Donkeyshott & Xuitlacoche

If Vanga is right World War Three begins next year. By Yannis Vaks In 1923, in the village “New Selo” not far from the town “Petrich” 3 young girls were walking along the village road towards the stream when suddenly the sky turned black, the wind picked up and a frightening storm begun. The girls were immobilised with fear, The wind knocked two of the girls onto the ground and blew one of them off her feet and into the sky. The two remaining girls were so frightened so they ran home and were so shocked by what had happened that they couldn’t speak - they came back without their cousin. When the storm calmed down, people went out to search for the12-year old and within an hour they had found her. She was lying in a field in shock with her eyes full of sand. Slowly Vanga went blind. The first time I heard her name was in early childhood. Vanga is the most famous psychic in Russia and the former Soviet republics Ordinary people know who she is. If you ask someone: "Who is Nostra

J. G. Ballard's decomposition Of course I came to Ballard through science fiction, but I could never finish his books. I started them well enough and ploughed on. But the subtext said to me. No. This isn't it really. Not yet. The Drowned World The Wind from Nowhere The Drought The Crystal World And then came: Crash , which was an artificial and stellar conjunction of his obsessions. And I read it when it came out in 1973 and I read: The Terminal Beach The Day of Forever The Best Short Stories of J G Ballard And Empire of the Sun much later, (after the movie) What do you think of books when you are 13? What do you think of the "textures" of Hal Clements, John Wyndham, Arthur C. Clark, Ray Bradbury, Brian Aldiss, Aldous Huxley and J. G. Ballard? And then what do you think of books like Crash . Or when you inadvertantly pick up the biography of Frank Harris or after having heard Suzanne try to read Leonard Cohen's Beautiful losers or scan through John Updike'

Give up the act Nick Cohen: You are a right winger advocating a return the Thatcherism and cuts. If we read a flood of articles we see that massive amounts have been given to "restart lending". But this money that our government has freely given to rescue the richest amongst us could have gone into public services. The austerity programme of the Tories following on (in a worst case scenario in a year or so) is the direct result of this gift of tax revenue to the rich. We know this. Cohen says that the governmet wastes money and there goes the deictic reference to the conventional wisdom the right have put so much money and column inches and air time into building up: that the public sector is inefficient and that, by implication, it should be sold off to the rich to run efficiently for profit. Why should I have to argue against this ridiculous notion: the case for the public sector? Why should anyone have to argue the case for the obvious? It's o

Matt Seaton should give us the below the line low down, asap . But the strange and sad thing is that this is the first year that CiF itself has not been nominated as a top political blogging site when it obviously is. If we thought about it we would have to think about the weaknesses of the present arrangement on CiF. 1. The terminal 5 -type screw up of the redesign. 2. The fact that posters are no longer equated with bloggers. Bloggers post in big fat thundering letters , while posters write in a tiny little squeaky type face and disappear from view after 50 comments. 3. Then instead of really tackling the big issues face on what we get is a constant polling of the Guardians market segment: "readers". Us. That's why Charlie Brooker and David Mitchell excite the Guardian, because we get the celebrity fan clubs posting (the kind of "Oh David, I love you," swoon, swoon thing.) and the Guardian believe a new posting dawn has arrived. It hasn't. You build up

Somalia 1993: Snafu Americana The US troops' Mogadishu beach-landing was a PR comedy of Forrest Gump proportions, ending in tragic PR disaster – but it was again, more an effort, initially, at peacekeeping than imperial aggression. The capital of Somalia had totally imploded, and had been in complete anarchy for many months. So again, in the absence of an effective UN army which the post cold-war world so badly needs – not one more blue-beret detachment to monitor buffer zones – some force would sooner or later go in and try to restore basic order. Remember, the implosion of Mogadishu was in no way the immediate or even medium term fault of any outside power. It happened like this: sub clans of the Hawiye – the main original clan of the city and surrounding countryside – having driven out president Siad Barre and his Marehan clan and their allies, in weeks of brave house-to-house and street battles, after years of increasing oppression – started to turn their RPGs and their AK47s

It's the ungovernability... Obama should act as Clinton did in 1993 to try and bring order to Somalia under the auspices of the UN. Robert Fox in the Guardian says: Current orthodoxy sees piracy as a product or symptom of failed or rogue states. The inference from Obama's statements is that the world must fix the Somali pirate problem at source, by fixing the anarchy of Somalia itself. Well yes. " Black Hawk Down " and all that. The US intervention in Somalia in 1993 was initially quite a selfless action. There was no benefit to the US in intervening in Somalia. It was a humanitarian intervention aimed at creating a secure environment for the delivery of aid. UN resolution 794. Of course in the end they fucked because they were incapable of reading the situation in Somalia correctly and supporting the man on the spot. The UN negotiator UN special representative Mohamed Sahnoun . The US didn't succeed but their attempt was initially brave and principled and

Respect Jacob Zuma!   ... and hope that he will do the job Thabo Mbeki didn't do. Yes, Jacob Zuma was tried for rape, but he was acquitted. Yes, he was accused of corruption, but the charges were dropped – again and again - and many ordinary South Africans celebrated when they were. They did so because, despite the ten year vendetta against him, Jacob Zuma earned the respect of the majority of ordinary South Africans the hard way. Jacob Zuma was jailed for 15 years on Robben Island from 14th February 1964 to March 1979. After his release he organised internal resistance for two years and then, after setting up ANC intelligence networks, he joined the Central Committee of the ANC. In comparison to Nelson Mandela, Jacob Zuma is, what the Chinese would call “an uncarved block”. Although Nelson Mandela, was a high ranking member of the Tembu Royal House , he rejected tribal customs, ran away from an arranged marriage, studied law at the University of Witwatersra