Donkeyshott & Xuitlacoche

I believe that part of knowledge is its desire to show itself and its refusal to put up with merely a hidden existence…Knowledge radiates and wishes to expand everything along with itself. One ascribes the qualities of light to it… There is a small Herodotus in every young person who hears about hundreds of things, and it is important that no one should attempt to raise that person beyond that, by expecting restriction towards a profession…They wish to radiate knowledge as soon as it takes hold of them, so that it won’t become mere property for them. Tony Hall

Britain's asylum system assumes children are guilty until proven innocent Phil Hall  guardian.co.uk, Monday November 24 2008 08.00 GMT  I tutor a 15-year-old Chadian refugee. His father was killed and the youngster was imprisoned and tortured. His mother had him sprung him from prison. From prison he was sent in the back of a lorry to the coast where he was stowed in the hold of a cargo ship heading for Dover. He arrived at 4am one January morning in 2007, wet and dressed only in a T-shirt. He had no idea where he was but instead of sympathy and succour he was interrogated and intimidated by angry, white-skinned "green-eyed" people (as he saw them). He had been taught to fear the Italians when he was little, he said, and these people were scaring him, so he assumed they were Italians. Given all that he had been through he couldn't cope and broke down. He suffers from post-traumatic stress disorder. Later on he was given an interpreter, but the interpreter ...

…reference to Woodrow Wilson brought to mind a comment by Wilson in one of his speeches, published as The New Freedom in 1913: "The government, which was designed for the people, has got into the hands of their bosses and their employers, the special interests. An invisible empire has been set up above the forms of democracy." Tony Hall - Donkeyshott

IN PERSPECTIVE… In the second week of September, large numbers of innocent occupants were killed in the bombing of big city buildings at the instigation of Islamist terror groups run and financed by Arab Muslims. New York in 2001. Of course. And Moscow two years before. Responding to a wave of anger and revulsion, staring at the prospect of a centre that could not hold, of a state no longer able to protect its citizens, the President ordered the armed forces to move in and to bomb and blast the perceived source of the terror. That’s how Bush saw it and did it in Afghanistan; that’s how Putin responded two years before, in Chechnya. We all know the differences. But what are the similarities? It was three decades earlier, in the third week of September 1970, that the Jordan Army went into the Palestinian refugee camps, bombing and blasting. They killed 5,000 people. That was Black September. The historical times of the first black September were very different to those of the second and ...

Karen Armstrong says that all religions have compassion at their core and that they should all be looking for issues where they can converge, and converge on the enlightened values and laws of secular democracies too; secular values enshrined by such documents as the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR). We have to support the UDHR to the hilt, but I would argue that rather than using the opportunity of the anniversary of the UDHR to beat the rationalist drum, we should be reanalysing UDHR and broadening it into a commonplace of humanity. We should be looking at the underlying syncretisms between different ethical codes and in the light of these syncretisms, finally bring as many people on board the UDHR bandwagon as possible. What chance is there then that an evangelical atheist can agree on the need for convergence between secular and religious principles? A concept of human rights that ignores religious belief is exclusive, not inclusive. Convergence has far more real pot...

There he is looking out of an advertisement in the pages of the Guardian: James Bond, a public schoolboy with a machine gun in his hands advertising Barclaycard and Aston Martins. Was he once a member of the Bullingdon Club too? Probably. But where can we find an alternative James Bond, the heroic and stylish story of a hard-wearing sophisticated hero of the left? How about Dale, Dr Dale T McKinley? As a youth he moved to the US from his native Zimbabwe, where he trained at Ranger school, the US equivalent of the SAS. He went on to get a PhD in Politics and while he was studying for it he travelled to El Salvador where he was with the Farabundo Martí National Liberation Front (FMLN) and used his military skills to defend village communities. Back in North Carolina Dale became incensed when he heard the CIA were recruiting at his university. He had seen the CIA's Felix Leiters at work in Central America and hated them. With colleagues he hunted them down and physically threw the rec...

On the day after the Nobel committee gives a Frenchman the prize, lets say what's true about the Emperor's new clothes. US TV series like Lost are hyped up entertainment products with little or no lasting cultural relevance - especially outside the USA. There is a place called planet USA where J.J. Abrams and his colleagues exist. I think it must be a little like secondlife . There, human reality is the product of a lot of fictionalisation. Artificial values are manufactured and sustained in the face of Imperial wars. Stories of the American dream belie the reality of lives lived under the thumb of the US corporates, banking mafias and olygarchies. In the 1930s and 40s there were a group of people who made intelligent and thoughtful films. This progressive group was later extirpated from US cultural life by McCarthyism. And since then there has been very little of real value produced in the mainstream. What is subversive or interesting about Lost then? We can conclude, howeve...

Knowingly or unknowingly the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation's good works have helped to offset an aggressive and destructive US foreign policy. The Foundation has done its best to save lives and rescue communities in Africa, while in the Middle East, US foreign policy has destroyed lives and communities. What is the Gates Foundation's answer to the conundrum of African development? It is to triage Bill Gates wealth towards helping the poorest people in Africa. The scale is different, but there is nothing new in Gates'philanthropic instincts. Helping poor Africans is a fairly traditional practice for US magnates. Generations of Rockefellers have had lots of fun raising money for African charities at $250,000 a head dinners. The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation aims to rescue African communities by financing the poor, helping small farmers (in particular women) and combating disease. But when it comes to confronting neo-liberal agendas, the Foundation has had very li...

A sweet, piping voiced colleague reminded me of Bobby from the railway children. In fact she told me a story which shows she actually was Bobby. She had been travelling from Calcutta to Delhi. He mother sent her when she was 14 with her little 8 year old brother. But with warnings that as they went past one part of the journey, they shouldn't look out of the window, because there were bandits. But "Bobby" did look out and saw the bandits stealing money from people who had got off the train. So, in character, she rolled down the window and shouted at them to stop it immediately. Of course they just laughed. So she threatened to call a policeman and they laughed again, because the policemen got their cut from the robberies. Of course they boarded the train, probably to assault her, she was firey and beautiful child with long black hair. Quickly she locked the sturdy door of the compartment of her train and they banged and banged at it. The train pulled off, but still they d...

Phil Hall Sunday June 22, 2008 An 82-year-old former bomber pilot I met in the street the other day said: "Supermen. Ha! If Hitler had come over here we would have given him a proper kick up the jacksy." As Michael White suggests , British people are fond of the myth that they won't tolerate dictatorships, despite the fact that there were many fascist sympathisers in Britain in the 1930s. Yes, we do live in a relatively free and secular country - just ask any young Afghani woman studying at a college here for her opinion. But there is also evidence around us that the British government is engaging in repression. And not just in Iraq or Afghanistan, but here in Britain. Perhaps those of us who have lived for a time under dictatorships can spot some of the warning signs: • Inconvenient elections are avoided in the name of getting on with the job. • Leaders of the opposition are character-assassinated by the state media. • Institutions like the legislature begin to lose th...

How about making a parallel for religion with language that goes like this: Languages - Language - dialect - idiolect Religions - Religion - Religious Sect - idiogen The point is, for example, that that attack on religion always characterises it as monolithic or sectarian which it isn't. All religious people have an unpredictable personal variant on religious belief too. And what you say and your private opinions are similar probably to many other Christians and Muslims. For example, the "idiogen" of a Muslim woman will probably be idealistic and hopeful about the future of women in Islam in a way that her religion as a whole or her particular religious sect would not approve of. So she keeps it to herself. She values her community above her idiogen. Talk to most Christians, of course, and you will find that each person, no matter what their church says, often has quite a rich and individualistic spiritual life. Most Catholic women, I believe, expect that at some point th...

The government is curiously quiet on the impact of immigration on wages. When we took to the streets 30 years ago, it was a different story Phil Hall Is the government is being completely honest in the rhetoric it uses to justify its open-door policy for immigrants from the former eastern bloc? Hazel Blears, in her visit to Boston in Lincolnshire, focused on busting the myths around immigration, the myths that immigrants are a burden and the myths surrounding immigrants and crime, social housing, social security and health. But she doesn't mention inflation. Speaking in Bradford in June 2005, the governor of the Bank of England, Mervyn King, was clear about one of the main benefits of the recent immigration : "Immigration has reduced wage inflation. The inflow of migrant labour, especially in the past year or so from eastern Europe, has probably led to a diminution of inflationary pressure on the labour market." In the Lord's report (pdf) , Professor Nickell is quoted...

Most of the charm and the taste for me is in the food culture. In this respect both Delia and Blumenthal share a characteristic for me. They are both charmless. They cook, literally in the case of Heston, in a vacuum.. Delia is the reductio ad absurdam of Blumenthal.. Take Blumenthal's philosophy and boil it right down and you end up with Delia. Delve a little further and you end up with lambs fat on the cheapest chump. Pedigree Chum dog food research scientists say dogs go mad for it. "Adobo" is a very bitter red substance. It tastes quite acrid. Who would think to consume it? Or rotted fish - Where does the taste for that come from? It comes from 80,000 years living by the shores of the North sea without enough salt or time to preserve the fish. It doesn't come from Willy Wonka's food texturing lab. Marmite is the taste of the industrial revolution. Vegemite is a vegetarian riff on Marmite, there is something William Morris about it. Something post industrial. T...

The Mexican regime escaped international sanction in 1968 through a combination of extreme and swift repression and by putting on a great show at the Mexican Olympics and thereby winning international support. Thanks, in part, to that continued international support, it managed to hold on to power for another 35 years. We must not let the regime in China pull the same trick. We should boycott the Beijing Olympics. Steven Spielberg resigned as an artistic adviser to the Olympics because of China's silence over Darfur. Before he quit, Mia Farrow drew parallels with the 1936 Berlin Olympics, saying he "could be the Leni Riefenstahl of the Olympic Games". Farrow had a point. But perhaps there are other Olympic parallels we can draw. The Mexican state in 1968, like the present day Chinese state, was corporatist. There was one-party rule indivisible from the government; no independent judiciary, trade unions or employers associations; the media was completely controlled by th...

Unlike us, Mexicans don't gorge on dairy chocolate for Easter; if you too are tired of over-indulging in chocolate products full of milk and sugar, ditch the chocolate bunnies and try some Mexican "chocolate" chicken instead. One of the favourite sayings of my grandfather, a francophile and a gourmet, was: "Chocolate is nice, cheese is nice. So how much nicer must cheese and chocolate be?" We would laugh at his little lesson in good taste and I went along with the European idea that chocolate was simply a sweet food for a long time. That is, I did so until I tried mole. One legend is that mole was invented in Puebla, Mexico about 300 years ago. A bishop was coming to lunch and as the nuns hurriedly made the final preparations for the meal they were about to serve him, a tablet of chocolate accidentally fell into the sauce. It was too late for a change of plans, so the nun in charge simply carried on stirring in the sweet chocolate. They gave the dish to the bis...

Temple Inn with the fountain playing next to it is the most peaceful and glorious tourist free spot in the whole of London. Despite the Da Vinci Code shlockbusterI have been there many times and haven't seen that many tourists. I think the dip through the doorways from the strand or the side gate from the embankment flumoxes most of them and sweeps them back and forth from Trafalgar Square to the Tower and Tower Bridge. You can encompass Shakespeare, the fire of London, the Crusades and Dickens' London seated on a quiet seat near the fountain. 12th night was performed in the Middle Temple Hall. The Middle Temple Hall escaped the great fire. The Temple Church, of course, is the Crusader link and the Fountain itself is described in Martin Chuzzlewit. "Brilliantly the Temple Fountain sparkled in the sun, and laughingly its liquid music played, and merrily the idle drops of water danced and danced, and, peeping out in sport among the trees, plunged lightly down to hide themsel...

Bohm Dialogue rules for blogging (adapted): 1. We need an empty space to blog on and time to blog. 2. Each contribute suspends judgement for as long as possible in the conversation. 3. Everyone tries to express themselves clearly and relatively succinctly. 4. Occasional, non destructive playfullness should be acceptable 5. The assumption and exercise of honesty is desireable. 4. People should sometimes incorporate and build on other individuals ideas in the conversation. http://www.answers.com/topic/bohm-dialogue?cat=technology

we need to look at the ideological underpinning for this British citizenship test and ceremony: The ideas of the political philosopher John Rawls. This notion of citizenship implies the notion of a social contract. A social contract with a government in which everyone has the opportunity to participate. But when a government acts on behalf of interests that are not expressed through democracy, advocates, or is manipulated into advocating, the private and overweening interests of multinational corporations that act through "market forces". Then that government cannot uphold its part of the bargain. It can't sign a social contract with its citizens. This contract is void. Citizenship in the USA and UK, currently, is merely an agreement to uphold the status quo. To let the ring holders carry on running the show. To let the ruling class - the establishment entrench itself even more firmly. Hence in the UK we swear loyalty to the Queen. Yes, the Queen does indeed represent...

Eve Hall, a former consultant and expert with the UN's International Labour Organisation, took a hard look at a global virus that causes communities a great deal of harm. It doesn't take much to start trashing a community. For a start, bring in people from hundreds of kilometres away to replace permanent workers. Don't offer the incoming workers anything but piecemeal and temporary jobs for the barest minimum wage (if they are lucky). What happens to them when they aren't employed is none of your business. Advertise these wonderful opportunities on the local radio station to make sure you have got a surplus to choose from. Don't give them housing, let them squat, wherever, but let the proper houses that were occupied by the permanent workers, before they were retrenched, fall into the hands of thieves and squatters who take away the doors and the windows and finally, show incredulity when crime happens. Subcontracting and sub-contracting ... big fleas and little fle...

We, the family of Eve and Tony Hall, wish to thank you most warmly for your messages of sympathy and condolences received on the occasion of the death of both our mother and father. The bouquet you sent on the occasion of our mother's memorial service were photographed in the sitting room of Matumi, above. As loyal ANC members almost all their adult lives they would both have been very honoured to be so remembered. The three sons and their families were likewise very honoured and touched by the presence of ANC friends. Among the ANC members present at the funeral ceremonies were longtime friends Josiah Jele, Agnes Msimang, Gertrude Shope, Max Sisulu and Elinor Sisulu, Francinah Baloyi, Mpande Msimang and Mandla Msimang. From Mozambique came our friend, former Frelimo and Mozambique Vice President Marcelino dos Santos. We wish you every strength in the near future, in helping to lead the ANC, alongside the SACP and Cosatu, in renewing the policies of the ...

Look back, look around - and get going Tony Hall, in this posting of early 2006, goes into a rave of global proportions, looks modern history in the eye, and asks: doesn't it all add up to a multitude of models, a huge variety of lessons, a rich tapestry of possibilities for a broad consensus of the left? Dear debaters… I am so exercised with the enormity of present events and the fallout ahead, that like many of us, I am spreading out into a rave of global proportions. In my case, it's about revisiting almost at random, moments in the history of modern times, not afraid of the contradictions, but really to call up the positive, and to build a broader consensus than ever. I hope some will want to follow and stay the winding course of my meander, picking up or knocking down points and pointers as they go along. Most of all, I hope that people will read this roundup, and other blog essays before it, and postings to follow, as my archive of actuality, my rhetoric of reality. As a ...

No, Hodge was right. What you get after a revolution. The French revolution say, is a cultural revolution. This is a "good" thing. Let me give you the example of the Mexican Cultural revolution, which was messy and partial, like the Mexican Revolution itself. Well before the revolution the descendants of the Olmecs and the Zapotecs and the Tarascos and the Aztecs and the Mayas were despised and looked down upon by the ruling class in Mexico. After the Revolution this changed. Now in every school in Mexico they are taught to be fiercely proud of the achievements of the old Mexican civilisations going back about 3000 years. Statues to the kings and princes, like Cuahtemoc and Nezahualcoyatl, went up in every town. And when we look at France, or at any country that has been mature enough and lucky enough to get rid of its ancien regime, then we see the cultural flowering that happened as a result. Russia in the 20s, despite the grinding poverty and the civil war, was a great cul...

1. Soak four layers of Victoria sponge with sherry. 2. Bind the discs of sponge together using clotted cream and lemon curd. 3. Mix some Elderflower cordial into whipped Jersey cream. 5. Layer the whipped cream mixture on top of the cake. 6. Arrange the raspberries and blueberries into a Union Jack on the cream. 7. Decorate with sparklers and ribbons. http://blogs.guardian.co.uk/food/2008/02/ask_allegra_tarts_and_open_pie.html

It is apt that the most glorious moment of Antonio de Padua María Severino López de Santa Anna y Pérez de Lebrón's life was when a gun on a French ship blew his leg off. Well done that ship! He was an old fashioned, white, middle class Mexican, who openly despised Indians and seduced the maids. Not a nice boy. He was clever and half educated. He was a bully! He was born in Xalapa, which is a pretty town. Though Xalapa doesn't boast about him much. He started out as as a shopkeeper in Vera Cruz and then became Captain Arredondo, the Indian killer's cadet, which was a Bad move. And bad move followed bad move. He stole money to gamble, womanised. In the early years, he follwed Arredondo about hunting down Mexican fighters for Independence and killing the so called Chichimecas and then, when the Spanish were already on the run, really, he chose to fight for the Mexican "Emperor" Iturbide, who made him a general. By way of thanks, Antonio helped overthrow Iturbide. The...