZY! LOOK AT THEM BEING CRAZY!

Seems to sell enough wood pulp to keep Murdoch in satellites. Sick. The sad sadists by proxy who swallow these buckets of snot should remember that the pillory and stocks were abolished long before the battle of the Somme. They should know that even General Haig was more human than them. At least he had the excuse of patriotism, all they have is the sick superiority of Marie Antoinette.
 The press do like insulting the mentally ill, such as Frank Bruno and Gazza. Meanwhile, the psychological result of being a paid liesmith, of being a contortionist with the truth, is to distort the victim's sense of reality, to make them crazy as Gazza. It is therefore a matter of some urgency for journalists to make up their minds which world they want to live in, the optimistic one which tries to make things better for as as many people as possible (progress) or the one in which they are allowed to spread their chronic depression as widely as is profitable for their bosses.
 Make the right choice and people will start to despise them a bit less. Make the wrong one and they will continue to be reptiles.

The Five Year Plan.

Five years of the most expensive promotional video in history - for the arms industry.
From the grand opening night of Shock & Awe, through every minute of grisly horrormongering since, all designed to create fear and the need for weapons- which in turn eats up productive capacity, which keep people afraid and insecure and keen to find strong leaders to defend them.

The 'plan'? I lied, there is no plan. Waste and degradation come quite naturally to modern consumerism.

Genetic Labelling From Birth, say Police Eugenicists

This should go down well.
I like the idea that criminals can be detected in childhood by their genes.
That would mean that we can have fore-knowledge of all sorts of other human characteristics. Political leadership, for instance, That would do away with all those messy elections, and put some old-fashioned common sense back into society.
Women who would be far better off rearing and householding could be segregated at birth and given appropriate physical training and taught the right skills to keep a man and a family happy.
Children who wouldn't benefit from a lick of education could simply be put in gyms and trained to menial tasks and to be the sporting entertainers of the future.
Children destined to be fascist scientists could be humanely exterminated at birth in the interest of the species - or is that going a bit too far?

Again, the teaching unions offer some sanity. What would we do without those terrible unions?

Ministry Of Lies Write History Of Iraq.

Teachers are rightly incensed by the prospect of having to lie to their pupils on demand. They object to being used as apparatchiks of the M.O.D - they have seen the hoops jumped through by the journalistic profession in its eagerness to please, and desperately wants to avoid the same shame. They realise that if they lose as much credibility as the hackocracy, their jobs will be impossible.

Teachers have to deal with real people. And they are charged with the job of making the lives of their pupils better. Their purpose is to give them skills and a level of appreciativeness which will enrich their future lives and hopefully deliver afuture generation of people better able to cope with the problems of society than in the past.

Sadly, the same can't be said of the bulk of journalistic endeavour lately.
The collusion over the Windsor boy's adventure holiday was merely a lapse into Victorian press etiquette - but with the added treats of hours of royal-rich footage and interviews to come. Far worse has been the collusion with the culture of fear. Fear sells newspapers, and as life isn't that terrifying, lies have to be told. And the person telling the lies, for a few crumbs from the table to of the media corporations, are journalists. They must know what they are doing is wrong and that it can't be doing them any good in this world or the next. But they carry on. And their purpose seems to be to make most people's lives more fearful, to narrow their perspective to a few marketable, packagable sterotypes - Muslims. Terrorists. Hoodies. Chavs. Yobs. Wags.

I suppose lawyers face the same industrial schizophrenia. They are almost as well-respected in Britian as journalists.

There is no call to bribe or twist
Thank God, the British journalist.
Seeing what the man will do unbribed
There's no occasion to.

Even More obvious Link

British Schoolgirls Ban Shakespeare

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A level students at Yesodey Hatorah Senior Girls' School in Stamford Hill, North London, decided to boycott Shakespeare because they believed 'The Tempest' to be ant-semitic. Rabbi Abraham Pinter defended the decision of his pupils:

"There was a perception that Shakespeare was anti-Semitic... We felt that we needed to respect those children's views. "We did nothing to discourage them. We teach our pupils to have pride in what they believe in. If you do believe in something strongly, there can be consequences. But sometimes it's worth paying the consequences."

So that's alright then.

'Do all men kill the things they do not love?'

Is this just more Religious Fundamentalism Gone Mad! Or is the story of bitter, exact retribution too near the knuckle for a generation of jewish people infested with territorial zionism? If Shakespeare isn't safe, how many more real poets and artists will be thrown on the scrapheap, and what mind-manacled dross will take their place? Does this really raise serious questions of artistic and intellectual freedom, or is it just another media-inflated case of teenagers showing off their newly-developed minds? Intellectual growing pains or religious indoctrination? And if Shakespeare is out, what's the problem with The Veil?

War Getting SO Expensive.

The cost of the Iraq war

Which is the point, of course. War uses up productive capacity, and eliminates surplus production - thereby solving a key problem of modern capitalism, or at least, keeping it under control.
So the more expensive the war the better. It is strange that Gordon Brown doesn't realise that.
Without war, there would be far too many skilled workers available to build the hospitals and schools and other things we need. This would force people to the conclusion that there is nothing which cannot be achieved through shared - or rather - distributed sacrifice, as in war, but without the obscene need for waste and mass murder. Through co-operation rather than competition. And that would be the end of the elitist, obsolete, political hierarchies of the last ten thousand years.
With the fifth anniversary of the Iraq War on the 15th, and no clean end in sight, it is time that the villainous confidence trick of industrial war was understood.

Stop The War

Meanwhile, the Climate War, the war to undo the sabotage of industrial capitalism goes on undeclared. The recurring analogy with total war, as made by Friends of the Earth and others, is very apt. This is a war for survival, and as in the total wars of the C20th, there will have to be sacrifices. How soon we realise that will determine whether the war is won or lost.

No government will make any serious headway aganst carbon emissions until it is free to do so. Until it has cut loose the drag of the profit-driven corporations, who will never do anything until it is too late. As they did in the total wars of the C20th, when the British corporate classes were busy supplying Germany with arms and materials untilthe last possible minute.

Pubs Due Insurance Rebate.

Since the total ban on smoking in pubs, there hasn't been much discussion about the insurance savings to the average pub. Surely the fire risk is reduced since the ban, and this should be reflected in the premiums being paid. Otherwise, pubs are paying for cover they probably do not need, or at least, which the insurance companies are now far less likely to have to pay out on. Which is more to the point.
What is this reminiscent of?
It's almost as if there was a once tax or other charge which was initially included in your rent, but then became payable directly by you seperately, but your rent stayed the same. As if the landlord was given a bonus at the expense of the tenant, and neither noticed!
But how could that happen? Surely the sturdy British Yeomanry with its famous business sense knows when it is paying for nothing? And yet it did happen, unless someone in private rented accomodation at the time can provide evidence that their rent was reduced when the ill-fated Poll Tax was introduced.
Until that point, A Portion of Your Rent Was Rates. We were reminded of this in a public information film of the same name. After the poll tax, private landlords all received an instant bonus, and private tenants paid for it. And neither seemed to notice - though the subsequent property boom showed that some small landlords read their bank-statements, at least.

Who Runs The Internet? In Defence of Trolls.

According to experts who can nearly speak English, some internet users can apparently not distinguish between "legitimate authority" and "illegitimate authority". They are simply "anti-authority". And therefore fail to realise that co-relation between "authority and likeability" does not imply that people necessarily assume "authority" because of "likeability".
Whatever that means.
Let's take a stab at interpreting it.
What is 'legitimate authority' on messageboards? Surely, the company or person who owns the website and sets the guidelines for use? Then what is 'illegitimate authority'? And why is there a problem recognising it when the only form of authority which counts is the legitimate kind?
As for likeability, while this may be important to those who have no real friends, or are confined by their careers to strictly regimented forms of social interaction, it is as illusory online as it is in any other form of expression.
'Likeability' also only has any relevance in a social context. And the concept of the online 'community' is equally flawed. It is true that the internet is the ideal medium for co-ordinating lobby groups and other caucuses for action or support, but the attempts to create pals' groups on messageboards invariably create inward looking, exclusive, self-congratulating cliques. The general pattern is for these kinds of groups to cluster around self-selected 'monitors' who take it upon themselves to assess the behaviour and deportment of every poster on their patch, on the look-out for 'trolls' and 'ments' and the other assorted mythological creatures invented to keep the children frightened and huddled round the camp fire for safety.

The new vocabulary of abuse is fascinating in this respect. The 'troll', once labelled, is always labelled. And with no comeback because the accusation is impossible to defend - unless the accusers are prepared to quote and address the offending text, which they never, ever are. This definitely undercuts their grandiose pretensions to professionalism somewhat, calling to mind a bunch of frustrated hacks, browbeaten by their bosses and destined to tell lies for a living until they draw their pensions.
The troll of fairytales lived under bridges and prevented travel by frightening the unwary. In reality, there are no bridges in the internet. No rivers blocking the path to dialogue. In the messageboard fairytale, the trolls are perched on stepladders in Milton Keynes central carpark, probably carrying a placard warning against the lascivious effects of meat and protein on the endocrine system and nerves. Anyone wasting their time with them does it because they want to, and therefore live a life which has no other form of stimulation, which is sadder than bingo.
In truth, the word 'troll' is totally meaningless, and its use is a sign of a poster in flight from thought. Of someone trying to become less conscious. Of someone unable to deal with the difficulties of difference other than by compartmentalisation and sectarianism. Of someone seeking to limit the amont of communication created by the internet - most powerful communication tool of all. In fact, as with other forms of sectarianism and paranoia, there are no trolls, only children afraid of bridges.
Now I know what "cannot distinguish between legitimate authority and illegitimate authority" means! Do as you're told and be like us or get out! A representative messageboard thug might be overheard grunting to another messageboard thug:

Stueyx
" Fuck 'em. They don't like it they can fuck off - or be like us. After all, it's not as if we can get our hands on them and give them the kicking they deserve for not being like us."

Who'd have thought it outside the Taliban and the Mafia? And from people pretending to be hotshot information 'professionals' who do nothing but post insults on websites all day. Even writers, who really should know better than to pervert both truth and their minds in this way. But then, the self-proclaimed british intelligentsia were always their own worst enemy, and as authoritarian as any commune or anarchist sect. Here's another one from a paranoid pile of puke on the Guardian entitled: "How Do You Deal With Trolls and Idiots Online?" Note the heavy emphasis on restriction of the freedom of speech. I have to translate again, because the Guardian refuses to allow me to quote GUT here, which is strange - or maybe not:

Lawlsie - 06:40pm Mar 11, 2008 GMT (#587 of 608)

'He is a saboteur. His words have the power to cause other posters to stop writing, and their brains to stop working.
I'd ban whoever I didn't approve of and who I couldn't better in argument or couldn't understand. When messageboards were run by mob rule, we could control exactly who was let in and who wasn't. We never had these problems then. People knew their place.
Sadly, the internet is not like that anymore. Anyone can join . The only answer is to make it too expensive for any but a like-minded minority, and then we could talk amongst ourselves to our hearts' content, and never hear another opinion but ours."

However, I have to risk a lawsuit and post this priceless piece of pomposity:
"We are all of us much better than this and much better than any troll."
You can just smell the self-pity and fear.

And still the carnival of idiocy goes on.
"Nothing is any good unless it makes money for someone else."
That is, the current theory that only paid writing matters. That money infallibly directs langauge towards truth and integrity of purpose. That nothing written by amateurs can be anything more than 'vanity publishing'. A theory which ignores completely the fact that the history of the media is almost exclusively one of highly sponsored lies - until very recently.
The pamphlets of the Chartists', trades unions and Suffragettes didn't attract any serious money, and certainly didn't make any. They cost money to produce. Market forces and the profit motive were objective opponents of these exampls of freedom literature as they always are. It is interesting that the liberal pretend-intelligentsia of today are less tolerant than Mao-Tse Tung, when he declared 'Let a thousand flowers bloom'. Their attitude, as expressed on GUT, is to smother all expression at birth by demanding it makes a profit in order to be taken seriously. The market fundamentalists are put in the same dilemma by the new universal freedom from capital restrictions on expression as the religious fundamentalists were when their dogma and certainties were painted into a corner by secularism. The question is, will they go as far to defend their paranoia? Apparently, total censorship is on the cards, as is making internet access too expensive for anyone except the chosen few. So how far will short of actual violence will their paranoia take them? As we've seen from the so-called 'Stueyx', some of the lesser breeds without the law relish the prospect, and deeply resent the new global freedom of speech given to everyone with a broadband connection. The only conceivable reason for this jealousy is that has exposed the poverty of their ideology and imagination. And as they are unable to play the game, no-one else should.
The old and trusted phrase to describe such churls is still the best. Dogs In The Manger, who are only capable of yapping responses such as:

SidewaysCork - 03:05pm Jul 14, 2008 GMT (#985 of 1017)
Fuck off and start your own board you tedious cunt.

Which is the messageboard equivalent of the McCarthyite sneer: 'Go back to Russia.'

Since the initial posting, the threads which are linked to have been deleted by The Guardian, which is a shame. No doubt the perpetrators of the Taliban sentiments can be persuded to repeat themselves. If so, they will be quoted verbatim, and damn the GUT and its proprietorial claims on the madness of its posters. Likewise with lies published on GUT messageboards. Or 'Malicious Falsehoods' as the Guardian has recently come to know them.

The BBC White and Black Minstrel Show

'The white working class feels alienated, threatened and voiceless,' And when were they anything else - especially if you leave out the word 'white'?
Except under the dreadful tyranny of those ghastly trade unions, of course.
But that source of empowerment and self-defence was finally crushed. And everyone from BBC bosses to rabid radio shock jocks and newspaper editors and company directors were very pleased. How much wider a cross section of society do you need to please?
The despicable image of the white face being systematically defaced to a black minstrel mask of alien language and culture is one of the worst cases of graphic hypocrisy seen on TV. The BBC should be ashamed. It totally ignores the reality of class identity and status, which is that the 'working class' now being courted has hardly ever been acknowledged or examined in British literature, art or journalism. And when it has been, the establishement has either attacked or ignored the result.
This theory that the White Working Class is being systematically abused and stripped of its identity by the mere existence of non-native working class cultures - and not by the demands of the marketplace - is yet another distraction from the political realities of the class system, and will only have the effect of further alienating people from those with whom they share a common cause. Which is the only reason for it.
The thing which really grates is the assumption that this 'alienation' is something new, and therefore can be blamed on immigration. This is clearly the unavoidable message of the trailer.
The face is not smothered in the logos of MacDonalds and Coke and Nike and all the other corporate vultures who are actually stripping the corpse of British identity and alienating British people from their culture. Instead the face is smothered in script - Chinese, Arabic, Hindi, Cyrillic - all written by the human hand.
In other words, the human beings who come here to improve their lives are to blame for this assault on the working class. Not the economic system they obey, and even less the corporate giants who are making the real money. So to solve the problem, the solution is obviously to get rid of the people and their alien, defacing cultures. Which is the ultimate act of alienation by the BBC, and of appeasement to the BNP and their fellow-travellers at The Daily Tits and other rags who try to keep working class aspirations as low and animal as possible.
There were lots of choices to be made when planning this preview. The choice of handwritten script in black sends a clear message that white British culture is being de-faced by alien cultures of different races. Not by impersonal, mercenary decisions in boardrooms, not by the great cycles of economic growth and decline or inevitable advances in technology or transport, but by the mere proximity in the same country of different kinds of human beings.
This is despicable, and I hope is not representative of the remit of the series.
------------------
March 7th.
Last night's Newsnight, with Margaret Hodge, Bob Crowe, Jon Grunt and a befuddled teenage apprentice tory MP showed exactly why this series will be a complete waste of time - unless the intention is to divide the working class even further and distract them from their common problems.
Amid all the futile mudslinging there was not a single word about the economic system which demands the homogenisation of ethnic cultures, wage-cutting immigration, and general insecurity among the people. Bob Crowe was just able to squueze in the point that Thatcherite de-unionisation was a factor in undercutting British wages. But was not able to make the point that the likes of Jon Gaunt, who smirked the loudest over the destruction of the main representative body for working class interests are now the ones whingeing loudest over the effects.
But apart from that, nobody had anything to say. The exploitative, divisive, dog-eat-dog, warmongering, planet-destroying capitalist system got off scot-free. Again. No surprises there, then.

10/3/08
And so it drags on.
BBC2 controller Roly Keating offers perhaps the feeblest, off-the-peg excuse for an excuse in the history of television. According to him, the infamous trailer is Only Doing It's Job:

"I absolutely refute that it is racist. It's clearly arresting, It denotes to audiences that they will find certain elements of this season challenging. Part of the point odf the series is to stimulate public debate."

Is that so? In that case why broadcast a trailer designed to stimulate fear and irrational hostility? And while we're being picky, what Roly Poly actually did to the accusation of racism was 'reject' it. As one of his commissions, the admirable Q.I. tells us, 'refutation' involves a lot more work that merely proclaiming: 'Je Refute', like some be-ruffed aristocrat. Perhaps he should watch his own programmes from time to time. He might learn something.
In the meantime, sensible people across the country have been outraged by this piece of racist trash. In the same edition of G2 as Keaton's double page spread was this from a little letter in English.

"This trailer is offensive, misleading and extremely divisive and is more typical of the attention-grabbing headlines we see in the tabloids...
it should be removed from our screens because it does nothing to promote understanding of or empathy for the white working class (as it pretends to do) or understanding of those whom this group considers, unjustifiably, a threat to their heritage."

Also:
BBC’s White Season is founded on racist lies
'Wise Words'
Crooked Timber
Challenging the Whitewash

Death Penalty Hysteria.

Why is it that countries which have the death penalty still have to use it? If it were any sort of deterrent, once a decade would be plenty. But in fact, those regimes which are most resolutely in favour of strangling, poisoning and burning human beings, are the ones which seem to have to do it the most. The USA, Iran and China spring to mind. Far from being a deterrent, the prospect of death seems to be an encouragement to the scrambled mind of the average murderer. Which does tend to lead to the conclusion that murder is not a rational act susceptible to deterrence by the threat of civic revenge. Again, the institutionalisation of revenge can only create more murderers, if anything.

Meanwhile in Britain, a lot of newspapers and TV advertising time has been sold recently after two brutal murderer cases, and the resulting, predicatble baying for the noose to be brought back into play. The Wapping Daily Tits can hardly wait. Along with the other rags which feed of the bloodlust of the mob, it is incapable of any curiousity into the causes of things. It sees the symptom, in this case the murderer, and if he can be disappeared, the problem will disappear.
It's a quaint old attitude, and predates science of course, just as astrology and witchcraft do.
But sadly, the notion that you can cure a boil by cutting it off is not one which can run a modern society. Nowadays, since the middle of the C17th or so, we eradicate the cause of a problem, then the symptom tends to disappear.

Countries like Canada seem to have mastered the knack of applying Cause & Effect to their societies, and have reduced murder rates since they stopped strangling people to death. Why are we not able to do the same? Could it be because there is far too much money to be made from keeping the prospect within reach of those who need to fantasise on the suffering of others? Is it just another branch of the horror industry?

Rowan Williams and Sharia Law

Strange to be defending an archbishop, but this was another example of rabid hatemongering by the right wing press.
Rowan Williams simply never proposed anything they accused him of.
He did not propose that Sharia law should take precedence over British Law. Or that Islam be incorporated into British Law. The closest he seems to have got is

"Muslims could choose to have marital disputes or financial matters dealt with in a Sharia court."

The hysteria has had naturally the effect of demonising Islam even further. Which may be good for selling papers, but is a very bad idea for Britain. Much worse than anything which Williams was proposing, in fact.

A system of settling disputes out of court within a year - and without paying exorbitant lawyers fees? What next? Interest free loans? Now that would cause mass apoplexy in the editing suites of Docklands.

The Art Of Spain - BBC4

I know it's a visual arts thing and all, but the treatment of flamenco could have been a little less daft, just for me. The influence of the Gitano on Picasso is fairly common knowledge, after all.
Nevertheless, the apparent fact that there isn't much in the way of visual art by nomads and exiles did make an interesting point by default.
The overwhelming profusion of Moorish and Catholic decorative religious art and the 'fear' of empty spaces he talked about are just Life (profusion) and Death (blankness) surely? Proof that the work of God was indeed everywhere possible.
And the quote from the Quoran was interesting. If there is only one god and everything is god, then surely territorial claims, such as the claim that Andalucia should be 'returned' to Islamic rule, are blasphemy. Its occupation by the Infidel is merely God's will. As in fact are apparent heresies like Evolution and Modern Astrophysics.
Maybe, maybe not.

The Unique Human Dilemma.

We've never been as certain that things are going to change so radically.
Millenarianism of some kind is a natural state in human nature and affairs. The sense of an ending is innate. But the difference between previous Armageddon hysterias and us is that now the concern is truly global, and based on a generally (if not universally) agreed system of thought and deduction - science.
For a long time, there has been too much competition and not enough co-operation in the recipe for human progress. In fact, co-operation is our defining human characteristic, far more so than competition. Civilisation has always needed a specific balance of competition and co-operation. But old habits die hard, and industrial capitalism definitely forced more primitive competition into the mix at exactly the same time when the added productivity it delivered provided the opportunity for more co-operation. This 'decision' of history to take the wrong fork in the road lead to the planet-threatening excesses of Consumerism. And now we know, with the benefit of hindsight - another difference between us and almost every other generation of human history - that we are stuffed if we don't do something fast.
I think that amounts to a unique dilemma in human history.

BoJo Bid Botched By Backstairs Ballyhoo?

Estimated £12k worth of free office space for Boris Johnson's mayoral campaign team from a developer who'd been given the bum's rush by Livingstone for wanting to build a Godzilla Theme Park opposite parliament, or some such. Shirayama Shokusan, they're called.
Still, it was only ever a matter of time.
And what does all this make David Cameron? And what does it say about his intentions for the insitution of London government, and Londoners themselves, that he should back such a predictably hapless buffoon?
Now I don't know who was who's bitch at Eton, but.. How could he not know that the allegations would soon start flying?
Maybe Kelvin McKenzie was right after all.

Livingstone and Northern Rock on the World Stage

One of the main charges made this week against Ken Livingstone is that he sought to create a 'mini-state'. A State within a state.. independent of the national government in some way.
The fact is that cities like London are now more than the administrative and commercial centres for the nation which they were in the age of the railways. Since the globalisation of capital, they do have their own economic identity. Globalisation has led to the fragmentation of the old national unit, as Scottish devolution also shows.
The role of the nation state is now to obey the rules of the global market, and pick up the pieces when it fails, as with Northern Rock. Its role as an expression of the political will of the masses is over, if it ever existed.
What still remains though, is the desperate need for something to oppose the demands of property and ownership over everything. An entity to support the quaint notion that it is not a crime to steal a bucket of water to put out a fire in a neighbours' house which might otherwise burn down the entire street.

Chaos Architecture On Sea

Timber from the Ice Prince cargo ship, which sank off the Dorset coast, is washed up on Worthing beach in West Sussex.

Great sculptures. They'll be even better in 5 years.
These constructions were made by the sea. The structural integrity they have was determined by the forces which created them. And so the more force (wave and tide) is exerted on them, the more they will be constructed by them, not destroyed. So shouldn't these structures be the most natural at absorbing those forces? And the more they are battered into shape, the greater will be their ability to absorb the same forces. In other words, these could be the perfect, chaos designed, tidal barriers. Any structural engineers or chaos architects out there?
Either way, some of this stuff is worth leaving, if only as a social experiment of how people react when a surplus of a commodity is left unsecured. After all, there is quite enough for everyone, and no top hat is going to turn up with a dozen artics for a load of soggy timber.

Children Vs Intel

Glimpsing Nigeria's Digital Lifeline by Jonathan Fildes
Intel says bye to One Laptop by Rory Cellan-Jones

Under the hood of the $100 laptop by Andrew Webb

John Naughton's take in this week's Observer was also interesting. As usual.
He says of OLPC's 'partner':

"It was a strange marriage. The first big contract signed by OLPC was with the government of Peru, which bought 300,000 XOs. Its vice-minister for education was then visited by an Intel salesperson, who is said to have comprehensively disparaged the little green machine. The politician apparently took notes of the exchange, which he then shared with Nicholas Negroponte, co-founder of the OLPC project, who shared them with Fortune magazine. 'It was unbelievable,' according to Negroponte. '"The XO doesn't work, and you have no idea the mistake you've made. You'll get into big trouble", that kind of stuff. We kept the sale, but when one of your partners does that, what do you do?'"

Here was a clear attempt to sabotage the project by a mega-corporation furious that a huge market was being denied it, but too blinded to see that the future markets resulting from a succesful OLPC would benefit them much more in the long term.
It is also surely no co-incedence that the windows machine is favoured by the most authoritarian educational systems.