Donkeyshott & Xuitlacoche

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 resourc

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 a

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

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

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

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 stairwel

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

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

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 sau

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, d econstruct 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

A chimp Language is the defining characteristic of human beings because, mainly through language, we create our representation of the world and act on it: history, art, film making, science, maths, literature, architecture, electronics, and so on, all require us to be capable of modelling the world. Modelling the world is closely linked to our feelings about the world.We develop empathy and compassion because one human can represent how another feels in their mind. I feel your pain - I really do - and I share in your hopes and wishes. In literature we live vicariously and intensely, and some of our strongest feelings may derive, not from our own experience, but from vicarious experience. This does not entitle us to greater freedom from pain and want than an animal. But humans have to be given the opportunity to fully inhabit the world of representation and imagination. People do not live by bread alone. An essential human right is a universal education, not simply the educat

William Blake, The Gates of Hell How do you rough up Wrath, Greed, Pride, Lust, Envy, Sloth and Gluttony?  What do you wallop them with? Blakean rhyme; with  ‘bows of burning gold, arrows of desire? How about self-flagellation? Equanimity and acceptance? We sit in theatres of cruelty - in our living rooms in front of screens, and then writers, actors and directors serve us up with large portions of evil, for entertainment. Assuredly, evil is better understood personified. Coppola, Tarantino and the Cohen brothers plagiarised the life of The Iceman, who killed over 200 people for the Mafia. These directors flaunt evil in quixotic, individual packages - they excuse themselves suggesting that they offer explanatory metaphors for capitalism, where Iago the killer is a City boy now, a speculator in futures who short sells country debt. He’s out for himself, for profit. He says: There are those who know the score and fake their respectability and honesty when they are just out for