Tag Britain

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Animal Farm: which character is Douglas Hogg?

Aug 19, ’09 8:58 PM

Douglas Hogg — the Brit­ish Tory MP who included the cost of clean­ing his moat on his expenses—reck­ons:

A par­lia­ment­ary salary does not sup­port the life­style to which most pro­fes­sional and busi­ness classes aspire.

Which got me won­der­ing as to which char­ac­ter Hogg most resembles in Animal Farm. My money’s on Pin­keye.

He car­ries on to suggest:

The salary of MPs is now so low in both abso­lute and rel­at­ive terms as to deter mem­bers of pro­fes­sional and busi­ness classes from enter­ing Parliament.

Sounds per­fect. Maybe MPs salar­ies should be lowered?

But ser­i­ously, my favour­ite, link the National Min­imum Wage to MPs wages in some way.

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What happens when the hang ‘em high brigade call the shots

Aug 8, ’09 12:05 AM

The Eco­nom­ist has an inter­est­ing story this week illus­trat­ing how sex offender laws in the U.S. have run amok and are not only mak­ing mat­ters worse but are des­troy­ing the lives of many inno­cent people in the process.

Plonkers with bal­lots + self-serving polticians = per­ver­sion of justice.

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‘They’ve made us scared to talk’

Aug 6, ’09 9:11 PM

Fam­ily of Ian Tom­lin­son — who died after being hit by police­man at G20 protests—speak out.

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You’ve gotta be kidding me…

Jul 15, ’09 1:59 PM

“Blair in frame to become first EU pres­id­ent, says Glenys Kin­nock.”

A war crim­inal as pres­id­ent of Europe? I think the accom­pa­ny­ing com­ments tell the real story.

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No, Afghanistan is not “a war we should be fighting”

Jul 13, ’09 8:30 AM

Afgh­anistan is spun as a war we should be fight­ing.

In fact, a fact long for­got­ten by the West­ern media and oth­ers involved in the inva­sion of Afgh­anistan is that, on 14 Octo­ber, 2001, the Taliban pub­licly offered to hand over Osama bin Laden to a third coun­try, provided the U.S. hal­ted the illegal bomb­ing of Afgh­anistan and pro­duced the neces­sary evid­ence about involve­ment of bin Laden or any of his asso­ci­ates in the 11 Septem­ber attacks:

In Jalalabad, deputy prime min­is­ter Haji Abdul Kabir — the third most power­ful fig­ure in the rul­ing Taliban regime — told report­ers that the Taliban would require evid­ence that bin Laden was behind the Septem­ber 11 ter­ror­ist attacks in the US, but added: “we would be ready to hand him over to a third country”.

But, in his usual pissing-in-the-wind style, Bush blew this oppor­tun­ity off, vow­ing to con­tinue the bomb­ing, adding:

There’s no need to dis­cuss inno­cence or guilt. We know he’s guilty.

Sub­sequently, Milton Bearden, a former CIA sta­tion chief who over­saw U.S. cov­ert oper­a­tions in Afgh­anistan in the 1980s, is repor­ted1 to have this to say:

We never heard what they were try­ing to say. We had no com­mon lan­guage. Ours was, ‘Give up bin Laden.’ They were say­ing, ‘Do some­thing to help us give him up.’ … I have no doubts they wanted to get rid of him. He was a pain in the neck.’

The Bush regime’s decision to con­tinue the bomb­ing put an end to any pos­sib­il­ity of a poten­tially peace­ful, legal res­ol­u­tion to the events of 11 Septem­ber 2001 and opened up the way for the inva­sion and occu­pa­tion of Afgh­anistan, Iraq and the threat of inva­sion of Iran, along with the mil­lions who have lost their lives or had them des­troyed as a result.

Not a war we should be fight­ing. Just busi­ness as usual.

Notes:
  1. I had to link to a source other than the Wash­ing­ton Post as the Wash­ing­ton Post appears to have deleted that art­icle from their archive for whatever reason. [↩]
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Death over there, excepting ours, is inconsequential

Jul 12, ’09 9:10 PM

Chris Walker, writ­ing to the The Her­ald (webpage removed):

It’s one of life’s more sav­age iron­ies, but one which has become drear­ily famil­iar, that your head­line “Death toll rises in Afgh­anistan” (Leader, The Her­ald, July 11) means Brit­ish mil­it­ary fatalities.

These are given piquancy because they exceed sim­ilar losses incurred in Iraq. Thus the headline.

As a mat­ter of fact, com­bined, they approx­im­ate the loss of Iraqi civil­ian lives only last week — repeat, week — in Mosul and Bagh­dad. But that’s how war’s rhythms (and its suc­cesses and fail­ures) are cal­ib­rated. That hun­dreds of thou­sands of Iraqis and Afgh­anis have died since 2001 hardly raises an eye­brow, far less engen­der­ing a head­line. But, then, death “over there” was held to be one of the reas­ons for inva­sion, and for stop­ping it “over here”, on the streets of Leeds, Lon­don or Glas­gow. Or so it is said. Thus death over there, except­ing ours, is incon­sequen­tial in our mind­set: even a mil­lion deaths by inva­sion and occupation.

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Abel & Cole upgrade

Jul 3, ’09 8:15 PM

Abel & Cole have upgraded their web­site and added new lines of products. Great web­site. Great com­pany. Highly recommended.

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Neda’s death used selectively as a propaganda tool

Jun 25, ’09 8:36 AM

Neda Agha-Soltan is a young women from Iran who was shot dead while protest­ing against repres­sion in Iran. She has a page on Wiki­pe­dia. Pho­tos and video and of her death have been widely broad­cast by the West­ern media, with copi­ous amounts of faux sympathy.

She deserves our sym­pathy because she appears to be a vic­tim of the latest West­ern bogey­man: Iran. She, as Noam Chom­sky might note, is a “worthy victim.”

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Video of women bundled to ground for requesting badge number

Jun 21, ’09 9:12 PM

The Guard­ian has video of two women being bundled to the ground by police for dar­ing to ask a police officer for his badge number.

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Another theory on Iran’s presidential election

Jun 21, ’09 7:08 PM

I was sur­prised today to find one of my favour­ite tech­no­logy com­ment­at­ors, John Gruber of Dar­ing Fire­ball, declar­ing that no doubt remains as to whether the elec­tion was fraud­u­lent. Really, because a theo­cratic gov­ern­ment is crack­ing down on dissidents?

If there’s one thing I’ve learnt from my exper­i­ences in the Middle East it is that all is not what it seems when West­ern gov­ern­ments and the Eng­lish news media are telling the story.

It … has been curi­ous to see the U.S. news organ­iz­a­tions sud­denly care about legit­im­ate elec­tions when most of them ignored, ridiculed, or covered-up evid­ence that George W. Bush stole the U.S. pres­id­en­tial elec­tion in 2000 and pos­sibly in 2004 as well.

–Robert Parry, Invest­ig­at­ive Journalist

While I wouldn’t be at all sur­prised if the elec­tion was fraud­u­lent — in the same way that I wouldn’t be sur­prised if the 2000 and 2004 U.S. pres­id­en­tial elec­tions were fraud­u­lent — there’s just not enough evid­ence to be in no doubt. At least in the case of Iran an invest­ig­a­tion has actu­ally been ordered.

The truth is we just don’t know. The only way to remove doubt would be another elec­tion involving neut­ral inter­na­tional observ­ers. Not on the hori­zon it seems.

Here’s another the­ory on Iran’s recent pres­id­en­tial election:

First, a few facts:

  • The U.S. and Bri­tain have a his­tory of med­dling in the polit­ics of other coun­tries, includ­ing lead­ing the 1953 Ira­nian coup d’état that deposed the democratically-elected gov­ern­ment of Ira­nian Prime Min­is­ter Mohammed Mosad­deq, to ensure West­ern con­trol of Iran’s pet­ro­leum resources.
  • The U.S. is repor­ted to cov­ertly sup­port Ira­nian dissidents.
  • Iraq was invaded on the premise of a nuc­lear weapons threat, which never existed.
  • Iraq was invaded because it has large stra­tegic energy reserves and Sad­dam Hus­sein wouldn’t do as he was told.
  • The Ira­nian gov­ern­ment is in the same boat.
  • When no evid­ence of nuc­lear weapons could be pro­duced Saddam’s dic­tat­or­ship was rolled out as the revi­sion­ist jus­ti­fic­a­tion for invasion.
  • The U.S. and Israel (both of which have a his­tory of launch­ing wars of aggres­sion) have talked openly of attack­ing Iran on the premise of a nuc­lear weapons threat.
  • Iran has never attacked another coun­try in aggression.
  • Iran may not have a nuc­lear weapons pro­gramme either.

The the­ory:

  • A large minor­ity of dis­sid­ent Ira­ni­ans believed they were going to win the election.
  • Ira­nian elec­tion was not fraud­u­lent.1
  • Many West­ern­ers (some of whom helped elect the invaders of Iraq and con­tinue to vote today) are lead to believe the Ira­nian elec­tion was fraudulent.
  • Due to this belief the U.S., Israeli and Brit­ish gov­ern­ments get to label the Ira­nian pres­id­ent a dic­tator. Some­thing to keep the West­ern lib­er­als happy while they attempt another coup d’état or invasion.
Notes:
  1. There is evid­ence that it may not have been, such as reports from Robert Fisk and a pub­lic opin­ion poll three weeks before the elec­tion repor­ted to show “Ahmad­ine­jad lead­ing by a more than 2 to 1 mar­gin.” [↩]
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