The BBC links from their front page using an iconic image, to On This Day about the Muhammad al-Durrah footage. The final outcome of investigations into this event continues still.

If you are going to read one thing today, make it this piece about Iran in The Observer.

I’d rather have my teeth pulled out, or a leg sawn off, without an anesthetic, than have to attend some politically conscious artistic event, set up by the chosen ones. Am I the only one?

Here’s the problem…

I find that the ‘intellectual’ ‘left’, in its shitty, erotic distress mode, has no interest whatever in aesthetic issues or artistic quality, but is as nakedly opportunistic and utilitarian in its approach to the arts as any of its Stalinist forebears or any other market orientated piece of crap that serves as a substitute.

For a fucking example: contemporary American political culture is extremely vacuous, immersed as it is in historical and theoretical backwardness. ‘Tis reactionary, obscurantist, adolescent, posturing shit of a high order basically.

Again…preamble to…

Read post here.

This is your anti-malice program. It begins here and now.

Please make the most of…

Hush-a-by lady, in Alice’s lap!
Till the feast’s ready, we’ve time for a nap.
When the feast’s over, we’ll go to the ball —
Red Queen, and White Donkey Queen, and Alice, and all!

Here’s an Onion headline that found its way into the New York Times: “Blackwater Tops All Firms in Iraq in Shooting Rate.” So either DynCorps got assigned all the low-priority targets like Ari Fleischer’s cousin, or else Erik Prince, founder of Blackwater USA, is sort of guy who changes the channel at home with an Uzi. At this point, you can play a kind of failed state Mad Libs:

The State Department [was very forthcoming about / would not comment on] most matters relating to Blackwater, citing the current investigation. But Sean McCormack, the [witless flack who blamed Denmark for its problems with the Mohammed cartoons / department’s spokesman], said that of 1,800 escort missions by Blackwater this year, there had been “[only a thousand set of steak knives rewarded for high kill counts / only a very small fraction, very small fraction, that have involved any sort of use of force].”

No Blackwater employees, or any other contractors, have [failed to cooperate fully with Iraqi investigations / been charged with crimes] related to the shootings in Iraq, although there are a number of American laws governing actions overseas and in wartime that could be applied, according to experts in international law. In addition, a measure enacted last year calls for the Pentagon to bring contractors in Iraq under the jurisdiction of American military law, but the Defense Department [claims it wants to first make sure the punishments are harsh enough / has not yet put into effect the rules needed to do so.]

“We don’t kill people, our low trading price kills people”: Blackwater USA founder Erik Prince

Oh — alright then — I will comment.

He responded in a humorous way that made the question asker, and the audience, chuckle. Har fucking har. What a fucking wanker.

Can we have a new President please? (and a new army –  and a new policy — and some fucker who knows what the fuck they are doing please)?

Har fucking har again — fucking har. Oh how I laugh. Fucking har again.

It had to be, I suppose.

I haven’t read the article, and don’t think I want to right now. Perhaps someone with a stronger stomach than me can give us a précis of Maddy’s ramble in the comments. Will?

Imperialism is on the march again:

President George W Bush said the US was “outraged” by Burma’s human rights record and announced further sanctions.

Hands off Burma, eh George? Respect? Anyone out there? Shhhhh …

One of Hollywood’s biggest film stars is being criticized by white campaigners for promoting a skin-tanning cream - a product that is now on the shelves of British shops.

The 40-second advertisement from the USA starts like so many others promoting razors or hair dye - but it’s an ad with a very big difference.

There’s a man who has no luck with the girls. He has markedly more pallid skin than his friends and the girl he is after. In a depiction of a Hollywood blockbuster set, one of the biggest heart throbs of US cinema, Tom Cruise, hands over a cream to the hapless chap, along with some mild admonishment.

Within a few weeks, the young man has much darker skin and is more confident.
[…]

Or is that different to this? And if so why?

No doubt you’ve seen extracts from the Iranian president’s speech at Columbia University in New York, and read about it in the newspapers. You may also have heard soundbites from university president Lee Bollinger’s introduction to the event.

Here are some some extended extracts from Bollinger’s talk:

So was Columbia University right to invite Ahmadinejad? I was originally very unhappy about the idea. But now, after having listened to Bollinger’s outstanding critique of the Iranian regime, and Ahmadinejad’s pathetic performance, I’ve changed my mind.

A few sentences from Bollinger…

“Why are you so afraid of Iranian citizens expressing their opinions for change? … In our country you are interviewed by our press, and asked to speak here today … I propose that you let me lead a delegation of students and faculty from Columbia to address your universities about free speech, with the same freedom we afford you today.”

Do watch the entire 10-minute video. Bollinger cites chapter and verse, and does so with surgical precision. Thank you, Professor Bollinger.

Hat tip: sandbasher

When I was watching this Bill Maher show segment I was immediately struck by how it captured perfectly, in just a few short minutes, everything that I despise about the American mass media, and about American “liberals.” Maher’s guest is the human bacillus Michael Scheuer, until recently most famous for having been utterly unqualifed to do his job for the CIA in tracking Osama Bin Laden. Rehabilitated as a turn-to “expert” on American foreign policy dans les affaires des jihadistes after having warmed the hearts of Fox News viewers with his rallying cry to hunt down America’s waylayers “without a great deal of concern for civilian casualties”, and more recently endorsed by Bin Laden himself, Scheuer has Maher slobbering on his slippers straight away.

Utterances proceed from Scheuer’s cakehole in the following sequence:

“I hope Israel flourishes. I just don’t think it’s worth an American life or an American dollar.”

Applause. Some muffled grumbles. Maher interjects, flaccidly, and Scheuer elaborates.

“Not only Israel, sir, but Saudi Arabia or Kuwait or Bolivia.”

Maher offers another lame interjection, and Scheuer waves old glory.

“What I’m telling you, sir, is I’m most interested in the survival of the United States.”

Raucous applause. Hoots. Maher pleads Israel’s special case as a democracy, and Scheuer scoffs.

“So what? Sir, it doesn’t matter to Americans if anyone ever votes again. We’ll get by just fine, sir.”

Maher gets a bit teary for poor old Israel, winning aaws and claps from audience. Scheuer then displays astonishing illiteracy on America’s role in Israel’s survival, and then this:

“I think it earns America tremendous pain, and increasingly dead Americans, fighting wars that are not ours to fight.”

Scheuer then confirms for Maher that he still thinks it’s okay to kill America’s enemies without particular regard for civilian casualties, and then he doffs his cap to that backward jackalope of a Republican, the “antiwar” Ron Paul, on the point that America should “stop intervening in their world except where it’s absolutely necessary.”

Maher: “Yeah. I would agree with that.”

Lovely, then. Bipartisan American consensus all round, concluding comment to the effect it was all about oil after all, something weird about daylight savings time, closing gag about guineas - you know, Italians - and. . . cue applause.

And that, my dear American comrades, is how we come to hate you.

Because no nation, Israel or Bolivia or Kuwait or anywhere else, is worth less than an American dollar, and an American life is not worth more than someone else’s, and the people you call your “allies” notice it when you cheer at the proclamation that the survival of the United States is all that counts.

Because it does matter if the rest of us never get to vote again, and you will not get by just fine, and if “their” wars aren’t yours to fight, then your wars aren’t ours to fight, and you will pay dearly for your disregard for civilian casualties, and it is not their world, because there is only one world, and you will be hated and reviled and detested in it.

You will be hated by democrats, freedom fighters, feminists, students, teachers, people who like to paint portraits, people who like to play musical instruments, queer people, kite-flyers, and people like me, or you will be hated by jihadists, obscurants, misoginysts, lynchers, tyrants, fascists and the scum of the earth.

Suck it up, American liberals. Decide.

Undergraduates in England spend less time studying per week than their European counterparts, a report says.

Aye, we know that.

The Higher Education Policy Institute surveyed 15,000 first and second year students. It found they averaged 26 hours of teaching and private study.

…..

The director of the institute, Bahram Bekhradnia, said there was also a marked gender difference in the amount of studying that students did.

“Boys are down the pub and the girls are in the library, you can characterise that as,” he said.

Ominous dude.

Or a big fucking parody?

I know I’m a Jewish lesbian and he’d probably have me killed. But still, the guy speaks some blunt truths about the Bush Administration that make me swoon…

You decide!

We certainly live in interesting times.

I’ve kept quiet about MoveOn.org’s silly New York Times ad about “General Betray Us” because, frankly, I think it’s small stuff compared to the more urgent matter at hand: that most Americans don’t know what the fuck the “surge” is, how it’s being conducted, or what the true consequences of it have been thus far. (As ever, the president has only himself to blame for failing to articulate his own war policy, and for using an impressive soldier and military strategist in the worst possible capacity, as a public relations man.)

Anyway, here’s the latest tenderloin the witless right has tossed to the ravening left*. You can expect the usual cycle of nonsense to commence, from the talking heads and the post-structuralists alike, to how this image represents North American society in chaos, the death of sanity and reason, blah, blah, blah. Salman Rushdie nailed it on Bill Maher this week: Talk about Iraq has been supplanted by talk about talk about Iraq.

I have to say, as someone who’s trudged through a few pages of Tariq Ali’s Clash of Fundamentalisms, I think this is lightweight Photoshop work. Bush as Osama, Osama as Bush — now that must have taken dozens of man-hours at New Left Review to pull off.

Evidently, the cover and title are the most provocative things in this issue of Maclean’s. And are you surprised?

We can be grateful for one small accomplishment here: At least most people now know just how really, really, really bad of a guy Saddam Hussein was if he’s become evil’s gold standard of moral equivalence. Hitler’s ghost must be going green with envy.

Indeed, on that same episode of Bill Maher, Janeane Garofalo, who always looks like she’s being broken up with, said that Saddam was a war criminal, Bush is a war criminal — hey, war criminals happen, man. Janeane should be more careful. Glib tongues wag and before you know it, a whole cottage industry of Sieg Hail-ing Dubya t-shirts teeters on the brink of insolvency.

* In my original post, I had it the other way about: witless left… ravening right. Terry Glavin, my Canadian comrade, was kind enough to point out that, like our own American Conservative, Maclean’s is one of those reactionary mags whose politics these days is indistinguishable from that of the far left.  At all events, there’s enough witlessness and ravening to spare on both sides of the spectrum. You should see Thanksgiving at the Weiss household.

Latest from Slate:

On Oct. 12, we shall hear again from Oslo, and I will be very surprised indeed if the peace prize is not awarded to Albert Gore Jr. (Don’t ask what a campaign against global warming has done for “peace”; that would be like asking what Mother Teresa or Henry Kissinger had ever done to reduce global conflict. The impression is the main thing.)

So, and if I am right, the former vice president will then complete a year in which An Inconvenient Truth has been awarded an Oscar and he has authored a best seller. Roll it round your tongue again: an Oscar, a best seller, and a Nobel Prize in the space of 12 months or so. Not bad. And meanwhile, the field of Democratic candidates looks—how shall one put it?—a trifle etiolated. Sen. Clinton may have succeeded in getting people to call her “Hillary” and to have made them feel resigned to her front-runnership, but what kind of achievement is that? Sen. Obama cannot possibly believe, and doesn’t even act as if he believes, that he can be elected president of the United States next year. John Edwards is a good man who is in politics for good reasons, but there is something about his populism that doesn’t quite—what’s the word?—translate. …

…..

I remind you that Gore was once a stern advocate of the removal of Saddam Hussein, and that in office he might well not be the coward or apologist that the MoveOn.org crowd is still hoping to nominate. One has the very slight sense that he contains some unexpended political energy and has acquired some dearly bought political experience. At any rate, nothing could be worse than the present dreary political routine, and if it takes a Scandinavian kick-start to alter the odds, then for once one can hope that the heirs of Alfred Nobel will have a more explosive and catalytic effect than they had intended.

All of it here.

No green halos this time, so you’ll have to imagine them:

Ahmadinejad briefly addressed two of his claims that had aroused the most controversy, claiming academics in Europe had been imprisoned for “approaching the Holocaust from a different perspective.”

He also said as a member of the International Atomic Energy Agency, Iran had the right to pursue peaceful nuclear technology, and said its programs had always been open to inspection.

Speaking in Farsi with a simultaneous translator, Ahmadinejad several times addressed the audience as “my dear friends.” Ahmadinejad characterized himself as a fellow academic, saying even as president he continues teaching courses on a weekly basis.

There were no disruptions as the audience sat in silence through most of the speech. There was derisive laughter when Ahmadinejad claimed “in Iran, we do not have homosexuals” in response to a question, while the end of the speech was greeted with appplause.

While claims about Iran’s nuclear intentions may be subject to debate, their treatment of homosexuals is not.

See also Norm’s take one, and take two.

WARNING: extremely graphic video below…you have been warned.

I’ve thought long and hard about whether or not to post the following video clip. In a sense it could be considered to be a snuff film. That is what makes me uncomfortable — to say the least — about posting it here.

However, I’ve come to the conclusion that it isn’t ‘entertainment value’ that those who view it here will gain (so not a snuff movie). Nor is it a form of ‘political oneupmanship’ aimed against domestic opponents that compels the dissemination of such filth. What the following does do is eliminate any idea of fascists, being in any way shape or form, as being ‘freedom fighters’, (or rather it should). The clip shows pure fascism at work, stripped of all it’s pretenses.

Update: Thanks to Sphinx in comments for further information and clarification:

“The logo of the video reads “the Islamic State of Iraq” in Arabic.

From reading the title and the logo, it seems it’s al-Qaeda terrorists or their allies killing people. Most of those killed by these terrorists are innocent civilians whom they kill, either because according to their sect, or according to their connection to any government institution which they consider illegitimate.”

In addition see here

“I posted this video to say that al-Qaeda is strongly active and keep reminding people that Iraqis are suffering and that it’s worse than what they see on TV.”

……

George Bush has been heavily criticized for his Axis of Evil speech in 2002:

States like these, and their terrorist allies, constitute an axis of evil, arming to threaten the peace of the world. By seeking weapons of mass destruction, these regimes pose a grave and growing danger.

He named Iran, North Korea and Baathist Iraq directly. Despite the continuing terrorist activity in Iraq ,and the perilous state of any hopes for democracy, there is no longer a potential military threat in terms of future development of nuclear, chemical or biological weaponry that could threaten its neighbours, or Western states. The real weapon of mass destruction, Saddam Hussain and his Baath party, is no more.

Iran continues to develop nuclear weapons, and seems set to obtain them if left unopposed. A not unsurprising outcome given the head of the IAEA thinks his job is to “keep the peace” between Iran and the US, rather focusing on his job to police nuclear proliferation effectively. Still, even he has limits.

Meanwhile the North Koreans appear to be shipping nuclear material to Baathist Syria and Iranian technicians were killed in an accident involving an airburst chemical warhead (including VX and Sarin nerve agents and mustard blister agent)) that they were attempting to place on a Scud Missile in Syria.

Some will automatically dismiss all of these reports as propaganda, after all didn’t Bush and Blair lie about WMD in Iraq? Others will argue that Bush’s Axis of Evil speech created the very problems we are seeing. Neither of these are tenable positions. That WMD was not found in Iraq, does not mean that WMD are not a problem elsewhere. Bush’s rhetoric may make relationships strained, but to suggest that North Korea, Iran and Syria would be playing a more constructive role in the world, but for George Bush strains any rational mind.

There’s an axis of something, what are we going to do about it?

Go and read Nick Cohen on the how libel laws are protecting those who promote hatred:

One prominent figure, who is occasionally allowed on to the airwaves to balance the Muslim Council of Britain, told me he never used the words ‘Saudi Arabia’ or ‘Wahhabism’.

When he wanted to discuss either, he referred fuzzily to ‘foreign funding for extremist doctrines’. He knows that if he speaks out, he will be banned from Saudi Arabia. Blacklisting is a formidable sanction for him and others as he has a religious duty to make a pilgrimage to Mecca.

He is also frightened of being sued - as is everyone else. Britain’s repressive libel laws are becoming a threat to security and racial harmony. ‘Saudi money is now a major source of income for London libel firms,’ one lawyer told me. ‘School fees and second homes depend on it.’

Is the above a genuine photograph of England’s Foreign Secretary, or simply one of Steve Bell’s more manic cartoon representations? Rory Bremner will no doubt be studying this picture intensely over the lead-up to the next general election.

We truly live in the age of the Nutters.

Got an email pointing to a ‘tube thing. The following post is a consequence thereof…

Rod Serling — now there’s an interesting man.

Yes — it’s that time of the week again — it’s cultural day!!

I have always understood, ever since reading him, why Walter Benjamin says: “There is no document of civilization which is not at the same time a document of barbarism.”

For example, I always hated having to read Shakespeare and Chaucer and just about every other piece of
‘approved’ literature shoved down my throat in the shitty, pathetic excuse for a school I was not educated in. This, on my part, wasn’t because of any innate political nous, nor an innate tendency towards philistinism on my part. No, thrice no! It was because of the elitist and forcible submission it entailed, a submission which served as the (a?) subtext for all instruction in ‘culture’, which I considered, as a naive child, to be beneath me, because of my particular plebeian (NB: for Yanks, plebeian refers to a social category of the population who have nothing to sell but their labor)  orientation and my very fortunate brainwashing into the ideals of democracy and the liberal humanism I learned from The Twilight Zone.

Anyway — that is the mere preamble to these Utubes. Enjoy…

Pisces (20 FEB-20 MAR)

Nobody is better at defusing an explosive situation than you are. But this ability will be sorely tested week when you have to prevent a nuclear bomb from going off in a major capital city. Should you cut the red wire or the blue one? Don’t ask me, you’re supposed to be the fucking expert.

Check your horoscope here.

Hang on, if the management of Blue Peter were so worried about naming a pussy with a slang word for, well, pussy, then that really makes them BLUE Peter doesn’t it?

Worldly wise as I am, (yo kidz!) I had to look it up, and the Blue Peter staff just automatically knew that Cookie was a slang word for female genitalia? What sort of sickos do the BBC put in charge of our young innocent children’s minds, I have a good mind to… wanders off into insane Daily Mail world of doom and gloom.

Oh, and another thing, bloody newsround (rubbish since John Craven left) are hiding the motivations for the decision from the kids. The BBC just can’t stop lying to the people!

Let the truth about the cat be known!