Donkeyshott & Xuitlacoche

http://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/File:Majakovskij.face.jpg In a way Futurism is a basic instinct. A lust of the blood for the modern. For progress. For clean lobbies and antibiotics and heart transplants and aircraft travel and genetically modified crops and embryo screening and Hotol and fusion. We eat Futurism for breakfast. In a way I like Futurism because it holds faith with technology. It says: Fly that airplane! Burn holes in the atmosphere until you can burn cleaner holes, because progress and modernity will solve the problems that arise from that valiant act. I suppose it is the masculine principle. At its heart futurism is human because it is Utopian. What is the problem with William Morris , for example? Isn't his vision of the future revolting - horribly cloying with his fussy wallpaper and his arts and crafts and his false ideas of femininity. How much more interesting Le Corbusier's futurist city , his contemporary city for three million people. Futurism may not ...

Why doesn't the world remember Takhti? By Ali Hosseyni Gholamreza Takhti's name is all over Iran and in ever city and town there are wrestling clubs with Takhti's smiling photograph hanging on the wall in a position of honour. There is even "Takhti" wrestling club in each every town in Iran. Takhti was a supporter of the Iranian Prime Minister Mohammad Mossadegh , and an enemy of the Pahlavi regime, which overthrew the democratically-elected government of Mossadegh in 1953 with the help of Britain and the US . In 1968 on the 7th January 1968, the Shah sent Savak to kill the legend. They said it was suicide. Mohammad Reza Pahlavi wept crocodile tears when he heard the news. It was not suicide. Mohammed Reza had ordered his death. Takhti was the greatest wrestler in the world in the 1950's and early 60s. He won a silver medal for Iran at the Olympics in Helsinki in 1952. He won a gold medal at 1956 in the Olympics in Melbourne and a Gold in Tokyo...

FLASHING THE GUARDIAN -- A BOOKS BLOGGERS' REBELLION :  The unheroic censor with a death wish Part 1: In which Norman Mailer stars in an experiment in search engine optimisation By ACCIACCATURE 3 February 2009 When Norman Mailer died in 2007, informed opinion – in the blogosphere, people who had read at least two of his books – was split. The army of readers who saw him as one of the most despicable misogynists writing fiction in the 20th century was perfectly matched by warriors on the other side, who raged that the label wasn’t just unwarranted but tantamount to heinous calumny. Before commenters returned to bitching-as-usual, tempers were lost on literary sites all over the net in debating temperatures high enough to bring to mind tiles burning off space shuttles re-entering Earth’s atmosphere. After I'd agreed to a spontaneous suggestion by our good friend Sean Murray -- a pioneer and stalwart of the comments section of The Guardian’s books blog – that we re-...

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