Donkeyshott and Xuitlacoche

19 Trianon Ave. Marseilles, Sea Point, Cape Town, 1959

2012-01-14T17:24:00.002Z

From a series of about 12 letter written over a period of 3 months by Eve hall who was 23 and pregnant at the time. Here's a street view of their apartment.

Darius Milhaud, Paris op.284

2012-01-14T09:23:00.000Z

Richard and the Ladies

2012-01-13T16:36:00.001Z

After going nearly mad, Richard came to. He came to around the time his family was being killed in Europe. Though he didn't know that. Telegrammes had been exchanged saying everyone was alright, Heini as the messenger. Richard quickly made lots of friends. He was in the bosom of the Jewish community in South Africa, in a peaceful country with a good job and he was admired by the ladies. I think he went a little mad again when the war ended and he heard the news about his family and he was reunited with the wife and child he had been forced by the war to abandon.

His best friend was Rudi Bechter who only died a few years ago and was charming, in a masculine way, right to the end. I was a little ungenerous. I asked Rudi: So were you and Richard popular with the ladies? Clare, his wife, answered with a loud laugh. Yes. And who made more conquests? Rudi of course, said Clare. I see, I said, looking at Rudi squarely. You were quite the mashers then. Rudi stopped smiling and went silent.

Izzy arriving in Paris 1929 -30, perhaps

2012-01-13T16:07:00.000Z

I love the suave confidence of Izzy and his son Richard, and the way their cigarette hands mirror each other exactly. The other two look like they've come with Izzy.

Lisa Göbel and Harry Piel

2012-01-13T15:16:00.001Z

From Lisa's photo collection

Harry Piel, the actor director, was a friend of Heini's before the war (and after it?) and because Heini and Lisa were inseparable twins he was a friend of Lisa's too. They all adored me, but I was a tomboy, and I didn't adore them, she said. And it's true. She was a great beauty and she knew it and they knew it and we knew it.

Granny was elegance personified until she died at the age of 96. No one I have ever known was more elegant, unless it was my mother or my wife. It's very odd. My wife reminds me of my grandmother.

In any event she said Harry Piel adored her two and that he was talking about using her in his movies.

Granny Lisa silent part in the opera, the Maschinist Hopkins (1929), third from the back.

Heini did go on to apear in over 60 German movies between 1945 and 1996, so it is probably Piel was not joking. Piel was famous for casting himself in one of his own movies alongside Marlene Dietrich, so Granny probably imagined herself as a Dietrich, though she was too bonny for that. Richard's friends were also in love with her and so was the great Henri Sellier.

Lisa really only truly loved Mom in the end though she loved Richard at first. Richard was so charming, she said. But Lisa was the real thing. She married a Jew just after the Nuremberg Laws were enacted. Her best friend at school was a German Jewish girl and she was at the windows booing the German soldiers leaving Paris with the French in 1944.

In the war she looked after Eve and worked as a translator at a hospital. The first thing all their friends in British and American army uniforms did when they came to Paris was to make a bee line to Lisa and Eve to see if they were alright.

The Lisa became the best cook and the best gardener and the best seamstress. But Richard refused to let her go out and make a career. She wanted to get into design and fashion and their friends encouraged her but Richard laid down the law. She never forgave him and while he was dying he begged her over and over again for forgiveness.

She may have loved him but she certainly didn't forgive him. Her criticism of Richard grew and grew over the years. He was a coward. He was a spendthrift fool. He was a tyrant. He was an idiot. In India when they came to visit us it seemed as if Grandpa Richard was the happiest he had ever been. He wondered at Indian food. He was the ultimate gourmet, so this was very open minded for him. If you think about it, he may have been all the things granny said he was, but he lost his father in the ghetto, his mother and sister in concentration camps and he only abandoned his wife and daughter in Paris because war broke out two months later and he was forced to do so. Was he a philanderer? Was he a bully? Was he a male chauvinist? Yes, but in India he seemed to re-adjust and Lisa didn't like that.

She was angry that he was happy and normal. But this is not written in defence of Richard, though he requires understanding. It is written in praise of Lisa. I am glad she told me the story of Her and Harry Piel.

In fact Harry Piel moved to Munich, like Heini, after the war, and so of course they stayed friends.

New Sarajevo eve of assassination picture

2012-01-13T14:40:00.002Z

Animated prayer

2012-01-12T12:26:00.001Z

Aithee'ists shud prai te blak h'eulz

Mait ai sedjest sumthing fer 'n aithe'eist te prai too.

A big h'eul.

'V kaus it wud ownli bee a litl h'eul, but if aul the aitheeists praid tegethe then the hole wud grow bigge nd bigge nd then it kud be soh big it kud eevn swolow god.

Te prai te a h'eul wud bee veri rispektibl becauz praiing te uh hole iz n admishn that won duz not no wot iz troo or untroo. It iz n edmishn ev ignerense. Secratic in the best sens ev the werd, bet ownli sow long ez yr secratisizm duznt haid filistanizm.

In m'eust kaisiz ai think it duz, th'eu.

Wots we'ed fe mi iz the wai kumyoonl praiy'e seemz te werk bet'e thn prai'ing on yer own. Aiv been in plaisiz we'er peepl gather nd u silens disends n yoo reely feel u presens. Ai supeuz its laik beeng et e footbawl mach.

O the igzampl ev solitary pre'er in e forist. Thauz plaisiz we'er cawld chaantid wudz, not inchaantid. Yoo'l notis them ritn ez 'chanctonbury' wud.

Aiv cum ekros the best prai'er. It we'ekz fe mi. Ai s'peuz its tauist reeli. Never had e paier bifo, bt ai laik this won. Hie geuz:

In th taimlss iz th formls.
in the formlss iz th da'aknis.
In the da'aknss iz th stilns.
In th stilns iz th seed.

Aut 'v nuthing kumz th bee'ng.
Aut 'v bee'ing kumz th meening.
Aut 'v meening kumz th mohshn.
Aut 'v mohshn kumz th akshn.
Aut 'v akshn kumz th deed.

Nd 'v lait - law
Nd 'v law - luv
Nd 'v luv - laif.

Altern'tvli (skjooz mee wail ai get the hang 'v this speling sistm.) yo kud ripeet th zool'ander pre'er. Ai met a br'zilien hoo adv'caitd it r'lig'sli:

Sai t' y'self 'uv' nd 'uv' 'gen:

Hoo am ai?

If yo ' ridiky'l'sli gud luking' then do this wail luking in th' mire'.'nd thatz 'n intresting kwestch'n, bikawz th' 'sumshn iz th't y' n'u hoo yoo a' wen m'ust 'v us reeli d'unt. E lot 'v pre'e must bee a je'eni inw'dz. Th' chanting iz dj'st laik a saund je'eni inte y' bee'ing. Pre'e iz not sh'u taim. Th' kwaik'ez 'e not bet'e th'n th' kathliks f' igzaampl. Its dj'st a difn'nt 'epr'uch.

Wot we'e th' praiy'z 'v th' paw peepl wo we' hareed inte th' deth chaaimbez et awshwitz? Did thei prai:
Oh God inte' ye' handz ai k'mend mai s'ul? Or did thei dj'st weep h'uplesli? Ai. That's th' kwesch'n. Think 'v that wen ye see a smug kistyen prai'ing.

Pre'er haz s'm veri ekjoot probl'mz atacht. In th' ferst plais it iz mediait'd bai langwidg. 'nd we n'eu langwidj iz a sist'm 'v sains. This meenz it ca'ant bee yunive'ersl et awl.

Th' uth' point iz th't wen ye h'v three calz te praije' yeling auve' th' rooftops et th' saim taim its a pain in th' a'as, much az sundai bel ringing waz up t' th' sev'nteez.

Pre'er iz simpli a fawm 'v autw'd faising a link lok with wots aut the'er. Th'ats its pauer laik e spel. It iz perlecjush'neri. It iz the autwed moovmnt ev th' mind frm th' intenshn t' th' akshn. It iz e ca'asting 'v thawt.

Fer igzampl. Th' hohl industri of NLP iz baist on a limit'd fo'om 'v prai'er. Intenshn alainz the subkonshs maind with th' unkonshes nd this maiks th' individyu'el mo'o pau'efl.

Peepl er fraitend ev kursiz not bikauz thei r styoopid, but bikauz thei undestand th' powe' 'v alaining mindz. A good igzampl iz frm Garsia ma'akez'z buk Kronicl 'v e deth fo'ort'euld. Its a big heks.

Praier iz impo'otnt te sumwon hoo bileevz th't th' spirit animaits us 'nd that wee 'r not onli machinz. Athee'istz bileev th't wee 'r m'sheenz 'nd s'eu thei need te doo a lot mo'or thinking befo'o thei ca onestli sai thei 'prai'

Thei kan 'v ko'os but onli in a rilidjez wai not en aithiest wai.

New aithi'ists hoo klaim te prai 'r djumping th' gun. In th' naim of th' fathe' th' son 'nd th' holi spirit. This is th' important point. It iz th' spirit th't animaits, nd if yu d'eun't think it exists then wot on e'eth a'a yoo praying too?

In Frankfurt: Lisa, Heini, Tina and their cousins including Ruth and Renata

2012-01-09T18:52:00.003Z

Izzy, Flora, Regina, Arthur, and a girl holding Eve - in Paris

2012-01-09T18:40:00.000Z

Granny Lisa and friends

2012-01-09T18:36:00.000Z

avec ma poupe Pierre, Avril 1945

2012-01-09T17:39:00.001Z

Granny Regina in a Paris park in 1936

2012-01-09T17:27:00.002Z

The Steinhardts in Spain in 1953

2012-01-09T17:21:00.001Z

Grandpa and John Anthony in the Kruger

2012-01-09T17:10:00.002Z

Family grave in Solln, Munich

2012-01-09T17:01:00.003Z

Who is he?

2012-01-09T16:53:00.002Z

Richard Steinhardt and friends

2012-01-09T16:30:00.002Z

Marriage of Wilhelm Göbel and Wanda Wyborski

2012-01-09T16:23:00.000Z

Else Steinhardt on Stage in the 30s

2012-01-09T16:12:00.002Z

Evechen Steinhardt in 1940

2012-01-09T16:06:00.003Z

In defence of J. R. R. Tolkein.

2012-01-06T20:43:00.001Z

If you walk through the English countryside you will see the Shires, the barrows, Mirkwood, the Tors, and you will visit the pub in Bree and see Mordor in the industrial wastelands and you will recognise things and think of them in ways you could not have done before. The poor man was from Birmingham, for Christ's sake. What's left of that beauty?

Yes, Tolkein's work deserves recognition because it is a work of secondary creation. The first virtual world will be Middle Earth because it is fully imagined. The author was the author of Middle Earth rather than the author of a mere series of books. Of course there were other's before him, but those tended to be the religious like Joseph Smith who confused his secondary creation with reality.

He generated thousands of imitations and derived works, which, though they might have been written by better wordsmiths, owed everything to J.R. Tolkein. Tolkein said that, in a way, he was trying to give the country he loved, England, it's own Edda, its own Greek myths, its own Beowulf. A lot of religious writing is poor literature, a lot of songs make poor poems. Dylan's songs are laughable as poetry,

But as an English legend Tolkein's Lord of the Rings is, perhaps, superior to Arthur because Arthur is more French than British, Arthur is more British than English, more Roman than British, more Celtic than English.

Tolkein's secondary creation is a confluence of legend. Legend and myth and religion itself is a creation of humans, The product of the imagination. Tolkein could easily have said that his God Manwe and Illuvatar were real and that Galadriel was alive on Avalon and many would have believed him completely.

Let's take Alan Garner, for example. Now many would say Alan Garner wrote beautifully. His Owl Service is an outstanding book for anyone to read and yet his legends of Alderly Edge, while well written owe much to Tolkein. Rowling owes Tolkein and Lewis. So many writers owe so much to Tolkein and for this alone he deserves a Nobel.

What do you owe a man who builds a bridge between you and a whole imagined world? You owe him everything. Tolkein has the greatness of Freud or Pythagoras. Before Freud no one quite saw the unconscious. Before Pythagoras no one quite saw mathematics as independently truthful abstraction and before Tolkein imaginary worlds were pretty half arsed.

However, there is a lot to criticise. Tolkein's women are unearthly, Tolkein's Orcs and Southrons are not quite right. And Tolkein's battles are bloody clichés. These faults detract from Tolkein's achievement. But the attack on Tolkein must be understood as an attack on the independent life of the imagination and on the notion of the separate mind and soul: as an attack on the New Dualism. In attacking Tolkein you vaunt Pullman. Pullman is a materialist twisting Tolkein's creation into a ridiculous pretzel and overseasoning it with Milton.

Attacks on Tolkein are an attempt to drag the mind back into the material, and subject it. C. S. Lewis writes about this in 'That Hideous Strength'. His characterisation of the usurption by science of the free and protean imagination is prescient. Because Tolkein forms a bridge from the mind by way of the imagination to creation itself an attempt is made to break that bridge and destroy Tolkein in the same way that attempts are made to denigrate religious symbols:

And how many people have been fired up to walk, to appreciate the English countryside, to go on adventures, to battle evil and to respect and cherish women because of the Lord of the Rings? Millions of people, perhaps.

Tolkein inspired everyone. Well he didn't inspire the Eustaces of this world or the Bill Ferney's. He even inspired this lovely music by Bo Hansson in 1973. It should have been part of the music of the Lord of the Rings and the Hobbit.

Kabsa

2012-01-06T16:34:00.000Z

This is the third time I have been invited to eat Kabsa. My host is suave and wears an Omar Sharif moustache. His house has plenty of space. The main living room is large and chair shaped cushions line three walls. His older sons also have moustaches. They wear black thobes and as soon as I have been ushered to a seat they serve me with a small cup of Arabic coffee. I know the people on either side of me. This is calculated, though it seems random. In the background the TV is on as a conversation piece. Etihad is playing.

Neighbours and friends and a few family members have been invited, and sit across and to one side and they all seem to get on very well. There is little I can understand, but I don't mind. Opposite me, two guests joke and the rest of the men laugh. At one point the shorter one with a gnome beard exclaims: "Christmas" and collapses in laughter hiding his face with his thobe. "Christmas" he splutters from behind of his thobe "Te hee hee."

It's uncomfortable to sit on a legless chair. My knees stick up and splay like a twisted grasshopper and I have to push myself upright, and lean over to leave the date stone on the square plastic mat. I used to have to sit cross legged to play the sitar in India, but that was a long time ago.

When the older brother arrives we all stand up and position ourself in careful order, to greet him. I stand second to last in line and watch how he clasps the hand and kisses each man on the cheek several times. When it's my turn we shake from a distance. Our host has left to get the dining room ready.

After conversing and eating two kinds of dates, fresh and preserved, we all get up and line up to wash our hands in the basin and then file down a corridor where the host welcomes us again.

Two very large dishes have been placed on the floor, around them satellite dishes. On each large dish there is a mound of colourful rice. On one is half the "broasted" back of a lamb and on the other its forequarters and hindquarters. On the smaller plates there is yoghurt and cucumber and there is fresh chopped salad, there are sliced tomatoes and lemons and cucumbers. Bottles of water and wine glasses for sparkling grape juice.

I am seated in a position of honour on the left of the older brother. It's agony, but I smile and wait for my muscles to distend. "Praise Allah," they all say.

Then One of the guests takes a knife and traces deep slices along the lamb revealing the fat. No one speaks. Silently we begin to eat. This is the third time I have eaten Kabsa so I know what to do. Only use your right hand to squeeze the rice together and then eat the rice. The meat is soft and fatty and tastes delicate and slightly wood smoked. A piece is placed in front of my edge of the plate and I murmur thanks and when I come to pull a piece off myself, with presumption perhaps I offer half of it to my neighbour, he tears off a piece and then he thanks me.

The last time I was invited to eat Kabsa I was shown how, by wrenching off a jawbone, I could use it as a little lever to snap a smaller bones at each temple, and take out and eat its brain. It is without much taste, but it is soft textured and sweeter than the meat.

The conversation starts, but is never gets started. You eat to eat. Our host has sat down at the other plate with his sons and younger children but he is still attentive. After a while, and my side of the plate has more rice scattered about it than you would find at a wedding, at the signal from one of the younger guests we get up and leave the dining room. We file back to wash our hands again, the jokes begin and the younger guest locks the large doors in the corridor. Our host is locked in with his family so that they can all eat convivially in private.

There are colourful bowls of fruit on the floor of the lounge ready for us. Strawberries, pears, bananas, apples. We sit in our positions again and they have shifted slightly and noticing my discomfort a perceptive guest has slipped an armrest near my right arm. We are offered mint tea. I should drink it with my right hand, but I drink it with my left.

We pass around the censer. I am familiar with these because my mother once gave me the gift of a meerschaum censer and a bag of frankincense when I was fifteen. But this is not frankincense it is Oudh perhaps. You must waft the smoke towards your collar and cloak to eliminate the food smells from the cloth.

There is a knock at the door. The younger family member gets up to unlock the partition, our host reappears and the conversation continues again and this time I have someone who speaks English on my right and the talk is of politics and economics and the jokes are a little funnier and more risqué and occasionally I am asked to contribute and the response is not direct but what I have said is discussed in a ripple around the room. The man at my side translates a few snippets for me. I understand one remark in Arabic well, without translation: 'Hitler Kwais.'

The son is ready with the teapot whenever anyone's cup is low. I take a minute to drink my fourth mint tea.

I lurch up abruptly and thank my host, without preamble. I have decided to break custom, and not prolong my goodbye, and so no one gets up to shake my hand. They nod. One or two of them do so quite sourly. Such bad manners on my part.

At the door the host remarks:"You are better than the others."

"Why, thank you." I say, and leave.

Free people eat meat

2012-01-06T11:18:00.002Z

Ordinary humanity is in close proximity to nature and long ago overmastered it.The young Masai are given spears and told to kill lions. The lions run. Manners, honesty and our relationship to nature are all taught with blades and cuts, not beatings. Beatings and punishments are for slaves.

Living in the Gulf means eating meat, the central food of the nomads who produced Judaism, Christianity, Islam, philosophy and science; the food of the nomads who went to the coast and built dhows as big as ships, who then put oars on the dhows, flattened their hulls to carry cargo, and traded with everyone who lived by the Mediterranean; the nomads who cultivated the first grapes; who grew and pressed the first olives: the nomads who populated the fringes of the south eastern Mediterranean 5,000 years ago.

There was a programme on TV about a tribe in Kenya who knew how to face down lions and take their kill. Perhaps you saw it. Three tribesmen with spears in their hands walked towards a pride of lions in unison and as they got closer, the lions, seeing the approaching men wrenched their jaws from the meat, despite their hunger and they started away in fear. The men cut off the choice pieces of buck and left the rest of the kill.

This was not a trick. The lions have long understood that the right thing to do when three East African tribesmen walk directly towards them is to run away. Human beings dominate the Earth, but we have dominated it for a long time and exercise that domination cruelly and viscerally.

It is hard for us to understand how two warriors can face down a pride of lions because we are accustomed to eating our pre packaged pet food, sleeping in our stables and responding predictably to all the electronic bells and whistles.

We in the cities are fearful domesticated people; but free people eat meat.

Jacobus Swart's garden and visions of paradise

2012-01-03T20:51:00.000Z

A rose in Jacobus's Garden.

I once asked Doris Lessing a question and was surprised by the answer. Or rather I made a statement. I said something that implied Karma: the accumulation of sin. (Read Sri Rinpoche and you will read how each day in a million ways we accrue Karma.)

Now what is this Karma if it is not a million actions that keep the world spinning like a top.

And Doris Lessing's answer was that she felt more innocent everyday. This is a very deep response. It contradicted the superficiality of many ideas about Karma. Because Karma is not a 'moral' issue as such, it is merely the spinning of your top.

Bless Doris Lessing for the statement. Let's paraphrase it like this and make it illocutionary:

'Onwards to innocence!' because - in a sense - she is saying - to me she is saying - that we are under fewer illusions as we grow older and so we are more innocent. Disillusion is innocence. In this definition I have made many friends over the years who are as innocent as new born lambs. And what is left for the disillusioned, but to cultivate 'the real'.

It is the spiritually paternalistic who have no mothers or fathers. They offer parental guidance but have rejected it for themselves. They become the primogenitors: like a working class kid who has made good and only visits his Mum and Dad at Christmastime.

I shared this with my father long ago. That the older you get the more innocent you are - in the sense that you are disillusioned, and what's true is clearer and you value it more. Rather burdened at the time he accepted this thought gladly.

Look at what the finger points at don't look at the finger. Though why not. Go ahead man, Look at the finger if you want to. It's closer to you. What's close?

Jacobus Gerhardus Swart's garden made me smile. It's very beautiful. It reminds me of the garden at Matumi where Mom and Dad lived. Except that they allowed it to be what it's makers had wanted it to be and then added their own presence.

Jacobus's garden is a vision of paradise in the way that a Zen garden is a vision of the concept of detachment. Lessing showed me a book of satellite pictures taken from space. It's something you will really like she said and it was, again, about detachment. When you walk through a Zen garden you are either disembodied or gigantic. You see the world fractally in the small and the human and the large: the Chinese would say in terms of heaven, the human and the Earth with the human, beiing at the fulcrum.

But in Jacobus's garden you are embodied and size does not matter and yet the small garden can take on cosmic proportions in the same way as you see the light of a nebulae, you see a flower come into bloom.

Ils faut cultiver notre jardin, said Voltaire, and he might have known what he was talking about. He was saying we should cultivate our vision of paradise, which was a garden: a garden which may become a way to directly experience the cosmos to the greatest extent that a human being can without needing to reify or speak symbolically. If everything we understand is understood symbolically (metaphorically) anyway, then how illuminating is it to delve into the symbolisms of what meaning stands for what meaning stands for what. Fingers pointing in a circle.

Paradise is a window box full of red geraniums on a sunny day... in a small flat in Dorset Square, a green and yellow canary flying round the room, a good bar of chocolate and the imagined presence of a beloved.

Because these four things are what they seem and they are not what they seem. And they are close and near and far and it's rude and futile to point, but I do so anyway.

Bilderberg 2011: für ich und mich,oder für diese

2011-12-29T12:16:00.002Z

It seems logical to suppose that we can work out an agenda for the conference by studying the guest list.

There are no representatives of the ultra-right on the list, or, indeed, of some of the disgraced financial corporations. Instead we see the WTO, the World Bank, and other UN organisations and plenty of experts and former ministers.

I don't believe Bilderberg is a conspiracy. In fact I think the conspiracy is to say Bilderbrg is a conspiracy.

I believe Bilderberg has become a conference where a certain strand of the establishment develops longer term strategies designed to make the western model of capitalist development more sustainable and deal with global issues.

If there is a link between the strategies proposed and what the conference attendees get up to when they return to their organisations and governments, then it is probably because they were influenced by the discussion, and not because they are members of SPECTRA.

Belgium
Coene, Luc, Governor, National Bank of Belgium
Davignon, Etienne, Minister of State
Leysen, Thomas, Chairman, Umicore

China
Fu, Ying, Vice Minister of Foreign Affairs
Huang, Yiping, Professor of Economics, China Center for Economic Research, Peking University
Denmark
Eldrup, Anders, CEO, DONG Energy
Federspiel, Ulrik, Vice President, Global Affairs, Haldor Topsøe A/S
Schütze, Peter, Member of the Executive Management, Nordea Bank AB

Germany
Ackermann, Josef, Chairman of the Management Board and the Group Executive Committee, Deutsche Bank
Enders, Thomas, CEO, Airbus SAS
Löscher, Peter, President and CEO, Siemens AG
Nass, Matthias, Chief International Correspondent, Die Zeit
Steinbrück, Peer, Member of the Bundestag; Former Minister of Finance

Finland
Apunen, Matti, Director, Finnish Business and Policy Forum EVA
Johansson, Ole, Chairman, Confederation of the Finnish Industries EK
Ollila, Jorma, Chairman, Royal Dutch Shell
Pentikäinen, Mikael, Publisher and Senior Editor-in-Chief, Helsingin Sanomat

France
Baverez, Nicolas, Partner, Gibson, Dunn & Crutcher LLP
Bazire, Nicolas, Managing Director, Groupe Arnault /LVMH
Castries, Henri de, Chairman and CEO, AXA
Lévy, Maurice, Chairman and CEO, Publicis Groupe S.A.
Montbrial, Thierry de, President, French Institute for International Relations
Roy, Olivier, Professor of Social and Political Theory, European University Institute

Great Britain
Agius, Marcus, Chairman, Barclays PLC
Flint, Douglas J., Group Chairman, HSBC Holdings
Kerr, John, Member, House of Lords; Deputy Chairman, Royal Dutch Shell
Lambert, Richard, Independent Non-Executive Director, Ernst & Young
Mandelson, Peter, Member, House of Lords; Chairman, Global Counsel
Micklethwait, John, Editor-in-Chief, The Economist
Osborne, George, Chancellor of the Exchequer
Stewart, Rory, Member of Parliament
Taylor, J. Martin, Chairman, Syngenta International AG

Greece
David, George A., Chairman, Coca-Cola H.B.C. S.A.
Hardouvelis, Gikas A., Chief Economist and Head of Research, Eurobank EFG
Papaconstantinou, George, Minister of Finance
Tsoukalis, Loukas, President, ELIAMEP Grisons

International Organizations
Almunia, Joaquín, Vice President, European Commission
Daele, Frans van, Chief of Staff to the President of the European Council
Kroes, Neelie, Vice President, European Commission; Commissioner for Digital Agenda
Lamy, Pascal, Director General, World Trade Organization
Rompuy, Herman van, President, European Council
Sheeran, Josette, Executive Director, United Nations World Food Programme
Solana Madariaga, Javier, President, ESADEgeo Center for Global Economy and Geopolitics
Trichet, Jean-Claude, President, European Central Bank
Zoellick, Robert B., President, The World Bank Group

Ireland
Gallagher, Paul, Senior Counsel; Former Attorney General
McDowell, Michael, Senior Counsel, Law Library; Former Deputy Prime Minister
Sutherland, Peter D., Chairman, Goldman Sachs International

Italy
Bernabè, Franco, CEO, Telecom Italia SpA
Elkann, John, Chairman, Fiat S.p.A.
Monti, Mario, President, Univers Commerciale Luigi Bocconi
Scaroni, Paolo, CEO, Eni S.p.A.
Tremonti, Giulio, Minister of Economy and Finance

Canada
Carney, Mark J., Governor, Bank of Canada
Clark, Edmund, President and CEO, TD Bank Financial Group
McKenna, Frank, Deputy Chair, TD Bank Financial Group
Orbinksi, James, Professor of Medicine and Political Science, University of Toronto
Prichard, J. Robert S., Chair, Torys LLP
Reisman, Heather, Chair and CEO, Indigo Books & Music Inc. Center, Brookings Institution

Netherlands
Bolland, Marc J., Chief Executive, Marks and Spencer Group plc
Chavannes, Marc E., Political Columnist, NRC Handelsblad; Professor of Journalism
Halberstadt, Victor, Professor of Economics, Leiden University; Former Honorary Secretary General of Bilderberg Meetings
H.M. the Queen of the Netherlands
Rosenthal, Uri, Minister of Foreign Affairs
Winter, Jaap W., Partner, De Brauw Blackstone Westbroek

Norway
Myklebust, Egil, Former Chairman of the Board of Directors SAS, sk Hydro ASA
H.R.H. Crown Prince Haakon of Norway
Ottersen, Ole Petter, Rector, University of Oslo
Solberg, Erna, Leader of the Conservative Party

Austria
Bronner, Oscar, CEO and Publisher, Standard Medien AG
Faymann, Werner, Federal Chancellor
Rothensteiner, Walter, Chairman of the Board, Raiffeisen Zentralbank Österreich AG
Scholten, Rudolf, Member of the Board of Executive Directors, Oesterreichische Kontrollbank AG

Portugal
Balsemão, Francisco Pinto, Chairman and CEO, IMPRESA, S.G.P.S.; Former Prime Minister
Ferreira Alves, Clara, CEO, Claref LDA; writer
Nogueira Leite, António, Member of the Board, José de Mello Investimentos, SGPS, SA

Sweden
Mordashov, Alexey A., CEO, Severstal
Bildt, Carl, Minister of Foreign Affairs
Björling, Ewa, Minister for Trade
Wallenberg, Jacob, Chairman, Investor AB

Switzerland
Brabeck-Letmathe, Peter, Chairman, Nestlé S.A.
Groth, Hans, Senior Director, Healthcare Policy & Market Access, Oncology Business Unit, Pfizer Europe
Janom Steiner, Barbara, Head of the Department of Justice, Security and Health, Canton
Kudelski, André, Chairman and CEO, Kudelski Group SA
Leuthard, Doris, Federal Councillor
Schmid, Martin, President, Government of the Canton Grisons
Schweiger, Rolf, Ständerat
Soiron, Rolf, Chairman of the Board, Holcim Ltd., Lonza Ltd.
Vasella, Daniel L., Chairman, Novartis AG
Witmer, Jürg, Chairman, Givaudan SA and Clariant AG

Spain
Cebrián, Juan Luis, CEO, PRISA
Cospedal, María Dolores de, Secretary General, Partido Popular
León Gross, Bernardino, Secretary General of the Spanish Presidency
Nin Génova, Juan María, President and CEO, La Caixa
H.M. Queen Sofia of Spain

Turkey
Ciliv, Süreyya, CEO, Turkcell Iletisim Hizmetleri A.S.
Gülek Domac, Tayyibe, Former Minister of State
Koç, Mustafa V., Chairman, Koç Holding A.S.
Pekin, Sefika, Founding Partner, Pekin & Bayar Law Firm

USA
Alexander, Keith B., Commander, USCYBERCOM; Director, National Security Agency
Altman, Roger C., Chairman, Evercore Partners Inc.
Bezos, Jeff, Founder and CEO, Amazon.com
Collins, Timothy C., CEO, Ripplewood Holdings, LLC
Feldstein, Martin S., George F. Baker Professor of Economics, Harvard University
Hoffman, Reid, Co-founder and Executive Chairman, LinkedIn
Hughes, Chris R., Co-founder, Facebook
Jacobs, Kenneth M., Chairman & CEO, Lazard
Johnson, James A., Vice Chairman, Perseus, LLC
Jordan, Jr., Vernon E., Senior Managing Director, Lazard Frères & Co. LLC
Keane, John M., Senior Partner, SCP Partners; General, US Army, Retired
Kissinger, Henry A., Chairman, Kissinger Associates, Inc.
Kleinfeld, Klaus, Chairman and CEO, Alcoa
Kravis, Henry R., Co-Chairman and co-CEO, Kohlberg Kravis, Roberts & Co.
Kravis, Marie-Josée, Senior Fellow, Hudson Institute, Inc.
Li, Cheng, Senior Fellow and Director of Research, John L. Thornton China Center, Brookings Institution
Mundie, Craig J., Chief Research and Strategy Officer, Microsoft Corporation
Orszag, Peter R., Vice Chairman, Citigroup Global Markets, Inc.
Perle, Richard N., Resident Fellow, American Enterprise Institute for Public Policy Research
Rockefeller, David, Former Chairman, Chase Manhattan Bank
Rose, Charlie, Executive Editor and Anchor, Charlie Rose
Rubin, Robert E., Co-Chairman, Council on Foreign Relations; Former Secretary of the Treasury
Schmidt, Eric, Executive Chairman, Google Inc.
Steinberg, James B., Deputy Secretary of State
Thiel, Peter A., President, Clarium Capital Management, LLC
Varney, Christine A., Assistant Attorney General for Antitrust
Vaupel, James W., Founding Director, Max Planck Institute for Demographic Research
Warsh, Kevin, Former Governor, Federal Reserve Board
Wolfensohn, James D., Chairman, Wolfensohn & Company, LLC

Rasmussen, Anders Fogh, Secretary General of NATO ,DEN
Merkel, Angela Dorothea, German Chancellor ,GER
Zapatero, Jose Luis, Spanish Prim Minister ,SPA
Gates, Bill, Former Microsoft CEO, Head of the Gates Foundation ,USA
Gates, Robert, US Secretary of Defense ,USA

Felicity Cloake's perfectly foolish food

2011-12-28T21:34:00.000Z

Epoisses Berthaut cheese from The House Mouse

Felicity Cloake is a post-modernist cook: a culinary representative of generation X. She deconstructs and reconstructs dishes into 'the 'perfect this and that' and serves them swimming in a weak sauce of irony. Authenticity is a ridiculous notion to Generation X cooks like Felicity Cloake. So, we do not get 'the authentic pizza' but the 'the perfect pizza'.

In this way we wil never understand the reason of Bagoong Balayan; it is a fermented anchovy sauce. The rot doesn't stop there. With the 'perfect pizza', not only do we de-contextualise food, but we take food out of its context. We are left with with rotting liquid fish. A large part of the perception of taste does not come from the nose or from terroir, but from understanding and respecting the cultural context of food in a profound way.

Certainly this understanding is well beyond the grasp of a materialist philistine who believes taste resides in fleshy buds and nerve receptors. If Adrian Ferrer is researching food then much of what he is researching is the the culinary history of fermentation, preservation and rot and its consequent beauty: the taste of bacteria and decomposition, of salt packing and pickle; of wine and Pont LeVec, of garos or garum - Bagoog Balayan to you.

Not very fresh and 'safe' at all.

Techniques of preservation were slowly developed and, if you were to be Kittlerian about it, you could say our historical tastes have conditioned us. Tastes for well hung meat and pickled and dried fish. For decomposing milk and air dried legs of Jabugo. In the fat of black Jabugo live vast infestations of tiny microscopic creatures.

Uncultured proclamations of freshness. Eating and drinking innocent fruit drinks. Victorian fruit drinks, Cromwell's fruit drinks.

And then there is the idiocy of wild eating. Most wild food too is uncultured. The seaweed and the Rowan berries and elderberries and beach leaves are all mildly toxic. The toxicity has been cultivated out of many domesticated plants. The world is not your oyster. No reference then from the post modernist, to the natural toxicity of most wild foods. Of the toxicity of the natural.

Why, because the sign for the natural is totemic. And we are expedient, not honest. Not authentic and so we nod. Yes. Natural is good.

Well no it isn't.

Domesticated plants are. The burned skin of the long cultured tomate.

Let's imagine you like to listen to Fairouz in the morning with your coffee, after you breakfasted on hot flat bread dipped in Al Wazir olive oil and then za'atr or laban.

Well that is taste. The taste of mountain Thyme an irretrievable product of experience and history, in the Gadamerian sense: impossible to deconstruct and impossible to reconstruct into some ridiculous and parochial Heath Robinson ideal of 'perfection.

(Earphones playing sounds of the sea? My arse!)

Or the diabetic who eats chocolate despite the knowledge that it will turn her blind. Or the obese who continue to eat comfort food. The alcoholics, the gourmets with their fetishes, the dribblers. To say ‘I do not serve dangerous food.’ is the culinary equivalent of the white-cloaked doctor's God complex. How do you know what will hurt people and what will not.

And aren't you just really sitting on the fence? If you will not serve food that harms (though you have little idea of whether it will or not) your customers, then presumably you are morally obliged to serve people with what is good for them. To doctor them with your food.

A Chinese woman I knew did just such a thing. She set up a restaurant where food was medication. It followed the Chinese principles of herbal and internal medicine and she used it on me. Bitter melon tea, dried sour plums, dried daisy tea, a litre of salted water, tea with spoonfuls of impossibly expensive eucalyptus honey - all to be taken at different times of the day.

A litre of salt water in the morning?

Yes, a litre.

But how much salt?

She looked irritated.

Well, enough she said. See this little salt packet? That much. Then after you have eaten that go out and march barefoot on a square meter of gravel. It has to be the right size or it will either cut your foot or it will have no effect.

Where from?

From a builder's yard. You are strong enough to carry it aren't you, she mocked.

Yes.

And when you pee, interrupt the stream from time to time.

All right.

And eat burned tomato skin. It's good for you.

OK.

In any event her honest intervention, at first, seemed downright dangerous and yet, you see. It was an honest intervention. It wasn't following 'the no harm principle' It was following the do good principle.

Just as there is no taste that arises out of food abstracted from its context except the taste of kitsch. There is no food that 'does no harm'. Altogether food has an effect; positive or negative and the effect is not calculable, and therefore the claim to not harm is risible.

First Fire

2011-12-17T17:19:00.001Z

Veld fire, photo from the SA Weather and Disaster Information Service.

My first clear memory at 3 years old is somewhat apocalyptic. Until then I had existed in an undifferentiated, pervasive loving light, as one frequently can when one is two years old. The love of two young people for each other and for me and my brothers; the love they felt for their country, earthed into mountains, buildings, flowers, fruit, people, struck and caught, until everything flashed and spoke; warmed, forming, radiating: a small boy lighting up into an answering awareness.

Mom was awaiting trial. Dad was hunting down stories for the Rand Daily Mail. And then we were living in Frankenwald on a Wits university soil station, far from the centre of Johannesburg, in the veld.

Late one afternoon there was a commotion. People seemed upset. The grown ups were getting into cars, calling to each other. Doors clunked to. One by one they moved off along the dirt road.

They put on our Jerseys and hurried us out of the simple red brick house. We had a small white car; a Fiat 100. I climbed in head first, onto the back seat, my brothers were put next to me.

Dad started the engine, and we pulled away, following the car in front, and being followed; driving along the track until we were beyond the eucalyptus trees and in the veld.

Cars were parked messily, angled on the uneven banked surface by the side of a field. Dad pulled to a stop, opened the door and leaped off.

The sky was grey, eclipsing. Mom pulled us out. Stood us together and told me to look after the twins. She told me to wait. She was frightened, I could sense it, but determined. Her lips pursed tightly, her voice low she told us to stay where we were and then she too rushed off.

It seemed very undignified to rush so. Where was the smell of burning coming from? I could see no fire only a ragged line of smoke and the smoke that rose up from patches of blackened grass nearby.

There was a pile of grey blankets. There she was. Someone handed her one. The adults were quiet, breathless and moving as fast as they could. They organised a new line, ahead of them, another line, a hundred yards away. They began to beat the earth, advancing towards the smoke.

The fire. They must be beating the fire. But where was it? As the blankets hit the Earth the red sparks scattered, revealing themselves, and the black chaff flew. All the people in that long line along the edge of the field were now working methodically together to a fluttering rhythm. The beaters moved away from us, foot by foot, into the field until they were almost out of sight.

After a while someone away called:

'The fire's out!'

A few people carried on beating until the word reached them and then they too stopped straightened up, turned around one by one, and walked back to their parked cars.

Mom and Dad come back smelling of smoke. We got back into the car and drove back home along the dirt road.

Teresa and Shams, Matumi 2010

2011-12-16T10:29:00.002Z

Back Of The Moon - Miriam Makeba

2011-12-14T18:10:00.000Z

TONY HALL: A LIFE LIVED FROM THE HEART (Born 3 June 1936; Died 31 January 2008)

2011-12-14T17:58:00.001Z

(Born 3 June 1936; Died 31 January 2008)

By Dale T. McKinley (for the Mail & Guardian)

Tony Hall in Dinser in 1973, alerted the world to the first Ethiopian famine

Tony Hall lived his life from the heart. He had a heart that embraced a life-long commitment to human freedom, absorbed large doses of self-sacrifice and enveloped those whom he loved and respected. In some kind of serenely symbolic and beautifully poignant way it was his heart that chose to pronounce on a life well, and fully, lived. Tony Hall passed away peacefully in his sleep at his Mpumalanga home on 31st January.

Tony was born in Pretoria on 3rd June 1936 into a family of note. His grandfather, Arthur Lewis Hall was a pioneering, world famous field geologist, while his Auntie Connie became the first woman lawyer in South Africa. His parents, John and Nola, raised him and three other siblings (David, John and Mike) while running the Lido Hotel in Eikenhof. . He had two other siblings on his mothers side, Joan Mary and Geoff. After attending Pretoria Boys High, he graduated to Wits University where, in the course of his journalism studies, he met, and married, the true love of his life, Eve.

Tony’s first job was at the Star in 1959, but he quickly moved on to the Rand Daily Mail where his journalistic skills were promptly rewarded. An interview with Nelson Mandela and coverage of the Treason Trial followed, and so too did Tony’s politicisation. The day after the Sharpeville massacre, both he and Eve joined the Congress movement. In the ensuing years, they had three boys – Phil, and the two twins, Andy and Chris. Their house became a (secretly renowned) gathering place for movement leaders where serious politics mixed effortlessly with jazz beats and hot curries. By February 1964, the apartheid authorities had ‘listed’ Tony and Eve as members of a banned organisation. Rather than end up serving lengthy goal terms, they packed up their belongings and, along with the boys, headed into exile. It was to be 26 years before they would return home.

During those 26 years in Africa, India and the U.K., Tony perfected the art of activist journalism whilst simultaneously being a loving father and supportive partner to Eve. As the news and features editor of The Nation in Nairobi, Tony blazed a trial of independent, critical journalism at a time when it would have been much easier and safer to simply ‘to do the job’. After his drafting of the Manifesto for the opposition party, the K.P.U., was ‘found out’, Tony was expelled from the country – something which he always ‘wore’ as a badge of honour. And so to Tanzania, where he became the training editor of The Standard, opening up the Hall household as a haven for various liberation movement leaders/activists and doing voluntary work for the ANC, FRELIMO and MPLA.

Stints with Oxfam and the U.N. in India, Ethiopia, Somalia and the U.K. followed. Amongst his many achievements, Tony was the journalist who ‘broke the story’ to the world of the first Ethiopian famine in 1973. He later played a leading role in providing courageous and critical journalistic analysis/commentary on the volatile politics of the Middle East as well as pioneering similar coverage for Eastern and Southern Africa. Throughout, Tony always maintained his unwavering support for, and practical role in, the South African liberation struggle.

When Tony and Eve were finally ‘unbanned’ in 1990, they had no hesitation in immediately returning home. Tony was ecstatic at the possibilities of a new, free South Africa. Still full of energy and passion, he continued with his journalistic and political work, first in Johannesburg and later in the semi-rural confines of his and Eve’s bush ‘retirement’ paradise (Matumi) near Nelspruit. Tony deserved Matumi, a stunningly gorgeous place where that big heart of his found both rest and inspiration, where he lavished love on an ailing Eve (who passed away at Matumi last October), provided a second home for his sons, their wives and his ten grand-children and played gracious host to comrades and friends.

Until his death, Tony never stopped dreaming. In what proved to be his last major piece of writing, he penned a document last year entitled, ‘A 2020 Vision for Southern Africa’, which, in his own words, presents “a quixotic mix of policy guidelines and practical measures to remind us that there are alternatives … there is a way … to promote and complete the emancipation and cooperation of the people of South Africa, and the region”. Practical, passionate and true to his heart … that’s a life worth living.

Hamba Kahle Tony. You will forever remain in our heart and souls.

------------------------------------------
ENDS

Milk skin bubbles

2011-11-26T05:00:00.003Z

I am rubbing at my dappled milk skin

Playing under a jacaranda

In a ditch by the side of a road

And the sunlight pats and strokes my back

And its full lips kiss my cheeks; constantly.

A calloused hand clamps around my upper arm

And pulls me up. Alive, a bubble expands

And breaks into ten bubbles in my stomach, my breast

And sends fifty million smaller bubbles to the rest of my body.

Carols at Matumi with the Martins

2011-11-26T04:45:00.001Z

* Bring your own drinks

* ONE plate of food per car…
* Spectacles!

* Oil the vocal chords!!

Hi Phil,

Just thought you’d like to hear news from Matumi....”heavens embroidered cloth”* as you described it – with which I have to agree.

It is now almost 9 months since we officially moved down here, and we are loving the peaceful tranquillity in such stunning surroundings. In the winter, I spent many enjoyable hours birdwatching from the verandah in the beautiful warm sunshine whilst the renovations were ongoing.

The Aloes viewed from the sink were a wonderful sight when they flowed early Winter. There always seems to be some breathtaking flowering trees year round and it was a delight to see some trees burst in to flower that we hadn’t expected! We literally “camped” for many months, but are now 95% finished in the house, and we are fixing up Nomsa’s house as I write.

Very little structural alterations – we extended the main bedroom wall out 2m (as you come up the drive) and this has become a walk-in wardrobe. We turned the garage in to an office/TV room (so Des can watch the cricket while he works!) and put in a gumpole/tongue & groove ceiling to match the rest of the house. The shed at the side has also been walled in for a workshop for Des. It has a lovely big window looking down the drive, the same height as the doors/windows of the office, so there are lovely lines as you approach the house.

The kitchen is looking amazing! (biased!!) We knocked out the pantry, chipped off the green tiles and put in a beautiful big window to enjoy the stunning view of the trees/bird baths etc. as you sit and eat at the table in the corner. Had new cupboards put in – lovely jacaranda wood, also an island where the gas stove is now, but still maintained the farmhouse feel, as there are no cupboards on the walls. I just love stirring the pot & never tire of the beautiful views.

The back bedroom near the kitchen has had a total makeover and it is now a stunning light and airy room. We lifted the ceiling to roof height so it’s at least 1m higher, and it’s also gumpoles/tongue & groove. Redid the shower, new tiles etc. A Perspex skylight goes right across near the door. So ‘sleeping under the stars’ takes on a whole new meaning!!

We now have an ensuite in our main bedroom – blocked up the door of the bathroom in the passage, and knocked through an opening where the wardrobe was. It had a complete facelift including a corner bath and I just love it. The bathroom in bedroom 2 is being redone as we speak – this is the last thing to do in the house. The other major thing we did was new flooring in the office/TV room, all the bedrooms and the kitchen. The guest cottage still looks the same, just lots of TLC etc. What is lovely is that we are painting the whole house a dark grey colour (‘elephant skin’ as Harry says) and it will blend in beautifully with the trees and bush. Windows will still be white. So far, the cottage is painted and some of the house, hopefully it will be finished by mid Dec.

Where do we park the cars? We have cut back in to the bank as you look up to the cottage and Happy (our builder, along with Hendrick, his side kick), has built a stone wall to reinforce the bank. We still have to complete the structure with gumpoles and a roof etc. giving it a wonderful rustic look and it will not impede the view to that side of the property.   Next year, we hope to build a verandah right along the front of the house overlooking Little Serengetti and will perhaps make a minor change to the front door area, repaving and merging the whole area to the new garage.

We are fortunate to have had Ponani and Gezani to help where needed as extra hands. Gezani is such a wonderful gentleman, as is Happy, our builder. Hendrick is a delight, just like his father.   Ponani...has gone walkabout a couple of times and is on a warning! But largely, I think he needs supervision and for the most part, is working well. Nomsa is always smiling and is very thorough. She has loved seeing all the changes and of course is delighted we are fixing up her place.

We have just had our first Aussie visitors (you did know I’m an Aussie I think?!) for the past month, and they helped with all the unpacking of boxes and hanging of pictures etc. I can’t wait to have Carols at Matumi on 20th (see attachement!) – I started this when we first got married and lived down the road, it carried on in Joburg and now we are resurrecting it here again. Will be doing it twice - I am going to Joburg to do carols at our house on 15th Dec as my boys and our friends there would be devastated if carols stopped (after 24 yrs. there).

It’s great to have Leigh and Harry as our neighbours again – Des (being the foreman on the job) has bounced a lot of things off Harry and he’s been a great backstop, especially when we have to make decisions we are not qualified to make! It is wonderful to feel part of a community here – we have joined the Heal group (environmental organisation in the valley) and go to a monthly security meeting up at Sudwalla. I’m sure you get the picture...we are very happy at Matumi and taking it to even greater heights, without spoiling what came before us. I think your mum and dad would approve!

Please pass this on to Chris and Andy ...can’t find their email addresses. Hope all your family are well. Have an enjoyable Christmas and we wish you everything we wish ourselves in 2012! Would love to have your dad’s ‘compleat guide to Matumi’ when you get the time.
Warm regards

Lori

Dear Lori,

It makes me happy to read your email. It was clearly all meant to be. It's nice to hear that the old place is buzzing again and that after the Nusseys and the Halls come the new house Martins.

I would love to come and visit one day, just to see how everything has been changed and renewed.
I do think of Matumi now, after Mom and Dad's departure, as a sort of launch pad to infinity. Do you feel their presence there at all?

I don't. For a long time I did, but it's as if they have finally packed and left. Waiting for us, no doubt at some place further on.

The abiding image for Matumi for me now is of the Milky Way. Of going outside and looking at the stars and seeing them in a surround.

Best regards,

Phil

I will pass this on to Chris and Andy as you ask

*That was William Blake, not me.

Response from Anandi Sharan on the question of the responsibilities of ownership

2011-11-23T03:11:00.003Z

Major landowners in Wrentham, Sotterley and Henstead agreed to enclose 700 acres:
the heaths, fen grounds, commons and waste lands in the three parishes in 1790.

Dear Phil.

Thanks for your thoughtful and interesting paper. I am sorry for the
late reply. I am responding without following the links you have
provided. So if I missed some of your background assumptions please
point out the false conclusions and I will go back to your links.

It is certainly startling just how rich these ultra rich are, and that
they are in a condition where it is possible for them to believe that
they owe little to individual states. I totally agree that
re-nationalising will do nothing because the wealth is always
associated with exploitation of the earth and of the bodies of other
people and so nationalising would just perpetuate those material
calamities associated with these people’s wealth. The commons offers a
good starting point for what the relationship in life actually is
between things and people, especially land.

Good husbandry definitely can create value provided the husbandman or
woman is advised what the value is that it is useful to create. A coal
mine is not value, but a forest is.

This is one of the ideas underlying new forms of land tax that can
accompany decentralised village and town ward consensus committees of
all adults for common land use management of their localities. The
idea here is that the land property can be in a private name so as not
to upset people but it cannot be inherited and it is taxed at a
floating percentage depending on how land prices are moving in that
region. So no matter how much a person makes from selling their land,
and the goodwill part is theirs for keeps, the commons – i.e. the
village or town ward committee – retains a good proportion of it for
services. And a decentralised commons need not give rulers in a far
away capital interference rights over highways, coastlines, beaches
and so on. If people want others to come they can let them come. If
not, not. The people if they have a commons will defend it and resort
to violence if necessary.

So my view on your new approach is that actually the duties of
property owners is everything: but because it is so difficult in
democracies for people to have a say, property duties need to be
enforced at site by people with the vision of the commons as they
would like it to operate to sequester more greenhouse gases than they
emit, for example, or plant more food than they consume, or to grow
building materials for houses and flax and hemp for clothes. In other
words, there are some material constrains on the commons in relation
to atmospheric stability that will guide us as we put these limits to
ownership. As you rightly say: property owners should pay all their
taxes and not pollute. So ownership should be more like a software
license. If you own a piece of land your consensus village committee
or town ward committee will license you to use it in a defined set of
circumstances.

The relation between the commons at the village and town ward level
and speculative activity of traders facilitated by the state is
another issue all together.

States – egged on by their ideologues whether in the name of kings or
‘the people’ - invade and enclose land and facilitate the exploitation
of ‘their’ regions for state aggrandisement and the aggrandisement of
their courtiers. As climate change impacts personal consciousness and
possibly economic decisions, the energy base of the society constrains
economic activity and changes the willingness of people as individuals
to engage with their commons. The difficulties Europe is facing of
reorganising money to suit the needs of the people, is because the
corporations would not like to let go of their global energy and
therefore their global power. The condition of people in India and the
UK is becoming quite similar in terms of the failings of the state in
relation to the commons. So the question of who is going to control
globalised money is a complex one today.

It may be that climate change will be the means by which hydrocarbon
installations are physically destroyed, and that the global system
will only fall apart as climate change begins to make life itself a
doubtful possibility. Thus personal physical control of land by a
person in occupation will be a very crucial factor in defending
people’s bodies and livelihoods all over the world. The question of
the real physical opportunities and conditions and relations need to
be taken into account. Democracy today is the means by which banks
through reserves banks and governments facilitate global debt-based
capitalism. There is no role for voters here as is seen in the process
of replacement of Berlusconi.

So perhaps my only point of disagreement is on the idea of
‘democratically elected governments.’ I do not think there are
citizens in democracies, only consumers. Whether the odd real human
being will defend the commons we will see by watching people’s
actions, including our own. So long as consumers prefer the comfort of
the system as it is to the chaos of the politics of the commons that
contains violence, politics and violence will always be displaced to
the ‘periphery’ (even if the periphery is in the heartland, say, all
agricultural workers in the case of India) by states on behalf of
their consumers. So what to do to defend the commons? It boils down to
physical resistance to the state and its agencies, courtiers,
financiers and profiteers.

Love from Anandi

Lisa and Eve Steinhardt making a wish at the Trevi Fountain in Rome in 1952

2011-11-18T02:13:00.001Z

Eve Hall, Mom, standing up to address an ANC meeting in Tanzania in 1972 - she edited the ANC's Voice of Women

2011-11-18T02:04:00.001Z

Tony Hall, Dad, in the Sudan in 1973 - 4

2011-11-18T01:57:00.001Z

Nyerere and Dad's boss, Frene Ginwalla, in the early 70s at the Tanzania Standard

2011-11-18T01:51:00.001Z

Tony Hall, Editor, and his team at 8 Days in the early 80s

2011-11-18T01:47:00.001Z

Tony Hall and his team of IMR journalists in Somalia in the 1980s

2011-11-18T01:42:00.001Z

Eve Hall, Mom, and her colleagues in Ethiopia in the 90s

2011-11-18T01:37:00.003Z

Eve Hall. Mom and her Colleagues in Somalia in the 80s

2011-11-18T01:33:00.001Z

Archduke Ferdinand arriving - Isidor Steinhardt on the top steps

2011-11-18T01:24:00.001Z

Evchen's birthday

2011-11-18T00:47:00.001Z

Chris decided to become a pilot.

2011-11-17T00:42:00.014Z

The engines of a beautiful East African Airways VC10, picture from B742

My brother Chris is, quite literally, a very high achiever. He's one of the top civil aviation pilots in Britain. But when I remark on that fact he just brushes it off.

'I'm just a glorified bus driver, Phil.'

But he forgets things about the past. I think it's because he has to store so much information in his mind about the different hydraulic systems of different aircraft and suchlike. So he might not actually remember this, but I do. I saw his warning light go on.

I remember the moment he decided to become a pilot.

It was 1971, winter, and we were on our way to Tanzania with Mom to meet Dad who was in Dar-es-Salaam waiting for us. We were leaving Britain behind with no regret whatsoever and going back to Africa. It was a feeling of release, of having been released from a dark and difficult land.

Because of the weather the plane had to make an unscheduled landing in Zurich, and we stayed overnight at an airport hotel. We were very excited. The hotel room was large and comfortable and had a wall to wall red carpet. It must have been made of an artificial fabric because every time we touched hands we received a painful static shock. So we agreed not to touch.

The next evening we left.

On either side of the glass doors, stood Swiss guards. We smiled at them, but they didn't smile back. They wore great grey fur coats and carried large machine guns with holes punched into the barrels.

We walked across the tarmac towards the plane: snowflakes whirled around; there was the red, yellow and white glimmer of lights; there were the planes and busy service vehicles, the runway and rotating radar; and we walked up to an East African Airways VC10 whose engines loomed above.

Really cool.

Chris said. 'This is really cool.'

And that was the moment, I think, he decided to become a pilot.

Honk Honk!

2011-11-15T14:56:00.008Z

Swallow, Eve Hall, 1940, age 4

You were thinking of your father, in Africa.

In the shop a Frenchwoman called your mother a 'Salle Bosch,' a 'sallope.'

So you said to her: 'Mutti, let me speak for you. Be quiet. I'll speak for you in French.'

'My father is in Africa,' you told those who asked:

'Where is your father?

'Who is your father?

'Is your father an escaping Jew?', they thought.

And so your mother, protecting you, in turn, said,:

'We know your father is in Africa.'

'Where's Africa?'

'Look, see that swallow?'

'Yes.'

'It's going to Africa. One day we will go too.'

'Let me show you in the Larousse. There was the colourful map of a continent and pictures of giraffes, with long necks that made you laugh with delight.

('Look, a giraffe!' You would always exclaim on so many rides through game parks.)

'Listen, you are Mummy's clever darling. Leibchen; now we have to tell another story. We must say that Daddy is French, you understand. Say that Daddy has gone awayand that he left us and not say he is in Africa.

OK.

At home that day, maybe the next or the one after that, in the flash of winter brightness you saw another swallow launch itself from the guttering above the window.

You drew it, cut it out and painted it.

* * *

In your hilltop home 65 years later you and dad watch birds and tell stories about them:

"To comment on the cleverness or stupidity of birds, one has to be anthropomorphic – how else translate their actions, and give them a meaning? So that’s the way I’ve tried to think about it and I’m afraid I’ve come to the conclusion that they’re nothing but a pretty face - the “bird brain” label sticks. Chickens are stupid. When they’re scared, they huddle together and suffocate each other; and they rush across roads in the face of oncoming traffic. In fact their brains are so redundant that they can still run around without them.From my experience, geese too are stupid, never mind what the Romans say – they can’t in fact tell friend from foe, and gaggle indiscriminately. My landlady in Harare had a flock of them in her garden that refused to recognise me as a legitimate, fully paid-up tenant. What’s more stupid looking (and actually, bloody frightening) than seeing 12 geese rush at you, necks outstretched, hissing? Hadeda ibises are stupid – they fly over our heads crying with hunger but don’t spot our invitingly cricket-pitted lawn.Grey hooded kingfishers are stupid – they get the crickets, but try to take a short cut by flying through our closed windows.Lesser striped swallows are stupid – they take a wrong turning out of their nests and into our dining room and can’t retrace their steps to get out again.Then there’s the male pintailed whydah, aka King of Six – the quintessentially stupid domineering male. For most of the year he’s just an LBJ* among other LBJs, humble, small, insignificant. But come October, he has a rush of testosterone, grows a very long tail, and becomes the nastiest bully on the block. The books say he has six wives (or five, depending on the source) and it is for them that he chases all other birds away – and not only birds: this twopenny’s worth of feathers even swoops furiously at us, fully grown, adult humans if we come near the bird tray. The bulbuls, the black collared barbets, the cape- white eyes, all larger them he is, keep away in the face of this harassment. After two months of exhausting aggression, the females have (one assumes) eaten their fill (though that’s not certain, because he seems to chase them off as much as anything or anyone else), and they “cuckoo” (i.e. lay their eggs in) the nests of the common waxbill. Then the long tail feathers drop off the male, and he becomes just another meek little hopping LBJ again. The only ones who maybe come out quite well in all this are the female whydahs – perhaps not so stupid: they drop off their young and run."

* Little Brown Job

You gave me a book on migrating geese, which I didn't read.

In London, later on you asked: 'Why do you never read the books I give you?' and I just wept. I hugged you on the red sofa and you said:

'Why are you crying?' and held me gently around my shoulder and neck.

And that was the last time I saw you, properly alive.

Yesterday, I sat with my son on a bench by the river (we were walking to Hampton Court) and I felt his youth and warmth against my side and together we saw, flying low over the shifting meniscus of the Thames, two geese with their wings beating strongly, followed by a trailing skein.

We are the geese that trail behind you.

Honk, Honk.

Swallow, by Eve Hall in 1940 or 1941 when she was 3 or 4

2011-11-15T11:15:00.001Z

Else, Regina and Richard Steinhardt

2011-11-15T10:57:00.000Z

Arthur Steinhardt in Jerusalem in 1941

2011-11-15T10:47:00.000Z

Tony Hall - first reporter on a South African daily newspaper to be banned.

2011-11-14T22:50:00.001Z

Listed Reporter to leave

[From the Star in February 1964 (?)]

Staff reporter

Mr. TONY HALL, a young journalist who has been "listed" under the Supression of Communism Act, plans to leave South Africa at the end of this week.

Mr Hall, 27, is the first reporter on a South African daily newspaper to be listed [banned] It means that he may no longer work for any publication in this country. When Mr. Hall was first warned, last September, that his name was to be added to a list of ex-members and active supporters of the now-banned Congress of Democrats, he protested to theDeparment of Justice.

LIVELIHOOD

"I asked for reasons and pointed out that I would be forced to give up my job and would lose my livelyhood." he said yesterday.

I was simply told that I had attended certain meetings and demonstrations. But the question of my career being wrecked was ignored."

The father of three small children, Mr. Hall received his final notice last week that his name had been added to the list.

"I have never broken any laws," he said. "This is retrospective punishment for something which I could not have known would have become punishable.

"At the time any activity of mine was quite legal."

Visiting Carmen in Manchester

2011-11-13T10:13:00.006Z

The rooftops of Manchester, Valette

When her mother brought Carmen to Manchester in September she packed a suitcase containing everything she might need. However, in contrast to the other girls in residential halls, Carmen didn't bring much. Other mothers piled their cars high with spatulas and teddy bears.

'Why have you so few things?' Carmen's neighbours asked her when they visited her room.

To make up for this, when I went to Manchester to visit her, I brought Carmen: a ship-to-ship, butane-powered foghorn (and warned her not to use it near a naked flame); a red kitchen timer with a silver dial to help her manage time (softly ticking, and with a short, pleasant ring); a large non-stick kitchen knife with holes punched along its blade and a round tip; 50 blue-ink ball point pens (in five colours); plastic folders. multicoloured Post-it notes; flourescent sticky-backed blazes; a smoke alarm and, finally, glasses to allow her to see who was sneaking up behind.

She looked at my purchases, said: 'Thank you Dad'; then ignored what I had bought and immediately tried on the white, form-fitting, quilted jacket which her mother had sent. 'Do you like it,' she asked?' Posing, studying herself in the mirror.

In my haste to fill the sports bag up with useful items, I forgot the matching blue wolly hat, scarf and gloves Teresa had also asked me to take to Carmen.

'Never mind,' I thought, 'at least she has a foghorn.'

On my way to Manchester on a narrow carriaged Virgin train - the compartment like the cabin of a budget jet - I sat opposite a man in his thirties in a grotty suit and white shirt who coughed. He scribbled in pencil on a large slim black notebook and, provocatively, put his coffee cup right up against the imaginary line that divided his table space from mine.

Following him into Manchester I overheard him on the phone, :

'Yes, well we need to do this across the board in all 11 prisons.'

Outside the station at first it was as I remembered it. Dark.To paraphrase the children's book:

In a dark dark country there’s a dark dark town

In the dark dark town there’s a dark dark street

In the dark dark street there’s a dark dark accomodation block

And in the accomodation block there is a box room.

I hoped Carmen’s room was cheerful. The impression of darkness was momentary; coming out of the station I saw that most of the people who were about were student-all-sorts, Manchester looks like a student town.

The sound track began. Quality music on every corner. Carmen, accepted it naturally, nodded her head saying: 'I like this song.' or 'I hate this song.'

I walked past a sign at a church entrance advertising: 'Mass in Swaheli.' Found my way to a launderette with an Internet service, emailed Carmen my address, travelled in a bus past Curry Mile, past the International Student Association. I got off near Platte Fields Park.

A young student with a large beard bounced along the pavement. I stopped him in mid bounce. He took off his headphones. 'Brighton Grove?' I asked. 'No sorry.' he said. Earphones back on, bouncing away again. In the gloom I had to walk right up to the road sign to read: 'Brighton Grove.' Turned left into a darkening tree lined road, and I find Luther King House.

Carmen, is waiting for me. 'You chose well,' she said, 'I’m only three minutes away.' My room, which was comfortable and clean, was in an annex up a flight of stairs, next to the periodicals section of the theology library. 'The right place for you then,' said Carmen.

'I love my politics lectures,' she said. But the lecturer has a rule. If anyone's mobile phone rings she must stand up and sing a song from the film Titanic. So the mobile phone of this extremely shy small Chinese girl rang; she was sitting right at the front. She had to stand up and sang in a quavering voice with the politics lecturer conducting:

Every night in my dreams
I see you, I feel you
That is how I know you
go on

Far across the distance
And spaces Between us
You have come to show you
go on

Near, far, wherever you are
I believe that the heart does go on
Once more you open the door
And you're here in my heart and
My heart will go on and on

'She got a big round of applause.'

'Was she traumatised?' I asked. You can get into trouble for doing that sort of thing.

'I couldn't see her face,' said Carmen, 'I don't know.'

We went to a tapas bar run by latin Americans for diner. Coriander and fresh tomatoes with the papas bravas, tasty, but overcooked, seafood, incessant salsa music - irritating. Then for a coffee at a smart restaurant with fairy lights '..trying to be London,' said Carmen. As we walked in a customer was complaining that he had just swallowed a piece of glass. The manager was apologising.

'The Chef must have banged the pan down too hard and a bit of the glass lid must have chipped off. They have to bang the pan to loosen the pasta you see.'

'A likely story.' I thought.

We watched TV in my warm room and Carmen left reluctantly. We agreed to meet at 9 am. I met up with her at 10 am. In this respect she is a chip off the old block.

'My friends liked your presents.' said Carmen. 'They want to meet you.'

'Forget that.'

'Yes, forget that.' said Carmen.

'And Lucy?'

Carmen texted Lucy. 'She's in the library working on her dissertation. I'm proud of her.' said Carmen. She's been so nice to me. She lives in a nice house down that street. I visit her often.

'I asked her to spy on you,' I said. 'Invite her to lunch.'

It's 11/11/11. I'll tell you the meaning of 11/11/11. I said to Carmen. It has no meaning, of course. It's Armistice day, but otherwise numbers only have intrinsic meaning in the mathematical sense.

Think of it like this. If your grandparents had done nothing with their lives then they too would have been looking back at past generations and lionising the people who went before them. But they kept busy.

When I went to Pretoria to the funeral of one of Dad's cousins I knew almost no one. I went with Eve at the suggestion of Colin Hall, (management Svengali and former CEO and Chairmen of companies). One of Dad's cousins spoke of Arthur Hall, our illustrious, shared, forebear. I mentioned I would be writing about him and the wife of Dad's cousin piqued, said.

'No, Alan - I think it was Alan - will be writing about him. What do you know of him. What's your connection?'

'And I said. "'Don't worry. I don't have that much to say about Arthur. I have a lot more to say about Eve and Tony."'

'You see the Pretoria family just carried on with their lives during Apartheid and so have to look far back for solace.

'But this date, 11/11/11 is the reset button for us. Now you can look forward. What you do, and what your peers and your brother and sister and cousins do will matter even more. What you think matters.'

I ignored Carmen's murmered interruptions.

'You are a bit too much of the teacher, sometimes.'she said.

'But I am becoming more of a feminist as I get older.'

'You are a sexist' said Carmen. 'naturally so. You aren't even aware of it.'

'Oh I am,' I said. 'I do it to please your mother. Mexican women lose their bearings when they aren't dealing with a modicum of sexism.'

'Just don't do it,' said Carmen.

'Look, my friend Rose.' Carmen exclaimed. From the bus I caught sight of a girl in jeans with red hair walking up a flight of steps.

We bought peri peri kebabs in Piccadilly gardens and got a lecture on zoning restrictions from the owner. A whiskered, unkempt man standing to one side watching two young Polish people serve the public.

'My Mum bought me a plant for a pound Carmen said.' Laughing. 'It didn't look like much. It was wilted. Mum said: "Just water it and it will be alright." So I did. It's very green and healthy now.'

In town Carmen lead me from place to place, cafe to cafe, shop to shop and my eyes grew rounder and rounder. Manchester is wonderful. It's so lively and interetsing. We walked into an Indie record shop. I hadn't heard of most of the bands. We went to a vegan cafe and we drank coffee. Then through the centre talking privately of family matters in Spanish. In fact, I am ashamed to say for a while I lectured her on Bauhaus and Garden Cities and our family connection with both.

Many of the dignified buildings seemed to have been converted into shops or pizza parlours. The massive Portico Library, converted into a high class chippy. We took a short cut through a big mall. Carmen took me to the Geiger shoe shop.

'Everyone's talking about this shoe shop.'

Past the football museum shaped like a glass trainer, to the Manchester Art Gallery. And in the museum there was a picture of a family in mourning. The dead wife's big head rested on two plump goose-down pillows. The dead woman's husband, her children all dressed in black velvet, stared out, intensely at us. The family crest was painted at the top.

The man was wearing a pair of Geiger high heeled shoes. His wife's perhaps. Stilletoes made from a black velvet material with a black velvet rose on the instep of each shoe. He leaned back in his chair, occupying most of the painting, his daughter pale, in the bottom right hand corner, his son occupying the space to the left.

There was Lowry of course and Valette.Then there was Grayson Perry: with his supperating penis flowers, gorillas and girls, in different poses and all in a pretty pass, beatifully painted and glazed onto what looked like Ming vases. And Perry's auto icon. 'It's not an auto icon', said Carmen. Jeremy Bentham didn't inspire Perry. Not everything is a copy, not everything is created referring to something else.

Carmen has a cool looking plastic bottle which advertises tap water. She refills it. 'It's a good idea,' she says.

'Yes,' I smell the water. 'It smells a bit of swimming pool.'

'Don't spoil it for me.' said Carmen.

'Would you drink Johnny Depp's swimming pool water? Angelina Jolie's?' Carmen laughed.

When we left the buidling it was getting dark. We reached Albert square. A huge geometric Father Christmas had been built over the entrance to the imposing buildings of the Manchester Metropolitan Council.

'That's disgusting.' said Carmen, looking up at it. 'How could they desecrate a beautiful building like that?'

We went inside. There were interesting stairways. The busts of Manchester's famous men had been placed in a chatty circle in what was now a large cafe, by one of the Windows. The dignified men that built manchester, mocked.

Manchester's self mockery

In the 1980s we took Yosser, in Boys from the Black Stuff seriously, Yosser tipped over a cliff.

'Giss a job. I can do that.' he says, following the linesman along a football pitch with his three small children trailing behind him.

We shared Yosser's mood sometimes. Sitting in the dole queue; hapless.

But then something happened. There are always periods of thermidor. Napoleon disappoints, Louise Philippe makes you despair. Russian revolutionaries committed suicide in exile, after 1905.

And then the world stops. And miraculously it restarts and we stop despairing.

11/11/11. Manchester mocks its working class roots. It mocks its former dignity. It mocks its family values, manliness and the work ethic, and so it resets the dial.

The symbol of Manchester is not the old Canal, it is the podium set up in front of the famous painting in the Manchester Art Gallery.

In the painting a climber tears at his hair as he looks over the abyss. presumably a comrade has just fallen to his death. The podium invites you to pose and tear at your hair in mockery of the climber and his fallen comrade.

* * * * * *

Where are you going? my colleagues asked me before I flew to the UK. 'To see my family and to visit my daughter in Manchester, Carmen.'

I bought her a turquoise pastel rucksack in a shop in the centre and then, after a meal of pie chips and mushy peas (which she didn't finish) she took me to the bus station, waited for the bus to leave, waved me goodbye. I love my daughter.

2011-10-21T00:41:00.000+01:00

Don’t argue withArthur, your geologist great grandfather.

Africa was really alongside America.

Believe in thebest bits

Of British boysand girls and brothers

Don’t try to changeyour children’s class and culture

And confine them to a country.

I'm Still dazed that, Dad, the free thinking socialist, died;

Still amazedthat Mom, Eve, was someone for everyone.

She gave us loveand set an example.

I eat enough andprovide English education here.

Now they are faraway, but my family is established.

Some of us evenfound France again, Carmen was in Paris,

But we have no Frenchfriends.

And who gave Godback to the Germans?

Who gave themgood government?

This was not theexperience of Granny and Grandpa in the 30s.

No God, no good governmentthen.

The Halls werealways half hard-heads and half home-help

And they always hadone foot in human history.

Isidor, standing on the Sarajevo steps in 1914,

I would haveliked to have meet him

But now I have my son John to talk to.

I write of the lifelines of love letters, for Lisa and from Lisa.

I was made a manwhen I married a Mexican

What’s the nameof tonight’s nation?

It is SaudiArabia.

My parents wereparty people.

Theyplayed in the p.m.

And they had such poetic sensibilities

And pointeddirectly at political power,

And at the needfor public property;

Quite an important questionreally.

I read everything andreally want to remember right,

And rememberrights

To make sense ofmyself too in the South.

This memoir is not only a Steinhardt sob story

It’s about how 2 people supported a socialist system that would

They hoped, ensure human rights.

And I did thinkthings through

With the help ofdad.

And he taught me to drive to the top of the town.

Together we tookthe turns, stalling

I haven't taught my son to drive.

I understandthat universalism and the inotic is useful.

Who were the key players?

What did they sacrifice?

These are our heroes.

Let’s visit, let’s walk.

He said: 'They wanted the coastline and the resources

And so they organised a war.'

And what we wanted,

My father and brothers and I,

Were whole women from wonderful worlds

And women with wonderful words.

Women and men work the world I am writing about

They make it work.

I write the years back, young.

I pushed the red button

2011-10-13T18:20:00.018+01:00

Be against forced marriage not immigrants.

Human sacrifice, forced marriage and clitorectomy; unacceptable in Surbiton.

If an Aztec, an Ancient Roman or a member of the Golden Horde was transported in time to Britain circa 2011-2, he might want to continue practicing his beliefs, however, and rightly so, there would be limits. It might be a little difficult for him at first, but it would be easier for his children.

Fights to the death, human sacrifice, pillage, murder, clitorectomies, forced marriages and explosive martyrdom are definitely 'no nos' in the UK.

Early this year I had an 17 year old student who confided in me that her mother and father wanted her to marry her cousin, her mother's brother. The girl didn't want to, whereupon the mother took away her phone and computer. She told me that she was afraid she might get up one day and be told she would be on a flight out to Sri Lanka - suffering extraordinary rendition.

On the walls of the college I was teaching at (I am working elsewhere now.). are signs that say that forced marriage is rape and illegal, and the poster gives the numbers of the people to contact within the college. I worked closely with two of the people concerned, one of whom was my line manager. I alerted him, and convinced the girl to talk to him.

He talked to her and from then on I was out of the equation.

He came to me afterwards and said. We've been working on this all afternoon, and we can't do anything, but all I can say is that if anything happens there is a big red button we can push. He looked tired and I knew neither he nor my other colleague were getting paid for doing this extra work. British civil servants can be the salt of the earth.

Two days later the girl's younger sister came to see me. Just to say:t My sister won't be coming to your class today because she is flying off to Sri Lanka.

I pushed the red button.

My line manager nodded. Disappeared and I knew nothing more, except that two days later he popped by and said. She'll be coming to school tomorrow.

She did. She was pale - for a Sri Lankan - and looked exhausted, but I sensed happiness and relief. You look a little tired. I said and smiled. Anything happen last week?' No, nothing. she said. I am sure you'll do really well in your exams, see you in class. She went off.

My line manager never told me what happened story because of confidentiality and privacy. But when I asked: Did they go round to her house and talk to her parents? He casually said. It was a little more dramatic than that.She was actually on the plane. It was a very complex multiagency operation. Everyone was involved, and don't worry, the parents don't know it was us, they think it was the airline. He couldn't say more.

Forced or coerced marriage is simply unacceptable here. It should be unacceptable everywhere. Ignore the argument that appeal to cultural relativism. Take young Bangladeshi girls and boys, plop them into Tomas Tallis; when they are older send them off to Tower Hamlets College, and you will get little Londoners. Nothing more.

Chain migration is a problem in Britain, it's true. You force your daughter to marry her cousin so that you can reunite your family in the UK and see your brother again. The family's well being is important of course. People migrate and make their contribution to the place they live in. The Sri Lankans have a hard time of it. When the Tamils came to the UK escaping a very real war and persecution they helped each other and built up little communities. In those closed communities the way women and children are treated might be seen to be a little problematic. But they adapt. Many Koreans for example, are accustomed to giving their children, especially boys,beatings, but in the UK they can no longer do this. Do they do it? Probably, Again the front line here is usually the school who alert the relevant authorities.

We all want to live in a fair society. Young people more so Let's call this ideal The City of God. We want to live in a place where each child is born equal and has the help they need to flourish equally and become a productive, well-adapted member of a productive, well-adapted nation, in a productive and well-adapted region of a productive and well-adapted world.

That's the ideal, anyway. Of course Britain is not that place: we have a two layer educational cake and all the icing is on the upper crust; the public schools have the resources. We do not really live in a meritocracy but a managed democracy. But still, many of us have been working to create a more human society a more politically correct equal opportunities meritocracy. Sometimes it shows. My former Tamil student can complete her course.

Luckily for her parents the courts in Britain are relatively tolerant of people who are still adapting to life in the UK. They have committed a crime, kidnapping and aiding and abetting attempted rape and slavery, but will not be going to prison. A social worker will come round and visit to check that the young woman and her sisters and check that they are alright.

In their mid to late teens, and in their early twenties, the drive of young people is social adaptation. Ask people who have come to this country as immigrants and asylum seekers if they want to marry young. Unless they are deeply in love or very vulnerable and in the power of their parents, they will say they want to stay single until their mid-to-late twenties, or their thirties. Some of them might not even want to marry. Some of them might be gay, God forbid. Young people adapt to British social expectations.

It is, frankly, beautiful to see how quickly most Arab, Sri Lankan, Muslim, Korean, Chinese West African, Polish, Chinese ... children and young people see the benefits of the system of social equality in Britain almost immediately, a system that so many people in Britain, socialists, liberals and even enlightened Tories, have worked hard to make an important part of daily life. These young people seize the idea that they can achieve what they want to, probably, if they work very hard and many of them do engage. This is so inspiring. There is something so valuable in the social fabric of Britain so precious, and it isn't broken. It's the product of the work of teachers, civil servants, conscientious people from every walk of life who have a sense of fairness.

However, though we may have a comparatively egalitarian society, the immigration system doesn’t reflect this. It is shockingly unfair and irrational. A despicable system. I have had people say to me. We are not going to visit you because we have to fill in too many immigration forms. Now I am talking about people of means. The barriers for foreign students to come and study in the UK are too high. The barriers that the current and last UK government put up to people wanting to come and visit the UK from poorer countries. And when they get here, for every ten British border guards who are alright, there is one who is a brute. Civil servants we should not admire.

In the The US, for example, the border control system is equally alienating, it has lost the US more friends and goodwill than all its recent wars combined. Everyone from the whole of Latin America, no matter how educated or patriotic or well off is frisked and treated like a criminal at the US border posts by very dumb and aggressive border guards.

Yes, stop forced marriages, but perhaps then reconsider the application to emigrate to the UK of the brother and family of the student whose story I told. Make it easier for people with family here to apply, but who live there, to apply. That would be human.

We don't hate British racists, we just want to stop them.

We don't hate British racists. We hate their ideas. The police in the US have a policy however. When they shoot someone about to carry out a crime they are not actually shooting them, they say they are stopping them from doing something bad. They are stopping the action.

When we jail and tag extremists we are just stopping them. When we act against British fascists we are confronting their ideas and their influence, we shouldn't hate them. Woody Guthrie's guitar said: This machine kills fascists. But fascism is just an idea in people's minds. Instead he should have written: This machine stops fascists. or This machine kills fascism.

The central concern of the British government should obviously not be for the well being of immigrants. It should be concern for the fully paid up, participating, tax paying citizens of Britain. However, it is a false dichotomy to say that the rights of immigrants detract from the rights of citizens. that is a false argument. That is the argument of racist scape-goaters. It is a discredited argument. It was discredited at the time of Enoch Powell's Rivers of Blood speech.

The rights of citizens and immigrants are not directly in conflict. There are problematic elements there, but benefits too. To juxtapose them is to create an artificial argument just as Hitler did with the Jews.

Especially when often racists are not talking of foreigners at all but of people who are now British. Whether British people are of immigrant origin or not doesn't make them other, They are as British in law as you or I or Eels and Mash. When you attack British people of a different ethnic origin from your own you are still attacking British people and not foreigners. The point is that immigrants are British people once they have lived here long enough and once they arrive and adapt. The attacks on immigrant communities are attacks on British people that some other racist British people are defining as non British for their own purposes.

Hitler said that the Jews had what the Germans deserved, except that the Jews were Germans. But he took their property and persecuted them and killed them all the same. Most of the Jews made no distinction. They saw themselves as Germans or Austrians.

Remember that so many of our doctors now are the children of the Kenyan Gujarati refugees from Idi Amin's Uganda and Kenyatta's Kenya. Many of our mathematicians and scientists will come from the Sri Lankan community in future, they place such a high value on maths and science. Look at some of the people who write for this paper. Children of immigrants. Sparky focused people doing very well in journalism because they deserve to be doing well. Now look at the media in France, Gernany, Italy and Spain. Yes, there is a lot of quality there but they lack a dimension our media has because we are - whether the racists like it or not - a fairer society.

The prototypical arguments of bigots are transparent. Here is an example of one such:

“A staggering 68% of all children born in Tower Hamlets are born to foreign mothers.That’s a lot of babies born into households where English is not the first (or even spoken) language. Subsequently, we have 448 000 children (according to the BBC) who go to primary school unable to speak English.”

Interpreting what the person here is saying, essentially he or she doesn't want any more 'foreign' babies. And that foreigners are reproducing like rabbits? And that the women who have the babies are not British. And that there are 448,000 babies born of foreign Bangladeshi women in Tower hamlets, few who will learn English.

Of course these racist arguments are cobblers.

When times get tough then people look for scapegoats because they are powerless to confront the real causes of our condition, of our situation. What is the real cause of unemployment and relative poverty and inequality? It ain't the fault of the Bangladeshi baby, mate!

If I were ever presented with this false choice, I would choose to support the foreign baby before the bitter and twisted racist. I support the young people trying to live well and trustingly and adapt to a dynamic modern society, thank you very much and I detest Britain’s narrow minded racism. I detest the ideas of the racists who grew up in the 60s and 70s. The Pinky’s, the Skinheads and the Suedeheads. I know them. I grew up with some of them. But society has chosen anyway. Just look around you. The racist ideas of certain old men and women aren't exactly the flavour of the month, the year or the last three decades.They have been unfriended, deselected.

The conflict between citizens who are and aren't of immigrant origin is an artificial conflict. We are all British and we are all in the same boat. blaming the immigrants is a stupid game. I agree with people who say: The problem is segregation. We should do everything we can to overcome it.

Never underestimate people. Never underestimate the young. The young haven't quite been completely socialized into all the unfairness in their own culture, though they are probably blind to some of it. They are wild and riot, but at the same time they haven't quite joined the society they attack, and with good reason.

Before you join society you stand on the edge and look in and you may not like what you see. This could cause you to do a number of things. Step back into some personal abstraction of religion. Become a counter culture radical like the wonderful young Spanish indignados dancing in the main squares. Go out on marches like the British school children who were kettled and deprived of lavatory facilities and forced to stand on their feet for hours without water - standard torture techniques by the way.

Children and young people have a heightened sense of justice and fairness. The Lord of the Flies is about the corruption of innocence, not innocence itself. Thank God for young people who can step back and look before they leap or step into adulthood and society and say. I don't like what I see. I want to opt out of what I see. Or best of all, I want to change what I see.

A letter to Fuchsia, editorial writer at the Guardian

2011-10-12T01:24:00.013+01:00

Fuchsia, editorial writer at the Guardian

I remember reading the Whole Earth Catalogue and the writing of feminists in the 70s, as a teen, and loving the idea of a building not as a penis, but a vulva. A scallop shell, a Nautilus following the Fibonacci sequence. Of course it was Theano who discovered the golden mean, more beautiful, even, than Pythagoras's' floating triangles.

A valley not a mountain. If the Pharaohs had been women, would they have built inverted pyramids? Catal Hayuk and Minos were rather feminine towns. You passed from one hole into another, one house layered onto another; labyrinths. Perhaps a labyrinth can be more impressive than a skyscraper. A labyrinth is complex enough to get lost in, but a tall building is stupidly linear even when it leans. You go up. You go down. A monkey climbing up a ladder.

After all, humanity came from the caves, the most feminine dwellings of all.

Fuchsia's is an editorial in praise of flawed capitalism. Towers that do not fall, but lean, quaintly. And it also speaks of the social class of the writer. Her concern is collapse. Her faith that, for all the talk, 'capitalism' will not collapse.

The towers referred to are old, and she asks us to look at the mercantile roots of capitalism. The beautiful flawed Italian craftsmanship, a by product of human excess, cruelty and of enabling corruption.

On one level the piece is trite, stubby; the shabby product of literal dreaming, not lucidity. You had to wash the dishes, didn't you? And so, at night you dreamed of washing dishes. Articles on Adam Smith are wedged forcibly into an ongoing debate about the viability of our economic system; we write of leaning towers.

The reference to impotence and capitalism is intentional. The problem is the inhabitants of Fuchsia's British Gormanghast, privileged and public schooled, assume that this is normality. They smile at Buckingham Palace and Alice, without defeasement. Instead, imagining diffusing, imagining, like Werner Herzog, that she builds bridges by writing of the symbol of the leaning tower. She thinks her readership is unconscious, and thinks she whispers to them in their 21st century big asleep.

A few years ago, after the financial crisis began a politician said said to me:

'Listen, we don't care if it's right or wrong, we just have to kick start lending again, people's lives depend on it.'

Around the leaning towers of British Gormanghast,is a shanty town. Fuchsia, writing in the Guardian, does not praise shanty towns. In her mind's eye, the people in the British Favella depend on the establishment, on Whitehall, on the City.

Buildings like a scallop shell

How did Peake describe the people who lived in the town around the castle? They were short-lived, violent and followed their own traditions and customs. They suffered in poverty, but understood that their welfare depended on the castle. They were very short and thin, flowered early, aged quickly, were primal, good with their hands, but not intelligent. Mervyn Peake gives the early 20th century middle class view of the ordinary people. Fuchsia's view of ordinary people.

There is nothing so much denies the humanity and equality of another human being as charity. The charity of a white European, for example, for a poor African. It embeds paternalism and a sense of superiority. The acceptance of dancing gratitude - revolting! The people of the town say thank you to the people in Gormanghast.

Nothing so unseemly as the attitude of a British bourgeois towards a working class handyman, the embarrassment of false camaraderie between classes. How that must have tottered after 1917.

It comes down to this:

Cameron and Osbourne will put the market at the centre of education and health. They will restructure the state so that the private sector controls almost all of it. The tower will seem to totter. But then along will come Ed Miliband. He will pour in the social cement. He will work out a hundred ways to make the Tory changes, that seemed so threatening initially, palatable.

Ed Miliband will cement the leaning tower in place. He will conserve all the deeply reactionary policies and marketization of education and health. He will do so just as Blair did so with Thatcher. Ameliorating here. Subsidizing here.

That is the political meaning of the editorial written by Fuchsia, an editorial on the subject of leaning towers.

Swallowing Melancholia 1

2011-10-06T04:04:00.033+01:00

At a boarding school in the North East of England, three boys of ordinary charm, formed a cabal at the centre of a class and successfully invoked the powers of a ragamuffin demon who was fond of tearing people. The music teacher did his best to exorcise it. He tried playing Beethoven’s 9th loudly to the boys in class. He tried trust exercises. He stood up in every Quaker school meeting murmuring imprecations and spells. But nothing helped.

The art teacher asked the children to draw a beautiful country scene, but one of the boys, seeing the demon, drew the hidden landscape of its home instead: a red sun in a dirty sky; the moon too close; a tall metal mast curving upwards, standing on a promontory by an evaporated sea; the sea bed stretching into the distance. The art teacher, puzzled announced: 'I would have like to have given this more marks, however, I can't. This is a pebble on the shore.

Melancholia is a film embedded with healthy irreverence and honest despair spoken in the language of Andrei Tarkovsky, Ingmar Bergmann and Peter Greenaway. It looks and feels like a poetic philosophical summation. It has this texture to it. It even uses the same opening sequence as Solaris and then burns the Bruegel Even the gently seething planet approaching is Solaris.

In the western tradition of occultism, Lars conceals by revealing. Hiding from the critics behind the art of cinema itself, behind the history of Europe refusing to explain. But if we listen to the advice of Jacobus Swart we can easily escape the referential traps. Touch the warm skin and feel the living creature under the duvet, the wedding dress, the tight suit. That's enough.

There is one period of human history that is very hard to look at or even properly acknowledge. The events of almost seventy years ago. That which it is difficult to name. The metaphor for this difficulty is perfectly expressed in the moment Claire looks up for the second time to see the planet Melancholia swelling overhead.

In a reference to the Draughtmen's Contract at the key moment of property transfer in the bridal chamber Justine hops out of the bathroom window, finds the guest assigned to trail her at the wedding, and mounts him with no ceremony.

Claire's husband: controlling, confident, responsible, powerful, patronising, kind, competent: a family man and a success, looks through the telescope and at Melancholia and sees that it will not fly by at all, it will hit. Comically, he freezes in fear. Then steals his wife's sleeping pills, and dies in the stables, in so doing quietening the horses and abandoning his wife and child without thought. His manliness and luster punctured immediately by his inability to deal with despair.

There is a self-help book. I think the woman's name is Brandon Bays. She recommends that you go within to find the source of pain by sensing it. Once you locate the pain go deeper within it and you will discover a black portal. Go through the black portal. Magicians have a name for this action. They have mapped this better, but their knowledge is taboo and no longer salient, it is woven into an old dusty carpet hidden in the attic. The falsely discredited weave of the old internal - external science of the west. Made to disappear.

Lars von Triers film is too complex for some the film critics, like Philip French to bother, perhaps. "sicklied o'er with the pale cast of thought" says French; he couldn't be bothered. Von Triers refuses to explain himself. 'You've gotta wanna know.' And the film critics done wanna. Why should they? When you approach Tarkovsky you do so with care. Have the critics who reviewed Melancholia stepped through any dark portals recently? Kirsten Dunst had, before she took the part. It's a useful pre-requisite to have been in a sanatorium, to have been treated for depression.

One of the key moment in all of Tarkovsky's films is the watering of a dead tree. Lars von Triers ends his film with his women and child sheltered in a skeletal Tepee made from the dead wood cut from living trees. Von Triers has no faith. Instead he has resignation.

In Lars Von Triers film Melancholia, Justine says.

'Life on this planet is evil and no one will miss it.'

The boy in Melancholia waits, as so many other children have waited before in wars, for it all to end. He waits in a small magic circle, holding hands tightly with his mother and his aunt. From this circle the tearing demons are banished.

Rightfully, Lars von Triers is not sure. He thought he was a descendant of the victims, but says he is heir to the persecutors and their collaborators. This is the confusion of a European inheritance. It is more honourable to accept it whole. To look up and see the proximity of WW2. How low and close it still hangs in the sky. How rarely do we face up to it, as rarely as we face up to our own death.

* * *

In my own case, should I look back at our own little man: Great Uncle Wilhelm? The widows pension was not enough to pay for his education in Frankfurt so he joined the Hitler Youth and subsequently the Luftwaffe, rising to the rank of technical sergeant. His job was to make sure ordinance was neatly packed into German bombers ready for dispatch. Or, instead, should I look back at aunt Else, the opera singer banned from the Vienna stage and radio, betrayed in France, taken to Drancy, deported to Auschwitz (in train wagon number 27) and gassed on arrival.

Should I say, and should my English brothers say, that we are the children of the Nazis or the children of their victims? Or is it better to ignore that half and affirm that we are, principally, the children of the British Empire. We were born in the country which filled its coffers with gold; raised in the country which grew its fine tea and Arabica and we came of age in India.

* * *

My mother sang so well that she was required to do so for visiting dignitaries at l’Institution de la Porte du Parc in Paris. But later on, at Kingsmead School in Johannesburg she sang with gusto and the teacher - perhaps she didn't like the sound of the French 'r' - in a calculated, or a casual, act of cruelty, in front of the rest of the girls said: ‘Don't sing, dear. Just mouth the words.’ From then on, if she sang, she did so breathlessly, with a tremor.

This is a pebble on the shore.

'Look at me. Listen to me. Wrench yourself out of your torpor and remember, if you love me. Don't make assumptions.'

Vote Labour for a Fair Britain

2011-10-03T00:28:00.003+01:00

The Achilles Heel of the Tories is their unfairness.

The Tory Party is Hobbsian; elitist and hierarchical by nature, based partly on the tradition of a managed democracy. When people vote for the Tories they vote for the status quo, which they see as British, for little Britain, not Great Britain. They vote for exclusion not inclusion.

Historically speaking the Labour Party is a democratic bubbling up of people demanding rights and equality not the party of top down control at all, despite its attempts at social engineering. To a Democrat and a Socialist every voting soul has the same value as every other, we are all the prodigal sons and daughters of social democracy.

Rather than believing in a natural British, organically grown, Duchy Original traditional establishment, Democratic Socialists hold faith with a properly functioning representative democracy and the ideal of a fair society.

The Tories will lose votes over time. Young people of voting age live in constant, and usually happy, proximity with people of different cultures; they reach out to each other using the Internet, befriending without prejudice and those reactionaries born in the 40s, 50s, 60s and 70s will soon fade away and die together with the Tory Party.

The idea of meritocracy is hot with the young people of voting age: the idea of fairness and reward for effort, though favouring meritocracy can lead down reactionary path. The impression is that young voters are also willing to reassess the merits of Democratic Socialism, but don’t take communism seriously. In Britain, occasionally even the most progressive of them go ‘Aaah!’ at a royal wedding. They are often monarchists rather than republicans and, to my dismay, hold fast to this achronicity.

However, it is far more British to be fair than it is British to be support the monarchy. The Tories have many weaknesses, but their Achilles heel is that they are, at root, at source, by their nature, unfair. They represent the victory of privilege and despite their rhetoric, they are not meritocrats at all. They lack a central quality of what we think of as Britishness. Their support for the dual school system system where children of the elites are streamed into top universities via the public school system illustrates the essential unfairness at the heart of Toryism. For this reason it will not survive.

However, in the meantime, in the short to medium term, the Conservatives are clever strategists. They read the Art of War by Sun Tzu and write about ‘The Big Society.’ They practice Soft Power. They may not be fair, but recognise now that people are social animals largely motivated by their unconscious. They want to deal with us in new ways. These ways informed by the sinister research into social control carried out in US universities.

Effective right wing policy over the years has often been an intelligent response to the arguments of socialists and social democrats. The policy to make secret ballots for union leaders compulsory. The policy to sell off social capital - council houses, the appeal to the greed of people by offering them shares in the British Gas.
The Tories practice a form of soft power. They are attempting to co-opt as many people as possible. They recognise that social entrepreneurs are their natural constituency. They aim to transform and harness the social in social democracy for their own purposes and create new ways for their supporters to band together asymmetrically.

But we can call their bluff. They are unfair - nasty some have said. Of course the word Fair has been done to death. Nevertheless, to defeat the Tories, the Labour Party should adopt this slogan and really mean it.

Vote Labour for a Fair Britain!

Deep wisdom for the young from Dr Seus

2011-09-27T23:26:00.002+01:00

Oh! The Places You’ll Go!

Congratulations!

Today is your day.

You’re off to Great Places!

You’re off and away!

You have brains in your head.

You have feet in your shoes.

You can steer yourself any direction you choose.

You’re on your own. And you know what you know. And YOU are the guy who’ll decide where to go.

You’ll look up and down streets. Look’em over with care. About some you will say, “I don’t choose to go there.” With your head full of brains and your shoes full of feet, you’re too smart to go down a not-so-good street.

And you may not find any you’ll want to go down. In that case, of course, you’ll head straight out of town. It’s opener there in the wide open air.

Out there things can happen and frequently do to people as brainy and footsy as you.

And when things start to happen, don’t worry. Don’t stew. Just go right along. You’ll start happening too.

Oh! The Places You’ll Go!

You’ll be on your way up!

You’ll be seeing great sights!

You’ll join the high fliers who soar to high heights.

You won’t lag behind, because you’ll have the speed. You’ll pass the whole gang and you’ll soon take the lead. Wherever you fly, you’ll be best of the best. Wherever you go, you will top all the rest.

Except when you don’t.

Because, sometimes, you won’t.

I’m sorry to say so but, sadly, it’s true that Bang-ups and Hang-ups can happen to you.

You can get all hung up in a prickle-ly perch. And your gang will fly on. You’ll be left in a Lurch.

You’ll come down from the Lurch with an unpleasant bump. And the chances are, then, that you’ll be in a Slump.

And when you’re in a Slump, you’re not in for much fun. Un-slumping yourself is not easily done.

You will come to a place where the streets are not marked. Some windows are lighted. But mostly they’re darked. A place you could sprain both your elbow and chin! Do you dare to stay out? Do you dare to go in? How much can you lose? How much can you win?

And if you go in, should you turn left or right…or right-and-three-quarters? Or, maybe, not quite? Or go around back and sneak in from behind? Simple it’s not, I’m afraid you will find, for a mind-maker-upper to make up his mind.

You can get so confused that you’ll start in to race down long wiggled roads at a break-necking pace and grind on for miles across weirdish wild space, headed, I fear, toward a most useless place.

The Waiting Place…for people just waiting.

Waiting for a train to go or a bus to come, or a plane to go or the mail to come, or the rain to go or the phone to ring, or the snow to snow or waiting around for a Yes or No or waiting for their hair to grow.

Everyone is just waiting.

Waiting for the fish to bite or waiting for wind to fly a kite or waiting around for Friday night or waiting, perhaps, for their Uncle Jake or a pot to boil, or a Better Break or a string of pearls, or a pair of pants or a wig with curls, or Another Chance. Everyone is just waiting.

No! That’s not for you!

Somehow you’ll escape all that waiting and staying. You’ll find the bright places where Boom Bands are playing. With banner flip-flapping, once more you’ll ride high! Ready for anything under the sky.

Ready because you’re that kind of a guy!

Oh, the places you’ll go! There is fun to be done! There are points to be scored. There are games to be won. And the magical things you can do with that ball will make you the winning-est winner of all. Fame! You’ll be famous as famous can be, with the whole wide world watching you win on TV.

Except when they don’t. Because, sometimes, they won’t.

I’m afraid that some times you’ll play lonely games too. Games you can’t win ‘cause you’ll play against you.

All Alone!

Whether you like it or not, Alone will be something you’ll be quite a lot.
And when you’re alone, there’s a very good chance you’ll meet things that scare you right out of your pants. There are some, down the road between hither and yon, that can scare you so much you won’t want to go on.

But on you will go though the weather be foul. On you will go though your enemies prowl. On you will go though the Hakken-Kraks howl. Onward up many a frightening creek, though your arms may get sore and your sneakers may leak. On and on you will hike. And I know you’ll hike far and face up to your problems whatever they are.

You’ll get mixed up, of course, as you already know. You’ll get mixed up with many strange birds as you go. So be sure when you step. Step with care and great tact and remember that Life’s a Great Balancing Act. Just never forget to be dexterous and deft. And never mix up your right foot with your left.

And will you succeed?

Yes! You will, indeed!
(98 and ¾ percent guaranteed.)

Kid, you’ll move mountains!

So…be your name Buxbaum or Bixby or Bray or Mordecai Ale Van Allen O’Shea, you’re off to Great Places!

Today is your day!

Your mountain is waiting.

So…get on your way!

Breakfast ruined; FreshOrangeJuice banned from Guardian Comment is Free

2011-09-27T20:32:00.013+01:00

Current avatar; banned by the Guardian Comment is Free mafiosi

One of my Avatars - I have many - was FreshOrangeJuice. It has just been banned from the Guardian comment pages. Big deal. Or BFD at they say.

Now what is interesting is to understand exactly what gets you banned from the comment pages of the 'Voice of Liberalism'.

This should be understood in context. I am generally supportive of Polly Toynbee's writing, I have corresponded with her. However, I am not welcome on the Guardian comment pages and when they discover I am behind an Avatar they do ban me.

The points I was making on this thread were not really about Toynbee, they were about the lost soul of the Labour Party and the support of the Guardian for Ed Miliband. Polly was my foil. Moreover, it is only for arguments sake that I describe the party of Wilson and Callaghan as a 'socialist party'. Truth be told it was merely a social democratic party. It was Polly Toynbee's party, but it shouldn't have been.

If you are interested in understanding the limits to the online debate and how it is framed by a newspaper like the Guardian that is nominally progressive, then perhaps it is worthwhile reading these posts*. In the style of The Mouse's Tale from Alice in Wonderland.

Ten steps to a Comment is Free banning

Post 1
FreshOrangeJuice

Guardian 26 September 2011 9:21PM

Polly, let me get this straight.
On the last two threads you have stated clearly that you are not a socialist and that you left the Labour Party because it was too socialist. You are a centrist. You are not on the left.
So why do you insist on supporting Miliband?
The answer is simple.
Labour is not the party of Labour any more, it is the party of the right wing social Democrats, it is the party of Liberalism and the 'radical centre.'
Your support for Labour amounts to a co-option.
Just as at one point, the support of Rupert Murdoch also amounted to a form of co-option.

Post 2
FreshOrangeJuice

Guardian 26 September 2011 9:24PM

You only supported Labour because it lurched to the right and lost clause 4.
Labour is NOT your party. You and other like you in the haute bourgoisie have made it your party.
But it is not your party.
You are a social democrat not a socialist.

Post 3
FreshOrangeJuice

26 September 2011 9:28PM

Your support for Labour, like the conditional support of many others on the Guardian, including Rushbridger amounts to an admission that Labour is not Labour in any shape or form any more, but a party of Social Democrats.
The upper middle class, the influential denizens of the private schools force fed for the top two universities, have taken over the Labour party because it was a party with possibilities of achieving power. Blair was one of you. He was an archetypical opportunist.
Blair was a man on the path to power who would flog any horse to get there. You and Blair and others like you, the elite, have helped take the Labour Party away from its roots in the people and you have flogged it like and old nag to get where you want to get and frankly it is very unseemly to hear you supporting Ed Miliband.

Post 4
FreshOrangeJuice

Guardian 26 September 2011 9:32PM

One of the great deracinations of modern political life has been the taking over of the Labour Party NOT by Militant, or left wing cabals, but by RIGHT wing cabals.
To such an extent that our former Labour Prime Minister is now a spokesperson for the US neo-cons advocating war on Iran.
This is the truth of the matter. Militant didn't take over the party, the right wing social democrats did. People willing to divorce labour from its natural base: ordinary working people joined together to protect their jobs and working conditions and social welfare.

Post 5
FreshOrangeJuice

Guardian 26 September 2011 9:36PM

You, Polly, and people like you on the right have been more responsible than the Murdochs in destroying the Labour Party, of making the word Left into a completely meaningless term, where the left is no longer socialist, but you can say you are left merely by the fact that you are against prejudice of all kinds.
To be against racism and sexism and other forms of prejudice is not left, it can equally be right wing and 'radical' centrist.
In other words identity politics is the screen the right hide behind. Because underneath they do NOT have the same interests at heart as ordinary working people. They are privileged and they protect that privilege in many ways.
They merely call themselves left as a pose as a lifestyle choice.

Post 6
FreshOrangeJuice

Guardian 26 September 2011 9:41PM

You found the Labour Party too left and so you left it. As it should be because you openly state that you are not left at all. You are more of a social democrat like Shirley Williams.

So why complain about the Labour Party? It was not your party in the first place. It was a party of the ordinary working people. A party with its base in organised Labour.

What you show in your support for Miliband is two important things:

1. That Labour has a weak connection with organised Labour. That it is wormy with political careerists. Miliband is one of them.

2. That you feel no compunction, as someone who is a Social Democrat, in supporting a Labour opposition that is not Labour at all.

It is right wing social democrat.

Post 7
FreshOrangeJuice

Guardian 26 September 2011 9:45PM

It is not a question of socialist ideas being old fashioned. If a Tory or a Liberal or a 'radical' centrist tells me that Socialism is old fashioned then I know they only do it to annoy because they know it teases.
What could be more old fashioned than David Cameron and George Osbourne's Restoration comedy government?
No. What we are really talking about here is a hollow party called the Labour party, with its soul scooped right out.
I would liken the current Labour Party to a spider crab. The former occupant has died and a spider crab has taken over the shell of what was the Labour Party.
And you, Polly, are asking us to give our support to your spider crab.
The right wing social democrat - free market party that uses the shell of what was Labour as a disguise.

Post 8
FreshOrangeJuice

26 September 2011 9:54PM

I'll agree that an alliance between a socialist Labour Party, which is what it always was and what is should be, the party of Shore and Benn and Bevan and Atlee, will form a natural alliance with a social democratic party because they share common ground. But your social democratic party has chosen to go into an alliance with the Tories, the children of Thatcher the milk snatcher.
Don't ask, now that your party has failed you, for Labour to become your party.
Ed Miliband says he is a 'radical centrist'
Indeed.
We all know what that means. It means he will sell his grandmother to get into power. That he is a power seeker, like Blair and that is all.
How else could you explain the fruity voiced Andrew Rawnsley giving Miliband his support.
The support of Rawnsley usually amounts to disguised flattery.

Post 9
FreshOrangeJuice

Guardian 26 September 2011 10:05PM

One of the uses Rawnsley has, apart from exerting influence through disguised - perhaps even open - flattery is that he is a weather vane. Rawnsley unfailing supports the pillars of British society. The status quo. He perfectly represents the interests of the status quo. His criticism is merely confined to the relative efficacy of the different players in intelligently upholding the status quo.
You and Rawnsley don't seem all that far apart to me.

Post10
FreshOrangeJuice

Guardian 26 September 2011 10:08PM

Actually, that's very unfair. You are more intelligent than Rawnsley and more perceptive and have a far more acute sense of social justice.
The point is that the Labour Party should not be your party. Neither should it be Rawnsleys. Vote for it tactically if you like, but stop trying to keep it in the right of centre.
It is the Party of ordinary people not the fucking establishment. Or at least it should be the party of ordinary people.
. . . . . .

"...Such a

trial,

dear sir,

With no

jury or

judge,

would be

wasting

our breath.'

'I'll be

judge,

I'll be

jury,'

Said

cunning

old Fury**;

'I'll try

the whole

cause,

and

condemn

you

death.' "

* I have left out a couple of posts where I correct my spelling.

** Nick Das

Generous responses to the discussion on the rights and duties of ownership

2011-09-27T15:21:00.001+01:00

Bryan G.

Dear Phil,

Thanks for the article and I’m sorry to have taken so long to get back
to you. As I read it I heard my own voice echoing the same or similar
arguments some years ago when I wrote a series of articles on
political, economic and ethical issues for a European journal.

The points you make about rights having their complement in
responsibilities is a point that needs to made with increasing
emphasis. In his famous book, The World we have Lost, a book about the
early modern period in English history, Peter Laslet describes how
employers in the sixteenth century employed apprentices in just the
way you suggest: they accepted all of their broader responsibilities.
In effect, the apprentice would become a full member of the family,
not just a ‘hand’, to use that most revealing of all metaphors that
arose in the early stages of the Industrial Revolution.

They accepted that when they employed someone they were employing the
complete person, not just one aspect of his complex personality. They
had responsibility for his emotional, moral and physical well being.
This strikes a sharp contrast with modern capitalism and liberal
democracy with their innate reductionist logic that sees society as
just a loose collection of isolated individuals and individuals as
just an abstraction, a ‘hand’.

It’s the logic of the free market to emphasise rights in isolation,
but it brings with it huge problems that we are ill-equipped to tackle
as long as we are in thrall to the nineteenth century ideology of the
free market. We have come to believe that this elegant
all-encompassing concept is nature’s ultimate self-righting mechanism,
that, if left to itself, will bring about the best of all worlds.
Unfortunately, politicians’ myopic gaze is so distorted by this
ideology that they fail to see the empirical evidence that shows not
only that free markets are an ideal concept rarely found in the real
world, but that they are driven more often that not by emotion, herd
instinct and panic. So, their blind acceptance of it as a regulatory
device is an abdication of reason.

More important, markets concentrate power into the hands of a few,
leaving societies riven by unsustainable social inequality. At
beginning of the twenty-first century we are left with problems that
were clearly foreseen in the nineteenth century and by many
commentators in the twentieth: an unsustainable passion for growth as
the natural world struggles to replenish itself (it takes the Earth
almost 15 months to regenerate what we use up in 12 months), global
warming, which is almost beyond our means to rein in, and rapidly
developing social injustice on a global scale, the threat of which can
only be held in check with ever greater concentrations of power in the
hands of leaders whose instincts are far from democratic.

I’m sorry to rant, but you have got me going. Like you, I suspect, I
would love to be able to contribute in some way to a movement that
raises consciousness of these issues in much the same way that the
Arab Spring was brought about. It has to be a bottom-up movement. Only
in this way can creative thinking break through the conventional
thinking of established ideologies.

Thank you for letting me read this. Keep in touch.

Best wishes,

Bryan G.

_____________________________________________________

Juan Carlos Chirgwin

Philip,

querido amigo,

Thank you for your letter and for your invitation to comment on your document.

But first of all let me apologise for my silence and lack of communication, but I do not have any longer the amount of energy and drive which I used spill daily during my younger days. Fortunately family obligations now take most of my productive time, and with Ximena we are always busy with the grandchildren.

Let me add though that I did read and much enjoyed documents you sent me months ago about Eve and Tony’s lives and their experiences. Thank you for sharing them.

Let me turn to your document concerning “property” and to protection values that by “natural law” are attached to such concept, although these have suffered pretty badly from man-made “legal erosion”. And therefore nowadays most of the “social obligations” connected with property appear to be hidden behind imposing walls of legal-paperwork that are in essence “illegitimate”.

But, the system that presently controls power in all the important political decision making centres, is well pleased with such arrangements and the only changes that might be tolerated are those that will add another turn of the screw of the “garrote vil” choking “public well-being”.

I feel just like you that our behaviour must we guided by both our individual needs and our responsibilities to other people and to our environment. The delicate balance between them is essential to ensure a stable relationship that allows the strengthening of the bonds among the different participants (beings and non-beings). Thus, from the very beginning we must strive to appreciate cooperation and respect – values that are totally lacking in today’s globalised world of domination and disdain for others.

In your document you analyse the problem of property from several angles. They include the meaning of property, and here we stumble with the first problem: it appears to have different meanings, and these changes are linked to categories both of people and of type of property.
The confusion of having different meanings for the same “word” is made worse when we learn that “the law” – an institution created by the people to ensure just treatment among them – has produced legal tools which justify some people to enjoy less obligations which are linked to their rights of property.

Finally confusion is turned to despair when this duplicity becomes the very essence of production and trading system, thus ensuring an economy that leads to concentration of riches and power in the hand of few people while the vast majority becomes responsible for all physical efforts and most of the intellectual input but with very meagre participation in the benefits which are obtained.

This overall look at the specific problem of property shows us that it is a complex problem. We humans have an uncanny twist to make our own life more difficult. And this is made worse the moment selfish interests creep into the fray. So I believe that we have to study “property” in terms of an idea (its conceptual meaning; its relationship with human values), in terms of its legitimate legal definition, and also as a factor of production and trade. Perhaps other aspects could be added, making it even more complex. But even if we just consider these three, we must be aware that although we might try to be as impartial and scientific as possible, we are –each one of us- in certain ways a product of a system made up not only of knowledge but of feelings.

As individuals, whether we like it or not, we have been for many years conditioned by “a life system” in which we were born, brought-up, educated and where we have preformed some kind of work and many other activities. Our language, our values, our traditions come as a special imprinting linked to some special culture; and there is no certainty this whole set of tools, that shape our social behaviour, does not have inclinations that play against the common good. Therefore, now that we are old enough to look back and analyse the ups-and-down of our lives, it is not difficult to feel that although each one of us is unique (a very promising trait), it is also true that most likely we could have been better. So most surely we all have a challenge ahead of us, and that is to strive for improvement. In order to strive in this direction we must verify each and every factor that guide our decisions and that condition our feelings, so that we can check all those factors which could affect negatively initiatives that search for the common good. We must be always alert and permanently striving to improve our social behaviour.

Human groups, throughout history, have shown brave attempts to question “systems of life” in which they lived. And some individuals even organised rebellions against “norms of behaviour” that had been imposed by force through organised structures of power which showed no respect for the common good of the vast majority of peoples. The most important modern political challenges to power structures, with worldwide repercussions, are those of the French Revolution and Bolshevik Revolution. In spite that these “ideas for social change” actually had a terrible cost in human lives, the mass of common people in countries that lived through it never had much opportunity to participate intellectually as individuals, to improve their social behaviour and contribute directly in better ways of government. Similar social tragedies followed independence efforts that eventually overthrew colonial empires during the 19th century and wars of liberation during the 20th century. History shows how, each and every successful uprising, was unable to deal with the legacy of the previous power system which through their ideas, institutions and manpower (their Status Quo), surreptitiously infiltrated the “new power system”.

From these rebellious efforts we can conclude that “ideas for social change” apparently need a prolonged period to organise masses of people to define by themselves and to practice new form of government; and, another indispensable condition, is that no external interference should occur threatening the good progress of the process of social change.

And all this longwinded chain of ideas leads me to uncomfortable conclusions. Our historical record seems to show that important events linked to “ideas for social change” have never been accepted by existing power systems. So perhaps the first conclusion is that authentic participation of the people has never come to fruition, at best ignored and most likely repressed. Democracy has never been truly present.

The second conclusion is that finally injustice can reach limits that are no longer tolerated and out of despair the suffering masses of people have no other way out but to turn to violence.
And an important remark to these conclusions: Up to now social upheaval has never expanded far enough and fast enough – important centres representing the interest of the “old regimes” remained sufficiently intact to pose a threat to the places where “ideas for social change” were in progress.

Thus it seems to me that the stuff that we are made of – our cultural legacy – is an important factor that plays against the “ideas for social change”. Most people are not willing to question the “system of power” in which they live. And the basic structures of modern social communities are conditioned by values, concepts and institutions that induce and control our thinking, feeling and actions in such a way that each individual “conforms to such norms”. Each individual is well aware of the risks implied by deviations from such norms.

We are at present living inside a complex system of power that is under the control of institutions
(multinational corporations) and in which virtual economic activities predominate. Furthermore countries and their governments, international institutions and world trade are all, directly or indirectly under their grip. Individuals and well meaning groups with alternative ways of thinking are thus faced with an enormous challenge. But even though they have been traditionally few in number and have limited tools to defend their ideas, they have always been present throughout history. I am sure that this is true today and that this will continue in the future until we change this world for the better.

Please forgive me for this untidy and obscure contribution but I hope that you might grasp that I am
very sympathetic to your assessment of the problem posed to us by “property”.
Best regards to you and your family. Lots of luck in all your endeavours.

Un gran abrazo

Juan Carlos
______________________________________________

Dominic Tweedie

Hello Phil,

Why are you stressing about the rich, qua rich? The act of exploitation happens in the workplace, not on the yacht.

The new relations of production that will supercede the sale and purchase of commodity labour-power and the consequent extraction of surplus value have to be visualised.

The new relations of production will equally as much as today be "collaborative projects" insofar as they conform to the basic human social pattern of two or more individuals mediated by a human artefact.

The problem today is not so much that the mediating social artefacts are property, but rather that they are in the first place commodity, and that for as much as we are in a world of commodities, human beings have been reduced to commodity labour-power.

The capitalist, acting as a capitalist, must throw his money back into the market, time and again. The capitalist's yacht, on the other hand, is not principally a circulating commodity, but is rather an enormous piece of consumption, and it is in this aspect of consumption that the yacht appears repulsive to you.

The essence of your criticism is not democracy or socialism. The essence of your criticism is bourgeois puritanism. You do not criticise commodity here. You criticise the rich when they attempt to escape from the world of commodity.

You criticise the rich when they try to cease behaving as bourgeois, and begin to behave as aristocrats. Of course to move from capitalism to feudalism is a step back. But your remedy is only to call, in effect, for the restoration of the (fantasy) bourgeois values of liberty, fraternity and equality. Such a "revolution" could only achieve the same result as before: the confirmation of bourgeois class rule.

May I offer you an alternative consolation? Consider that human beings do in fact behave in a largely communistic manner, even in the most bourgeois of societies. Language, the Internet, and daily life are all in practice carried on in the way of ancient society - interaction mediated by artefacts. Human relations are not entirely but only partially regimented by class-division and class domination.

I wish you would put http://domza.blogspot.com/ (Communist University) on your blogroll. It would give you support to the extent that you are not the only one kvetching, even if our conclusions may from time to time be different.
_________________________________________

C.A.B.

Phil, last week, I met someone helping to push democracy down to the smallest units of society by developing software tools that make collaborative decision-making as easy as possible. There is a small community in Australia -- Greater Geraldton -- already using these tools.

So you, for instance, would be shown how to make a specific proposal to do something about your fully justified outrage -- and put it up for debate by your community.

This is the way I lean -- towards action. I am tired of rhetoric, even of arguments as well thought-out as yours. I want to see more specific outlines of reform that other people help to improve.

Here's a clip from the website of the organisation CivicEvolution.org ... if the links don't go through, please would you re-post them:

"Think together to act together

We believe that meaningful change comes from the grassroots in the form of community written and supported plans to solve community problems.

How we do it

We complement traditional face-to-face citizen engagement with the scalability and access of social media and collaborative production. Our goal is to maximize everyone's ability to participate in creative community problem solving by giving them a platform where they can "Think together to act together."

Anyone can float ideas and aggregate clicks–meaningful change comes from a community written and supported plan to put an idea into action.

http://2029.civicevolution.org/
http://civicevolution.org/ ..."

The ultra rich imitate Captain Nemo, not Citizen Kane.

2011-09-24T13:58:00.029+01:00

Lakshmi Mittal on board his yacht.

Rather than imagining they are powerful citizens, the ultra rich prefer to believe that they are naturally unconstrained and owe little to individual states. They fantasise that they roam the world like Captain Nemo, and assume they have far more rights than duties.

At the root of the problem of modern capitalist societies are the concepts governing property rights and duties. There should be limits set to what can be owned and what cannot be owned. Effectively, nothing is ever really fully privately owned, all property is a lease from the state. You may buy your island from a country, but you are not buying a country.

Instead of simply re-nationalisating, though a few re-nationalisations wouldn't go amiss, we should reformulate property law. The problem with nationalisation is the problem of the Tragedy of the Commons. In other words, if no one owns something - fishing areas in international waters, for example - then that resource is exploited and exhausted. On a collectivised farm everything goes to pot and no one takes full responsibility for maintenance.

What is the value of property ownership itself? Pierre-Joseph Proudhon was wrong when he said 'Property is theft.' Property is not just theft. Clearly there is some value to it. Property owners look after their property. Property ownership generates value; call it the value of good husbandry. When you complete a transaction, the good husbandry of property has a price tag. It is called Goodwill and people will pay well over the odds for it. Good ownership creates identity, cohesiveness and permanence. It is worthwhile.

But ultimately, all property is merely leasehold from a legitimate national democratic state. At a deep level property is is not an inalienable right, it is a right that depends on the agreement of others. Ownership is tolerated and the only full ownership - in the people's name - can be by a democratic state so long as that state lasts. Property changes hands when the state changes hands. From a constitutional monarchy to a republic, for example.

The public highway, the coastline, beaches, land held in trust. These are examples of things whose ownership should be by the state and not by individuals or corporations. Individuals and corporate ownership would create privileged access and bottlenecks.

I would like to suggest a new approach.

We need to extend the notion of property duties fully. It seems to me that the duties of property owners have somehow been scaled back and in many cases rescinded. There are effective ways of doing this.

Essentially property ownership is a civil right, like other civil rights. However, contrast the way the rights and duties of property holders are handled with the way other civil rights and duties are handled. The duties of property owners seem far too 'negotiable' and flexible.

Parliament should have more to say on your property duties. Property ownership should be treated as other citizens' rights and duties are treated. In other words, the way the government upholds property duties is more like one of the foundation stones of a society and less like an economic lever to be manipulated as an incentive.

There are limits to ownership. Ownership carries with it solemn duties so long as the owner is part of a nation state and not outside it like Captain Nemo. If you are going to have a state which permits the ownership of private property, then you had better sort out property rights and make sure the property owners meet their obligations and that, for example, they pay all their taxes and do not pollute.

The reality of ownership should be more like a software license. For example. If you own a certain number of shares in a company then you you should be licensed to use those shares in a defined set of circumstances, just as a software license holder would be.

Use this concept of extending a license, for example, in order to limit and regulate speculative activity in the financial and commodity markets. Curtail property rights that are overextended. Link property ownership closely to civic responsibility.This would change perceptions. Extending the idea of the duties of property owners changes our perception of someone like Branson, for example, from a mild mannered philanthropist to a marginally responsible corporate citizen. Branson may support charities and use fuel that is less damaging to the environment, but he also supported Thatcher and got the tax breaks.

Institute a Buffet - Gates Law

The Warren Buffet Pledge and the Tobin Tax, are a start. But they lack a systematic underpinning and so they lack force. When the income of an individual has exceeded a certain amount then that individual should not only be taxed to the same extent or more than an ordinary person, but that that individual be required to reinvest an increasing proportion of that income socially productive capital. For example 30% of 10 million. 50% of 50 million. 80% of 100 million. Why? Because property ownership is a civil right and a civil duty.

Without doubt property ownership raises moral questions, just as many other civil rights and duties raise moral questions.

Certain levels of ownership cannot be licensed. Capital accumulation should be licensed and paid for through sufficiently high levels of income tax and more, paid for by the active civic participation of property owners.

Use the concept of leasehold. Make all property leasehold (including shares) with an option for renewal for inheritance purposes. This way accumulation can be controlled.

I am not surprised that bankers do not understand the limits of property ownership rights or, indeed, that bankers do not understand what constitutes property owning duties: to reinvest, to pay taxes properly, to avoid risk.

So, in essence, democratically elected governments should adopt a new approach to the rights and duties of property ownership. Treat property ownership more like other citizens’ rights and duties and reformulate them in terms of licenses and leases. After all any property that is owned in Britain is only owned within the laws of a democratic state as a state given right.

Andrew Brown in the Guardian on creationism: Not all creationists are cartoon Americans, Andrew.

2011-09-22T18:56:00.024+01:00

New Atheists and their agnostic fellow travellers like Andrew Brown
portray believers as cartoon Americans.

Andrew Brown's article is cartoonish. Most educated Catholics and Anglicans are indeed creationists. But they are not the Brown caricature of a creationist. If you believe in something infinitely intelligent and subtle, then you are hardly going to second guess it.

And for this reason most Catholics and Anglicans have absolutely no problem whatsoever with the theory of evolution to the extent that it is an explanatory falsifiable account of what is. To that extent. It is only when the theory of evolution is overextended - extruded - into suppositions, semantic games, theology and the meaning of life that it is partially rejected by religious people. This is reference of course to the deluded who are working in the field of evolutionary psychology, the heirs to phrenology, and their confreres in ancillary fields.

When Andrew Brown,who is on the agnostic borders of new atheism, and all the other new atheists – let’s lump them all together - direct all their criticism of religion at the stupidly extreme; at the American evangelists, then they become extremely irrelevant.

An argument like the one Andrew Brown puts forward is just a red herring, a side track into the US religious Badlands. Why do journalists and media people constantly direct their reflections on religion into the Badlands of America? For me the reason is simple. They still have the mentality of servants of empire. The empire is dead, long live the new empire. Their great grandfathers fought in the Punjab and did a damn good job administering it. Now they are on the periphery in the UK, in the New Punjab, concerned with the state of affairs in the glorious metropolis.

Were I a student who came from a religious family, and not a cartoon religious villain - the kind the new atheists (and their agnostic fellow travellers) imagine they are up against, I would prefer to face someone who was openly hostile and said why they were, to someone who was patronising and superior who never actually gave a clear account of why exactly his arguments were superior.

Where are these arguments? There is the assumption of elitism which can't rest solely on Darwinism. That would be foolish, Darwinism doesn't encompass all nature and human endeavour. Then why exactly would someone like Andrew Brown think he is in a position where he might advise teachers to patronise and tolerate the belief of a child from a religious family? It's the assumptions behind this article that I think are quite offensive.

Let's indulge these creationist children, says Andrew Brown. From what high ground do you 'indulge' them Mr Brown? From where exactly do you derive your own puissant sense of intellectual superiority? Your upbringing perhaps? Your education? Your experience? Your achievements? Are you convinced that these give you sufficient license?

Of course the creationists in question are children. But in my experience the arguments of the children of proselytising atheists betray, not intelligence, but high levels of intolerance. Carte blanche to all the intolerant atheists. And look at them, these atheists. Many of the children who believe in creation also happen to be the children of first second or third generation immigrants, of asylum seekers.

Isn't it just so convenient to be able turn on them. The right are the new atheists. The social Darwinists. The left are more tolerant. Not in the Nick Cohen sense of the word. We accept the solidarity of our religious brothers and sisters in the fight for social justice. You on the other hand. What are your politics?

The left who attack religion do so claiming it is the opiate of the people. And yet in the field, in NGOs and on the different battlefronts where the cause is social justice, the left is more tolerant. In another way religion is simply a way of life. It is like a habit, the eating of Marmite soldiers dipped in egg yolk. It is as real as breakfast and singing, birth marriage and death. It is a human response to all these things, the living of them.

There is no insipid, simplistic, objective-rationalist account of what makes people tick that can very usefully rationalise or deconstruct a religious response to the art of life. But if the claim is that there is such an account, then that rational explanation had better be as complicated and rich and intelligent and thoughtful and full of love and hate and contradiction and humanity as people's religious response, as their religious life.

The grand theory that is supposed to be able to boil down human experience is a simple evolutionary abacus half understood by graduates from the arts, the classics and media studies. And the biggest joke of all is that you don't need to fully understand it, or have all the evidence for it in order to apply it to absolutely anything.

'Good' research says Andrew Brown, tells us that children are 'natural creationists? Good research like hell? Define research. Do you know what hard core scientists in the physical sciences think of your 'good' research in the social sciences? They think it is a pretence. They think it merely poses as science. It is subjective insight posing as objectivity. Take all 'good research' in the social sciences with a pinch of cracked salt, as you would a 'scientific' opinion poll.

You can keep faith with rationality. That's very important. But a lazy, unaccountable, referential, patronising, reductive, dehumanising faith.

No thank you.

To me Andrew Brown's article is highly presumptuous because it pre-supposes. Religious children are poor deluded fools and that have, according to research, a 'natural propensity' to be creationists anyway. An example of presupposition is:

When did you stop beating your wife?

Now, a new one is:

You should be patient with the deluded children of the religious who believe in creation.

Really, Andrew Brown?

Well I have neither beaten my wife, nor are my children deluded.

The right in the US is religious, however the right in Britain is not. Here the right direct their criticism of religion in order to attack progressive social causes, not just to defend minorities from the unfairness of some religionists.

The reason the right in the UK attacks religion is because often the religious align themselves with the poor and argue for social investment in communities and social reform. In Britain it is the right wing and centre-right and the centre-right posing as left, who are the reactionary atheists.

We have known for a long time here that the same people who viciously attack immigration are often the people who attack religion and all religious belief. It is a displacement activity because by law you can't incite others to racial hatred and so they attack 'religion' instead. It's the same target. What they are attacking is a way of life, the core identity of people. In this case this article constitutes a disguised attack on the children of immigrants. Andrew Brown making Fuja? I’ll explain:

Here’s a presupposition:

Most children who are religious come from immigrant backgrounds. The article therefore is directed mainly at people dealing with the children of immigrants. So let's rephrase Mr Brown's premise:

Don't attack the beliefs of the children of immigrants.

But if we were not thinking of attacking their beliefs then why raise the question? You might say for example:

Don't think of elephants

Well, I am thinking of elephants now.

On the edge of the Weald

2011-09-20T22:27:00.026+01:00

The ridge above the Weald

To live on the edge of a forest is to live by a path into dream, or childhood; when you were small and the legs of adults were like trees and their heads rustled with words, when the sky was oily and flowed and sparkled.

Just as we can easily conjure up the face of a grimacing wolf, staring at us from a dark window, eyes wide, teeth bared; just as we can sense against our midriff the whispered ripple of a shark in water; we enter a forest.

What remains of our own Weald was once the scrubby border of the great temperate northern European Forest. Those of us who were brought up in Britain, and who have read enough and completed a Grand Tour will overestimate our imaginative ability, supposing we can picture this Ur forest properly.

We can't, but what we can do is sense the Weald and its Silesian heart in the stories of the Grimm brothers, in older fairy tales. Forest boys and girls live in a the middle of Europe, in fairy tales. Just ask Carole J Silver and she will tell you.

It is quite difficult to see the Bailowieza, the boreal Taiga, the cloud forest of Nayarit, the Karri eucalypts, the Alpine conifer forests, the moist dipterocarp, the manglares of Tumbes, the Fatu Hiva and the Tilamook.

However, if you live in south west London you can drive, or take the bus or train to Guildford. It takes less than an hour. You may walk in Chanctbury Wood and look out from St Martha's hill over what was the Weald. Or go to Dorking and head for Box Hill, the ancient Yew grove near Ranmore common and beyond.

In Surrey the wealthy value their link up to the forest. The rich pay for it as we pay for electricity or water. And when John Clare went mad he did not do so because he was overly sensitive, he went mad because his piped connection to life was severed.

The Guardian - Christopher Hitchens on the Arab Spring and 9/11, a response

2011-09-10T00:08:00.011+01:00

Christopher Hitchens, supporter of imperialist wars. Oh the horror, the horror.

In reading Hitchens in the Guardian today (9/11/2011) we read a specious apologia. He is ridiculous, and yet the Guardian, drawing inspiration perhaps from its own Janus faced support for interventionism, exhibits Hitchens vulgar self justification on the anniversary of 9/11 as if his words were pearls.

Hitchens presents his mental puppetry to us as insight. It isn't. He 'illumines' us, or does he? Atta was a cold hearted loveless zombie. Mohamed Bouazizi was sick of tyranny. We know that zombie does not accurately describe Atta. He was not a zombie. To call him a zombie sheds no light. Sound and electronic letters signifying absolutely nothing. Puppet play.

In second place we also know that despite the fact that he was a catalyst for the events he sparked off, Mohamed Bouazizi was in fact suicidal long before he decided to politicize his suicide. If he did ever politicize it. Hitchens need not mention this; cavalier with facts and the motivations of his dramatis personae.

Moreover, to claim that the hodge-podge fighting against tyranny in Tunisia and Libya were fully paid up democrats and that the majority of fighters were people longing for western freedoms is a also a convenient lie. The moral backbone for the rebellions came from Islam. The insurrection in Syria has been catalysed by the story of a soldier slapping a young man around the face and saying to him: 'For you there is only one God and his name is Bashar-al-Assad.' This is the rocket fuel of rebellion, and it is hardly Saul Bellow.

What over-weaning presumption of Hitchens; presenting his autistic geopolitical puppet play to us as our reality.

Along come the ridiculous parallels with Czechoslovakia - ridiculous to a Marxist anyway. Ernst Gellner might have drawn some parallels, but no Marxist. Hitchens claims he is 'non totalitarian left'. Apparently this makes him a Blairite. He, like so many Trotskyists and lapsed Trotskyists before him, worked as ideological hit-men against socialism and were paid well for it. He offers no other explanation and simpers in the general direction of the American public. He admires their constitution and their 'variety'.

Hitchens is 'non-totalitarian' enough to support US wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. Some anti-imperialist! An anti-imperialist lauded and lionized in the liberal and right wing British press; in the US and the UK. If Christopher Hitchens rhetoric held then it would also have justified the Vietnam War and the Korean War and the war against Frelimo and the MPLA.

He observed the different strands of rebellion and gave them his papal benediction. Without saying so Hitchens implies that he predicted the Arab Spring. Show me the article or speech he gave where he predicts it. Moreover, the 'Arab Spring' is not as he defines it as.

Hitchens ends with co-option and a not so subtle allusion to his own impending 'martyrdom'. He co-opts Nadine Gordimer. I wonder if Nadine Gordimer took his position on the war in Iraq; on the intervention in Libya; on the continuing war in Afghanistan. We can find out if we ask her.

Finally, we end, not with an argumentative bang, as Hitchens promises in the title of his book, but with apologetic whimpering. I am going to die, so please believe me. Well I am sorry that you will die. And I am sorry that at least 250,000 Iraqis; men, women and children; had to die in a war that you supported.

An earlier Christopher Hitchens would have ripped the corrupt, self indulgent roue he became to shreds. He reminds me of Marlon Brando in Apocalypse now, a man troubled by his actions and incoherent. A man who has made bad decisions and is excusing himself to us, expecting that we will go along with his nonsensical, ridiculous, self defense and that we will see things from his point of view.

Hitchens, in supporting Blair and Bush's wars went into intellectual bankruptcy a long time ago. The only people who see and saw things from his point of view were the are neo-cons and the neo-imperialist liberal interventionists make believing they are 'progressive. The hypocrites who run the Guardian and Fox News, hand in hand with Christopher Hitchens.

Are we living in the New Dark Ages?

2011-09-08T20:20:00.007+01:00

Philip Blond explaining the Big Society

The answer is that we ARE living in a new Dark Ages. What makes this time a new dark age is that the light of reason is being snuffed out. We have people here who claim to be children of the enlightenment, but they are philosophers and thinkers who actually do not believe in the power of philosophy, in the power of rational thought, or in the ability of humans to act forcefully and rationally upon their environment.

The philosophers began by imagining what a good society would be like. The 'Good Society' is the objective of most decent political philosophy. The Good Society can make rational decisions about the way society should be run, which is why capitalism opposes it.

How on Earth can we live in a society that does not believe in the intelligence and capacity of human beings and human societies to solve the problems that confront it?

In the New Dark Ages theorists are forced to use a religious language of the market, they are forced to accept the basic premise that humans cannot directly govern their own society, that they have to defer to a deity, in this case the market. How can we be said to be living in an age of enlightenment when our rulers abdicate moral responsibility and relegate human welfare in preference to the workings and processes of wealth accumulation?

It becomes clear in our New Dark Ages our governments are not capable of taking rational and enlightened decisions and seeing them through. They do not have the power to do so. They do not have the power to decide:

- whether to go to war,
- whether to regulate the banking system,
- whether to mitigate the effects of climate change,

Our governments are so manipulated and corrupt, so in hoc to the real economic powers in our countries, for example to the Murdochs, to BP, to the Barclay Brothers and to BAE Systems, that they suffer extreme paralysis of the will - aboulia. Obama promised to get the US out of Afghanistan and Iraq - not going to happen. Obama promised to regulate the banking system - not going to happen - Obama promised to take measures to prevent global warming - not going to happen. Obama promised to change the nature of alliances in the Middle East - not going to happen.

In the dangerous New Dark Ages we abdicate will and reason and decision making, the people are marginalised and ignored and kept in the dark and fed shit. Our governments abdicate reason and instead listen to the soothsayers who speak of market forces. These market forces are up, they are down. The market feels buoyant, it is worried, it is cautious it is positive.

This weakness of mind is revolting. It is disgusting. It shows a lack of virility of fertility of thought and a lack of intellectual energy.

The social sciences are corrupt to the core. Successful social scientists are all nearly all co-opted. They work in the ideological skunk works of Capitalism. They produce their own versions of the Kubark Manual. The academic nomenclature have no shame in the pursuit of personal gain and influence. Ideologues are paid directly and indirectly in all the social sciences from Economics, Politics, History, Sociology, Art and Psychology, to help reproduce the conditions to help the money river continue to flow asymmetrically in the direction of the powerful.

The Nobel Prize giving in Stockholm, for example, has been an embarrassment. Ridiculous ideology disguised as theory is dished out to left wing and right wing governments alike and they swallow it all up..

There has been a generational failure of the will. A generational failure of western human beings to resist the powerful and use the intellect and act reasonably and forcefully in favour of rational governance.

We are not the same people who warred against fascism in Europe, we are merely their dumb, philistine children, and grandchildren. Our parents and grandparents were, in the main, capable of confronting fascism and the holocaust and Stalinism and dealing with the bastards who wanted to destroy the world. They could face up to their death properly and use their lives to some purpose. Not my generation. Not the generation that preceded it or the one that followed it.

We should remember the writing on the wall:

Mene, Mene, Tekel, Upharsin You have been weighed and found wanting.

I have more hope in the current generation, the people in their teens and 20s who can see the problem of the New Dark Ages laid bare in 2011, yes, even the looters.

My premonition of 9/11 and a small dose of paranoid misanthropy.

2011-09-03T02:21:00.002+01:00

We arrived in Mexico City in the year 2000 and left it in the year 2002. I've written about it. But I want to write about it again because I want to refine an experience that puzzles me. That really puzzles me.

I know it is real because I phoned my mother and discussed it with her. My mother could not come to see us because she was undergoing an operation for a minor cancer.

The house is a 1930s house or was. It was due for demolition from what I saw on street view. A hotel to be built in its place. It was a beautiful house in its way, but quite dark. On the ground floor the windows opened out onto our privada. The walkway we shared with six other houses, decorated with tiles.

The houses were large with wooden flooring and high. There were three floors but then there was also a long spiral staircase which took you to the roof and a servants' quarters on the roof.

The stairway was dramatic. It swept down to the lounge, and in the lounge there were white pillars. The stairwell was big too, and looking up, at the top there was a skylight. It had a landing big enough to put a sofa, for several closets and a TV.

Going up the stairs on the left was a large bedroom where Tere and I slept.

One afternoon I went to sleep and dreamed. Then went downstairs and while the dream was fresh in my mind my mother called me on the phone. She always called me when I was really upset. We were connected. She could feel what I felt. I could feel what she felt. I accepted this. I accepted this connection naturally, as you do. Because it is your mother. You should have a connection.

But she could feel what I felt and once she said to me. 'Phil, you are skating on the dark side.' And I knew what she meant. It started after I read Rimbaud when I was 16. My disordering of the senses. She was at least as intelligent as I am, more. She could understand, but then easily dismissed things that she considered unhelpful or irrelevant.

It's hard for me to put into words what I thought about my mother or what our bond was because I never reflected on it and I still haven't. At one time we got on each others nerves an lot. When I was a teenager. I have never interrogated myself about my relationship with my mother. I don't have to.

I lay on the cool, quilted covers of the king sized bed. Tere had Elvira come over and give her massages that were supposed to help her lose weight. Elvira massaged Tere with a rubber stick. The stick had blue suction pads on it. I used to look at her poor body afterwards. Elvira put her elbow into her work and Tere was always left with bruises on her waist and thighs.

Elvira did it once to me, but once was enough.

I could find out when exactly it was. If it was June 2000 or June 2001. Because of the operation my mother and father did not come and instead the rest of the family came and we hosted them. They were very loud when they did come and in the Palacio de Hierro one of the waitors was irritated enough to sprinkle crushed glass into my brother's Margaritta.

I faced him down. I said to him:

'Listen you mother fucker. If you are going to kill one of us then take out a fucking gun and do it that way. Don't sprinkle crushed glass into someone's drink you fuck.'

I was annoyed. But I could see something was up. Mexican people are more well behaved. Something was going to snap. Loud happy children are not universally welcome. The entitlement of children to cause a rumpus in public places is something that annoys me too.

But I'm just being grumpy. And those acres and acres of video, God I can't stand them. The self regard, the preciousness. Stop. Stop it.

OK.

I lay down on the bed. I thought of where I was. Near us the golden Angel of Independence on its pillar. 600 years ago we would probably still have been on dry land or perhaps in the water between Tenochtitlan and Chapultepec. Walking through Chapultepec with my children we found two kittens. One on each plinth near the run up to the monument to the heroic children who wrapped themselves in the Mexican flag and threw themselves down from the castle rather than give up to the American soldiers. We took the kittens home.

My daughters were delighted, but my wife was not. We had to get rid of the kittens. They have never had a pet throughout their childhood. I had many pets. Dogs and cats. But what happened to them when we moved. They were put down. Given away. Uncertain fates. To have had an animal then would have been cruel, I suppose. In the end we let them loose in the English hospital on the Advice of Aunt Li. She said they had a kind woman there who picked up the cats and looked after them.

Aunt li was the centre of our social life and a key source of nutrition outside our home in Mexico City; and yet I used to fear her influence on Teresa. When Tere came back from aunt Li she was deeply intolerant. There was something about being with Li that put her against me. I don't know what it was. But a pattern emerged. Which was odd because I like Li - everybody does - and I think she likes me.

Hard to explain. But I am a bit of a masochist anyway. Perhaps I wanted Tere to be hard on me. Perhaps I wanted to feel unworthy. I love spurning opportunity. So long as we can live I have constantly ignored betterment. That must get very frustratng for a woman. Very frustrating.

You give your ideas freely to everyone. She says. You can't keep your mouth shut. Yeah Dad, my children would repeat. Why do you give everyone your ideas. They just copy you and make money out of them and get the credit. Really?

Tere is not easily impressed by anyone or anything. She was by Marcus when he was against the PRI with his blue eyes, or were they green, and his implacable opposition to the elected dictatorship. But then it became clear he was an idiot. She looks up to her younger brother who became very important in Mexico. Jets and helicopters at his disposal. Black Marias. I am not at liberty to say.

Tere stopped telling me about her family because she said I would blurt it out to the Halls and here I am blurtng. But I am not saying anything really, am I?

So let me get back to the moment I want to recast and reflect on. I am lying on the bed. The same bed which I lay on with Dengue fever for a whole week while my family were in Uruapan. It's called the bone breaker. I knew I would get it. There was a student. I don't think she liked me. She had been away for a week with dengue but came in and insisted on having a tutorial. I was worried.

What if a mosquito bit her, then bit me? Would I get dengue too. A mosquito bit her and then bit me and then I got dengue too. We underestimate how maliscious people really are. How intelligent they are in their small and great unpleasantnesses. How well they conceal their inadvertant acts of spite. I believe she meant it to happen.

I remeber her skin, a bit sallow and her eyes looking at me from across a desk. She really had nothing to ask me and I had nothing to say. She sat opposite me, our knees nearly touching, and I was too polite to bat away the mosquitoes.

I am on the bed. I can hear a faint ruch of traffic and the room is light and in an hour or so I will have to pick my children up from school. Far away in the south of the city. I drive fast. Very fast. Irresponsibaly fast and remember the first time I was in Mexico City as a teacher and a strange girl plucked me out of the staff room and said: Come home with me. She was very thin. She was extraordinary. Armida was her name.

She took me all the way down to Coyoacan. I don't know why and I met her father, a former politician, and her cousin. Her cousin was young and slimy. He had set his mind on joining the government and was repeating the slogans of the PRI. You could see he had made a conscious decision. He made my skin crawl. I had met people like him in the young communist league in the Ukraine. Stop at nothing psychopaths.

But I am being harsh.

It turned out that this strange young woman had had a romantic attachment to an American which he or she had broken off and that he was a Morman and couldn't marry her. Still storming with emotion left from their farewell she chose me. It became clear that who I was was completely irrelevant. She took me back. But she drove very fast and very badly. Weaving from side to side. Travelling at only a meter's length from the car in front. laughing.

On the bed, my only anxiety was the need to pick my children up in a few hours time and then my wife in Polanco later on. I worked at the same place she did. But as a consultant, so I didn't have an office there. One of my old enemies was working there and she had blocked my appointment to a higher post. her name was Rosalia Valero. She chose her friends and was fircely loyal to them. She chose her enemies and would never make up with them.

Later on I heard that her house burned down with everything in it and it wasn't insured. I didn't know how I felt about that. I asked myself. How do you feel about this. I got no reply from myself. Not sad. Peturbed, perhaps. Another person I disliked, Dr John Wells at UCL suffered something worse. He is gay and lived with his lover on Monserrat and the volcano exploded and drove him off the island.

I remember him humiliating the elderly father of our tutor Bas Arts. Mr F Aarts. At the end of the lecture F Aarts gave, he humiliated him. He did the same to lots of people. In the interests of academic excellence of course.

So I lay on this bed and it was midday and the room was very light and the house didn't smell very familiar. It smelled of its former occupants. A woman like a governess and an old man with white hair. A troublesome busy body. But they were kind enough. In the room at the top on the roof there were boxes and boxes of surgical spirit. Old rubber gloves, suitcases and lampshades. They were his. Or hers.

I went to sleep. I dreamed and when I woke up I went downstairs and had a conversation with my mother.

.....

I'll describe it later.

Geo-engineering, a response to George Monbiot in the Guardian

2011-09-02T15:03:00.015+01:00

George Monbiot, a modern Calvinist

Global warming is going to happen so we should work out ways of dealing with it, and geo-engineering is one rational way out of the labyrinth. We have to go under the knife and the fact that you, George Monbiot, downplay the importance of geo-engineering is neither here nor there.

Echoing the author of the Gaia Hypothesis, J. E Lovelock, David Deutsch in his TED talk pointed out that it was already too late to prevent global warming. It is already a disaster. The actions taken to reduce CO2 are not even purported to solve the problem. The lesson seems clear to him. We need a stance of problem fixing not just problem avoidance.

He goes on to say that the world is buzzing with plans to reduce gas emissions at all costs, but that, instead, it should be buzzing with plans to reduce global temperature, and reduce the higher temperature efficiently and cheaply. He notes that, at the moment, these initiatives are on the fringe, but says they should be central.

Deutsch says global warming was an issue before we knew it was an issue. It was already too late in the seventies to prevent climate change. If we did not even know we were causing this problem, as Deutsche pointed out, then these problems are not primarily a moral issue.

It is the moral stance of the climate change prevention activists that I find objectionable. The question is not really a moral one. It is a moral one only to the extent that it is a systemic and political issue. The problem is also a technical one. Like finding the cure for bacterial infection, discovering a way to make crops produce more food, or inventing a form of energy that can be transmitted to every home. Penicillin, chemical fertilizer and AC current respectively.

I sense the submerged Calvinist instinct in Monbiot's approach and that of his fellow moralists, who use the issue of global warming as a stick to beat people with. Perhaps the corollary for climate change activists raging against over consumption, is the born again Christians raving against homosexual intercourse. Yes, unprotected anal intercourse does lead to the spread of AIDS, but tone it down a notch or ten.

God and hell-fire no longer apply, but the new crusaders have the same Calvinist aims: Eat less meat. Limit your consumption. Don't use the heater. Don't travel. And you should add. And stop having dirty sex and farting. Geo-engineering is portrayed by Monbiot as a ridiculous distraction. He caricatures one geo-engineering idea as a Heath Robinson device and by extension the whole field. He employs a rhetorical device, a logical fallacy. The ridicule of one idea is his weapon of choice to ridicule all geo-engineering ideas.
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Embracing the intellect and science not spurious arguments about morality. The moral bullies don't think much of geo-engineering because it cramps their style, it is a usurper. The whole debate needs to be turned from one of blame into a more technical practical and political one.
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The proponents of global warming remind me of the old saints and martyrs, or of the people who used to be passionate about macrobiotics.They seem slightly derranged in their fervor. We should question the psychology of these people. What is the psychology of a 'moral crusade' against global warming? Guilt about a privileged upbringing? God knows. Or Freud knows.

Moral crusades allow people to be sanctimonious and and berate. The global warming debate is the perfect arena for moral bullies.But moral bullies are not attracted to the question of dealing with a problem that was created even before humanity knew it existed they are attracted to the question of global warming because it allows them to be sanctimonious moral bullies - they used to chose Trotskiism. While the climate change activists bully, they also portray themselves as victims. Victims, as we know, always have the high ground. Monbiot's telephone is surely tapped.

David Deutsch hit the nail on the head. Ignore the moral bullies. Problems are inevitable, but problems are solvable. Global warming was out of control before we knew it existed. It's not a personal moral problem. Our energies should not be going into preventing a problem that we could never have prevented anyway, but into understanding the problem and engineering solutions to it.

The emphasis needs to turn away from blaming and become more technical, practical and political. Embrace the intellect and science not spurious arguments about morality Monbiot. Moral bullies don't think much of geo-engineering because it cramps their style, it usurps their function and vocation. Geo-engineering, in addition to CO2 reduction, is the only way forward.

Technical solutions would make people like Monbiot irrelevant and that's a good thing. Would he welcome his irrelevance? Would he welcome a battery of technical solutions to this problem of having to cope with life on a warmer planet?

Of course there are political issues involved, but those are systemic, issues of entrenched power, of the weakness of government legislation in the face of corporations. The weakness of national governments in the face of global problems. Those are serious issues, but they are not reducible to matters of individual choice.

And as for advocating nuclear power, well that is laughable, isn't it? Laughable after Fukushima but also laughable in the sense that advocating nuclear power means putting more political power into the hands of corporations and making the systemic problem far worse.

Whistling in the wind: a response to Polly Toynbee on the question of class.

2011-09-01T17:47:00.023+01:00

Our grand liberal, Polly Toynbee

Polly, I am a fan and you have my qualified support for most of the things you say. But let me ask you this. Micheal Rosen said that you, Polly, talk about class at length without once mentioning the word capitalism. Michael Rosen is right. It doesn't make sense to speak of class without understanding it in terms of the economic system we exist in. If class is a product of capitalism, just as serfdom was a product of feudalism, then can we ameliorate its negative effects in some way?

Can you stop people accumulating power and wealth? How can you stop them if they are the ones with all the wealth and influence? Isn't it really a win for some, do well for a few others and then a lose, lose, lose, lose, lose, lose, lose, lose, lose situation for the rest?

You could legislate of course. But the legislators are not unbiased, they favour the powerful, the ones who can pay good money to work the angles in the legal system in their favour. The ones who can buy out the media that would otherwise investigate them for their underhand dealing with the police and politicians. The ones who can spend money to lobby politicians and offer inducements and directorships to those who play ball. You could always vote. But what good does that do, speaking honestly?

In the time of Wilson when the government persued a mild social democratic policy and refused to join the US in its war in Vietnam there was a plot to overthrow Wilson. The Prime Minister of Australia, who was left leaning, was actually fired by the governor of Australia. The Queen's representative.

In 1976 the CIA and their allies were tasked with making sure that the Italian government didn't have a coalition with the Italian Communists. The CIA financed a coup d'etat in Greece that overthrew the socialist government there. The British and the Americans supported the dictatorships in Spain and Portugal to the bitter end. The idea of social democracy is too dangerous for them not in the abstract, but in reality. We don't have the option.

The truth is you can't change the state through a democracy. If you start to do so the real vested interests in society will oppose you tooth and nail. The police will mount baton charges on horseback against 'the enemy within.'

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Unless you can address the ... question [of class] properly, Polly, I think you are whistling in the wind. What can we replace capitalism with? I hear you ask. Well I don't know. But by failing to oppose it we condemn ourselves and billions of others to exploitation, poverty and enslavement.
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The only reason they caved in in 1945 to the building of the welfare state was because there were nearly three million men with military training in the British Army in 1945 and most of them were working class. When they voted Labour the capitalist state jus rolled over. That's partly why our establishment opted for a professional army, so they could never be held to ransom like that again.

The only reason the establishment has to keep the welfare state and to ensure the rights of working people and its citizens is if there is some opposing power. Now that opposing power, with all due respect, is not a journalist with a conscience and strong arguments. It is a trade union movement and organised civil society. Not David Cameron's vigilante neighbourhood watch but joined up civil society capable of really opposing government when it serves the banks.

Ask yourself this. If democracy is no use and no government is capable of withstanding the demands of bankers and if the bankers can guarantee they will be bailed out then what force can oppose them? Who can really stand up to the search of the powerful for profit and super-profit? Certainly not a group of concerned middle class and upper middle class liberals.

The problem is this Polly: you liberals present no alternative to capitalism and class difference and allowing the powerful to rule is the very essence of capitalism. But you don't oppose the essence of capitalism. Why do you think companies end up relocating to China? Simply because they can pay people less, they have a dictatorship that will guarantee no organised protest and they can make more money. You know this. I know this. We all know this. Why get involved in a discourse about 'class' if you can never face up to the real cause of the problem of unfairness in society?

Benevolent capitalism is a myth. When Britain had an empire conditions were atrocious in the factory but they gradually improved. There were reforms. When there were no reforms there was repression, there were Peterloos. Our rich were so rich from exploiting the poor people of the colonies in India and Africa and around the world that they could afford to buy a little security by paying key sections of the British working class a little more money. As you might pay a maid a little more so that she doesn't steal. Or as you pay a security guard to protect your wealth.

The liberal reforms were the result of the successful endeavours of men and women of conscience, but of the fact that men and women of conscience were allowed to implement reform, for example to the labour laws, because the establishment was investing in its security. It was paying people off. It didn't want revolution.

But our government in the UK now seems to have made a conscious decision. It seems to believe that, because it has a huge and quite effective security apparatus with CCTV cameras trained on people living in every estate, and data bases and a professional army and practice at repressing populations at home in Northern Ireland and abroad it can use the security apparatus for its political agenda and squeeze a little more out of the British people.

It can dismantle the welfare state. It can charge us much more for basic services. It can lower the taxes on the rich and allow companies to stay off shore and only pay 20% tax or less because there is nothing we can do about it. The Cameron Clegg coalition is betting on the effectiveness of repression. They have the security service the monitoring and the professional army and the trade unions are weak and all the newspapers back their ideology and so they will do it.

Your liberalism will always fall on deaf ears. It will do so because the establishment no longer want to or need to buy the consent of the British people. They govern through ideological hegemony, through force. Instead what we should be talking about is getting mass movements organised. Powerful mass movements, just as the Arabs have done. Because we are fooling ourselves if we imagine that there is any morality in the way the real world works. money and power talk. That's it. The rest is window dressing, a smear of icing.

Who was it who said that the only way out of the Labyrinth is rationality? Well it is irrational to look at the small picture. It is rational to recognize that class is the product of an economic system and that that system is capitalism. It is irrational to discuss class without discussing the nature of capitalism.

By fooling oneself that we are dealing with moral beings who can act independently and not a group of people acting mainly in their self interest and with nothing to oppose them but the beration of liberals we get absolutely no where. All we do is create the illusion of opposition and salvage our consciences. Isn't that what you are doing Polly - in the end? You appeal to the better instincts of the middle class, of educated people. These people, to the extent that they are in difficult circumstances at the moment, might agree with you. But most of them know what side their bread is buttered on. They serve and are servile. Call hem 'professionals' if you like.

Now you are probably on the editorial board of the Guardian. You should be. And if you are the you see the assumptions that the Guardian makes about British society. Let's be honest here. What are those assumptions? Let's be truthful.

1. Does the Guardian support capitalism?
2. Does the Guardian believe that class difference can be overcome?
3. Does the Guardian believe that class differences can be overcome in capitalism?
4. Does the Guardian hold to Blair's endorsement of the Third Way?

The third question is probably a non sequiitor for you. and I hope the answer to the fourth is not yes because the Third Way has been discredited as capitalism by stealth and ideological entrapment.

Unless you can address the third question properly, Polly, grand as you are, a modern Macauley, I think you are whistling in the wind. What can we replace capitalism with? I hear you ask. Well I don't know. But by failing to oppose it we condemn ourselves and billions of others to exploitation, poverty and enslavement.

The Torta Cubana is only for heroes

2011-08-30T18:56:00.003+01:00

Torta Cubana from Ryan's blog

When I was single and didn't have time to cook and I was working in Antonio Caso Street in Mexico city, I dared to eat this sandwich on several occasions with the promise to myself that I would not have supper and the excuse that I had not eaten breakfast.

It is the equivalent not of one meal but of three.

It's hard to eat it with delicacy and you have to approach it from the right angle. Moreover, as it is usually sold in the street and so you have to be a little careful. Only real Chilangos eat this sandwich. The sandwich is hot and weighs about three quarters of a kilo.

Between two large elongated baguette-like baps place the following ingredients in succession:

2 slices of fried ham
1 wiener schnitzel
1 fried Egg
Yellow cheese
Avocado slices
1 thin steak
2 slices of tomato
Mayonaise
Rashers of bacon
Leaves of iceberg lettuce
Fried onion
A slice of fresh, white Panela cheese
1 frankfurter sausage split in half
Some chopped up pickled Jalapeno chiles
1 chipotle chile.

Buen provecho.

Are you conflicted? If you are British, please don't be.

2011-08-27T23:54:00.016+01:00

Words from Obama's Libya speech.

Some people think the only good linguist is a descriptive linguist, but they are probably wrong. There should be an official Academy of the English Language The failure to regulate language is abdication, because to ignore what we consciously think and know about the structure of words - to ignore our attitudes to them, is wrong. We can mould language, just as we can alter our DNA. For example:

Conflicted is a horrible borrowing into British English, deconstruct is a vacuous term, quantum is not understood and misapplied, doors are never alarmed, blogs sounds shitty, Shiites are actually Shias, quality time and me time are shoddy, selfish concepts, substantive is rather insubstantial and the focus group should be penned up in marketing, not left to roam free.

An academy could rule out the stupid and influential jargon of the half educated young invented on the bus on the way home from school. I'm going gym. They say. The young sods leave out to the.

An academy would have a riposte to the way advertising and PR corrupt language - and ruin good music - by association. Business also ruins good words and expressions. I used to quite like the words, google and googleplex, until a company with the same name spoiled them both. Now they aren’t even recognised by my spell checker without their capital Gs.

Certainly, the word Left co-opted by the centre right is a misusage.

An academy could warn us regularly about the danger of default US spell checkers and the encroachment of Mirriam Wesbster.

An academy could coin new words, as it does in France and re-mint them. Here's a word which should be included by an academy. It was coined by my father: inotic as the opposite of exotic.

If the academy regulated language it would have to work democratically and representatively, with force of expertise and argument. Let’s look at one example in more detail; the possible regulation of the usage of hoi polloi.

According to our resident grammarian, hoi polloi already includes the article. David Cameron might say. Hoi polloi were rioting and they are criminals not protesters. But he should not say: The hoi polloi were rioting.

Think of the meteorological phenomenon called - in English - El Nino. Now would you say: The El Nino started early this year. No you would not. Would you say: The la belle France. No you would not.

Now ignorance is an interesting argument for lexicalisation, but it is not convincing. The people who originally borrowed the term, probably understood how to use it in the original Greek, or they would not have been able to borrow it. Hoi polloi was not lexicalised as pidgin. Therefore, logically, hoi polloi should be lexicalised from the Greek without using an article in English.

Crossing paradigms to structural linguistics, watch your step, the borrowing hoi polloi only has a meaning syntagmatically in relation to other words. Semiologically, if you like - if you are literati.

Another factor is the Principle of Least Effort: the PLE. The phenomena whereby language is simplified. Conjugations are lost from English; subject pronouns dropped from Spanish; consonants from Arabic; word order from Russian, and so on and so on. Over time the meaning of hoi polloi will change. The dropping of the concords with the PLE.

The process of lexicalisation itself involves reflection. The choice whether to use a word or not. And this is the key and the justification for the formation of a British Academy of the English Language. Language can be regulated and acted upon consciously.

Words phrases and usages are subject to analysis and reformulation. If I say that Hoi Polloi includes the article, now it becomes a decision to wilfully ignore the etymology of the word.

If we all got together and decided not to say: 'I feel conflicted about this.' then it would indeed go away. There is a decision to make about whether to say the hoi polloi or not. Take the decision. The fact we can take a joint decision is the argument for doing it properly.

Now let's look at the arguments for laissez faire, letting the language be, and letting words arise 'democratically'. Ask yourself. Do they arise democratically? Clearly they don't. Those people who dominate, those groups who have power in our society have de facto control of the language.

Even the language of the street is not democratic. It is selectively made visible by corporate media. If there is no thoughtful, decisive intercession then the same people who choose what you will eat and wear and drive, will put new words and usages into your mouth together with your cornflakes.

Let us imagine you want to talk about Libya. You will describe Libyan 'rebels' 'liberating' Tripoli. People with the same ideas as some of those rebels have just blown up the British Council offices in Kabul. You can't talk about Libya without referring to the 'rebels'. If you call them Jihadists then you aren't playing the political game. Who controls British English?

Humpty Dumpty said, ''in rather a scornful tone, it [the word glory] means just what I choose it to mean neither more nor less. The question is, said Alice, whether you can make words mean so many different things. The question is, said Humpty Dumpty, which is to be master that is all.?'

The argument for having no body to regulate language is an argument for laissez faire. It is an argument for letting those who are masters of our public discourse keep their power....That is all.

It is extremely alienating and claustrophobic to be forced to use language dominated by the corporate media in order to communicate publically. Every word comes with its default usage, a hidden style guide entry. There are rebels, there are terrorists, and you may not use Marxist terminology without irony.

You may not redefine objects and things and theories and ideas because all of these uses are already conquered and colonised. Soon like water, language will be copyrighted and its uses restricted like software - mindware. They will charge us to use their manufactured words – which stink.

The question of what words we should and should not use is not a trivial one. Words are concepts. An argument for a state Academy of the English language is an argument for the regulation of English under common democratic representative ownership.