Donkeyshott & Xuitlacoche

Obama promises the USA Rawlsian balls Obama will be cowed into compromising over any plans to tax and spend on the poor unless that spending is merely strategic, focused and highly limited - and he suggested as much in his speech. I had an hour long conversation with my brother on the phone who had flown over to be at the inauguration. He thinks I am being offensively ungenerous. Isn’t Obama better than Bush, Phil? Obama is such a well meaning sincere chap. A gent. A sincere man who deserves the benefit of the doubt. I’m sorry, but the right way to see Obama, Chris, is as the face of a massively expensive marketing exercise on behalf of US corporate capitalism. You’ve heard of “greenwash” well isn’t Obama a kind of “blackwash”. My brother described the inauguration as an African American’s day out. A day when the dreams for African American equality came much closer. Point taken. And what a salutory effect the Obama must have on a racially divided country and a traumatised African Amer...

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

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

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

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

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

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