I may not like what he is, but I certainly like what he does. For Cornet Harry Windsor (or Wales) that is putting his “sorry arse” on the line in Afghanistan. Well done that man!

Mr Windsor was pictured on the news this evening struggling with a heavy machine gun. As someone who has fired nothing bigger than a .22 calibre carbine it’s not for me to mock the young man, at least on this subject. Away from the gun young Harry appeared fully in command while acting as a tactical air controller, describing a network of trenches and tunnels behind Taliban lines. One can only hope that the inhabitants of those dusty ditches received a nasty surprise as a result of the prince’s information.

Now contrast the on-screen behaviour of this junior army officer with that of Channel 4 news anchor Jon Snow, who this evening bravely battled with a newspaper editor and an arsey Tory MP. Snow’s petulant reporting of Windsor in Afghanistan has understandably led to a robust reaction on the part of some viewers. One respondent – an armed forces captain – accused Snow of “treason”, and the newsreader reported this himself with a distinct air of smug self-satisfaction.

Update 29/2-08

A decision has been made to withdraw young Harry Windsor from Afghanistan, and I guess that Jon Snow will be looking even more smug and self-satisfied on Channel 4 News this evening. To be honest I’m not sure if I can bear to watch it. Listening to his fellow celebrity newsreader John Humphrys on the radio this morning was quite enough bullshit for one day.

What a result. A hooray henry with some redeeming qualities signs up to do something useful with his life. And now the poor lad is to be flown back to Blighty where he will twiddle his thumbs during the day, and spend his evenings getting rat-arsed on the public purse.

Yes, the Ministry of Defence has milked this story for all the positive PR it can extract from it. But can one blame the government and army for this? Spin aside, the fact is that an inexperienced but seemingly capable young soldier did his job and battled with an enemy of humanity.

I guess the chatterati will now go back to whingeing about how the youth of Britain are a useless shower of feckless and irresponsible ingrates.

Leave them alone in Italy.

The country’s highest appeals court has just reached a judgement banning men from touching their genitals in public.

More here

Whereas on the Guardian comments page it appears to be a virtue to proudly display bollocks for the whole world to see.

Reports are coming in that a big fat gadgie from Hull was responsible for the 5.3 magnitude earthquake that caused widespread damage to homes and businesses in the early hours of this morning. Gastroenterologists warn that aftershocks are to be expected, and the authorities have advised homeowners to take appropriate precautions.

[A] student living in Leicester, said she was “absolutely petrified” when her block of flats began shaking around her.

“The front of my chest of drawers fell out and my candles fell on the floor and broke. I thought it was a ghost.”

Well you would, wouldn’t you? Incredibly, it wasn’t.

PARIS — France may send hundreds of ground troops to eastern Afghanistan where NATO-led forces are fighting al-Qaeda-backed insurgents, Le Monde newspaper reported on Tuesday. It said the move would be part of a new Afghan policy being worked out by President Nicolas Sarkozy and his advisers.

France has about 1,900 soldiers under NATO’s Afghan command, most of them based in relatively calm Kabul, and Le Monde said the fresh troops would be deployed outside the capital.

“Their destination would be zones of potentially fierce fighting, preferably the eastern region of Afghanistan close to the tribal areas of Pakistan,” it said.

Might be of interest to a minority of a minority.

In other news…

Iraq condemns Turkish incursion… “a violation of its sovereignty” they say.

U.S. of Fucking Ayyyeyeaaaaaaaa looks around, whistles… all while standing in awkward and funny way and that like … concentrates on “race clothing” and matters of real import like… “funny name and wears funny clothes”. Good for them.

Doomed — we are all doomed.

Can I get a witness? Can I get a witness brothers and sisters?!

. . . cannot put Humpty together again. It’s not going to happen. The only way forward is to start over.

Spend some time talking to Afghan-Canadians for once. Ask our comrades in Afghanistan what they think. Pay particularly close attention to the anti-Taliban, pro-democracy forces among the great Pashtun people, whose suffering is the deepest, on both sides of the Durand Line.

Trust the people. If there’s hope, it lies in the proles.

MAJOR UPDATE: Ils Viennent! Vive La France!

I don’t really share the ’soft-spot’ most Glaswegians seem to have for Tommy Sheridan. I think he’s a bully, an ego-maniac and a fucking liar. I have nothing but contempt for his grandstanding and the way he slandered life-long trades unionists and socialists in his defamation trial, simply because he couldn’t bring himself to say, “None of your fucking business”, when the allegations of his private life surfaced in the NOTW. I also don’t buy this shit about the ‘unprecedented’ nature of the perjury charge against him. It may be in Scots Law but it follows a pattern set by Jonathan Aitken and Jeffrey Archer: lie your ass off that publicly and you’re bound to get the wrong kind of attention.

However, the behaviour of Lothians and Borders polis strikes me as being a little excessive, to say the least. Please don’t believe the crap you hear from the ex-pat Glaswegians floating around the blogosphere who seem to sincerely think Sheridan is the victim of some vast conspiracy. I’ve yet to meet a real one - y’know, somebody who actually lives here - who thinks he told the truth during his trial. I’d assume the jury thought the same. But they probably thought, rightly in my view, that the NOTW were lying too, so given a choice between the two, they found in favour of Sheridan. Because in a beauty contest, he was the least ugly.

And the treatment of Gail Sheridan, I think, shows a certain vindictiveness on the part of Lothians and Borders police. The half-inching of a few minatures is hardly material to the case. Doesn’t she have enough to contend with - what with a small child and the fact that she’s married to a bawbag like Tommy Sheridan? In all I’m afraid I had to agree with that rarest of creatures, a Scottish Tory, in the shape of Alan Cochrane of the Telegraph:

“I may have laughed at his jokes and admired his turn of phrase from time to time but his working-class martyr act has never struck this observer as anything other than self-aggrandisement.

However, as the weeks, months and now years grind on in the seemingly interminable inquiry following his court case victory against the News of the World, a fact has to be faced. It is this: by any standard or criteria of fair play, Mr Sheridan is getting a raw deal.”

Exactly so. I don’t believe for a minute that Tommy’s only crime is to “speak truth to power”, as his supporters would have it. No, he is, in my view, a complete and utter bastard of a man. But the people he’s up against are bigger bastards. Big bastards with power.

Forget all the nonsense that you may have heard about Kosovo being “the Jerusalem” of Serbia. It may contain some beautiful and ancient Serbian and Serbian Orthodox cultural sites, but it is much more like Serbia’s West Bank or Gaza, with a sweltering, penned-up, subject population who were for generations treated as if they were human refuse in the land of their own birth. Nobody who has spent any time in the territory, as I did during and after the eviction of the Serb militias, can believe for a single second that any Kosovar would ever again submit to rule from Belgrade. It’s over.

But how did it begin? In fact, Kosova has never been recognized internationally as part of Serbia. It was only ever recognized as part of Yugoslavia, and with the liquidation of that state Serbian claims upon its territory became null and void. A little history here is necessary.

All here.

Quotation:

Monopoly, the world’s best-selling board game, is going global. A simple idea, substituting the iconic properties of the original game with hallmark cities of the world. Hasbro is letting people vote on its Web site for which cities to include in the new game.

In this celebration of capitalism, would-be moguls could buy up properties in cities such as Moscow, … Tokyo, Japan and Jerusalem, Israel.

Wait. Nix that last one — at least the Israel part.

Given the white-hot controversy over Israel — the world’s most fought-over piece of real estate — should the board game refer to “Jerusalem, Israel” even though Palestinians say Jerusalem will be the capital of any future Palestinian state? Should it say “Jerusalem, Palestine?”

Instead of rolling the dice, parent company Hasbro is taking the middle ground.

The company is letting people vote on its Web site for which cities to include in the new game — “Dublin, Ireland” for example. It recently removed “Israel” after “Jerusalem” and then eventually removed all of the country names.

Hasbro told The Associated Press that a mid-level employee decided on her own to take out “Israel” after pro-Palestinian groups and bloggers complained — sparking even more protests *from the other side*.

“It was never our intention to print any countries on the final boards and any online tags were merely used as a geographic reference to help with city selection,” Hasbro said in a written statement. “We would never want to enter into any political debate. We apologize for any upset this has caused our Monopoly fans.”

Comment:

Jerusalem is the capital city of Israel. In all its long history it has been the capital of one nation, Israel. Since a Palestinian country has never existed (of which, please note, ’tis not the same as saying it should never exist) it would and should, quite possibly, perhaps, just maybe, rule that one out by default. Note: I have left some things unsaid.

And because I’m cheery owing to the Hak-Maoist helping me figure out how to hoist up a tube in this web lodge at long last, some cheery music from when I was a kid:

Plus how it’s done out our way nowadays (sorry, no music):

Just when you think the nadir has been reached, a craven invocation of pan-Slavic ‘racial’ mythology appears at CiFillis, which in another time and place–if the words ‘Jews’ and ‘Germans’ were substituted for ‘Muslims’ and ‘Russians/Serbs’–would have been published in the editorial pages of Der Stürmer:

The independence of Kosovo is a hugely emotional issue for Russians (because Kosovo [sic] is part of the sacred soil of the Holy Slavic nation) … intensity of opposition to Kosovo’s independence in Serbia and Russia is such that it would be a mistake to ignore it (we will not tolerate this war of extermination against the Holy Slavic nation) … create a precedent for many separatist movements all over the world, from the Basques in Spain to the Uighurs in China (and especially those pesky Chechens, of whom we cannot massacre enough–100,000 and counting) … Many Russians warn that the creation of a Muslim state in the middle of Europe will strengthen the position of Muslim minorities and of Islam in Europe generally (we must protect our sacred soil from the dusky asiatic hordes) … They also point to the role of Kosovars…in drug and people trafficking in Europe (because there is absolutely 100 percent no drug or people trafficking going on anywhere in the former Soviet states–oh no) … If Serbia, an independent state…can be partitioned like this, flagrantly against its will (the will of 95% of Kosovans must not be allowed to interfere with our Holy mission) … Even if one accepts that Serbia committed abominable atrocities in Kosovo–which few Russians do (those weren’t atrocities because they fucking deserved it–they have hairy palms, they cannot control their sexual appetites and they don’t sit straight on the toilet) … how would the British feel if in 20 or 30 years Windsor, for example, proclaimed its independence on the grounds that the majority of its population was now Muslim (Windsor was a part of Pakistan until it was annexed by the British Empire in 1912–honest).

Gail Sheridan, the air hostess wife of soon-again-to-be-disgraced “ex-socialist” MSP Tommy Sheridan, has been arrested for stealing miniatures of alcohol from her employer British Airways. The 44-year old was recently charged along with her husband with perjury following Mr Sheridan’s successful libel suit against the News of the World ‘newspaper’.

Alcohol miniatures? What kind of redistribution of wealth do they call that then? Defenders of the working class my arse. The Sheridans are so completely useless that they cannot even manage to nick anything of value. So what else did Lothian and Borders police find in the couple’s home - a stash of facial fresheners?

The Sheridans will need all the solidarity they can get now (ho ho!).

Ta very the Ingrate.

Stupid fucking twats

And look at what Ed Balls says…

Schools Secretary Ed Balls said: “Anyone who has seen the horrors of Auschwitz at first-hand knows what a life-changing experience it is.

At first hand!!! I don’t fucking think so. These people make me physically ill.

I would shoot them. With blunt bullets. And shit like that.

Update: thanks Fridgey

Part 1 of 9:

“Nah– I was the wrong age then”

The rest on the Utube — you’ll see ‘em, you’ll find ‘em.

…or how Iran is coming to love the bomb.

I refer to a US National Intelligence Estimate published a couple of months ago that was widely reported to clear Iran of involvement in developing nuclear weapons.

The man responsible for that judgement, Director of National Intelligence Mike McConnell, is now back-pedalling, and refers to “confusion” in the way the media reported the original assessment. In testimony earlier this month before the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence, McConnell said that, in hindsight:

“I think I would change the way that we describe the nuclear program… I would argue, maybe even at least significant portion, was halted and there are other parts that continue.”

McConnell is not saying that the Tehran regime is continuing with the nuclear weapons programme described some four years ago by US Intelligence. The difference now is to do with definitions of uranium enrichment processes and weaponisation.

McConnell now tells the Senate committee that:

“Iran continues to pursue fissile material and nuclear-capable missile delivery systems… Iranian entities are continuing to develop a range of technical capabilities that could be applied to producing nuclear weapons. Iran continues its efforts to develop uranium enrichment technology, which can be used both for power reactor fuel and to produce nuclear weapons. And, as noted, Iran continues to deploy ballistic missiles inherently capable of delivering nuclear weapons, and to develop longer-range missiles.”

David Horovitz of the Zionist entity’s esteemed organ The Jerusalem Post has his own spin on the story, and you can make of that opinion(ated) piece what you will. What is clear is that, journalistic selection effect aside, the US intelligence community tied itself up in its own syntax in the original estimate of Iran’s nuclear capabilities.

Horovitz remarks that you will be lucky to see the revised estimate reported in the mainstream media. That is a little over the top, as even a cursory web search shows, but McConnell’s recent pronouncements are most certainly not front page news.

Unsatisfied with missing Obama’s clear about-face on Cuba, Yank liberal blogger Steve Clemons has written this extraordinary post for Comment is Free. It’s clear that his advocacy for ending the trade embargo is moored to his twittish belief that life in Cuba is just peachy:

While few have yet come to understand the importance of his announcement and the manner of it in the US, the fact that Castro is concluding his term at the end of his constitutionally determined tenure demonstrates a respect for rule of law, at least in Cuban terms.

Actually, there is nothing in the Cuban constitution that determines the length of Castro’s “presidency;” all it does is stipulate that the National Assembly decides who occupies this post. As far as a “higher body of people’s power” is concerned, the National Assembly operates much like the Soviet Central Committee did. (One of the unfulfilled promises of the Communist revolutionaries was to restore the country’s 1940 Constitution, which Batista abrogated but which had previously been hailed one of the most “progressive” democratic covenants in the world.) Also, a “respect for rule of law”? How dare Clemons?

The current constitution legally guarantees “the enjoyment of political freedom, social justice, individual and collective well-being and human solidarity.” Now here is the introduction to Amnesty International’s 2005 report on the imprisonment and systematic abuse of prisoners of conscience in Cuba:

In March 2003, the Cuban government carried out the most severe crackdown on the dissident movement since the years following the 1959 revolution. Scores of dissidents were detained, seventy five of whom were subjected to summary trials and quickly sentenced to prison terms ranging from 26 months to 28 years. This crackdown came as a surprise to many observers who believed that Cuba might be moving towards a more open and tolerant approach towards opponents of the regime: the number of prisoners of conscience had declined and had been superseded by short term detentions, interrogations, summonses, threats, intimidation, eviction, loss of employment, restrictions on travel, house searches or physical or verbal acts of aggression. In addition, in April 2000 the Cuban Government began implementing a de facto moratorium on executions, which was broken in April 2003 with the execution of three men convicted of hijacking a tugboat to leave the island, in which no one was harmed.

[…]

According to the trial documents available, the evidence on which the March 2003 prosecutions were brought and the sentences confirmed included:

1. publishing articles or giving interviews, in US-funded or other media, said to be critical of economic, social or human rights matters in Cuba;
2. communicating with international human rights organisations;
3. having contact with entities or individuals viewed as hostile to Cuba’s interests, including US officials in Cuba, or members of the Cuban exile community in the United States or Europe;
4. distributing or possessing material such as radios, battery chargers, video equipment or publications, from the US Interests Section in Havana(2);
5. being involved in groups which are not officially recognised by the Cuban authorities or which are accused of conducting counterrevolutionary activity, including among others: unofficial trade unions; professional associations such as doctors’ and teachers’ associations; academic institutions; press associations or independent libraries.

Instead of even the barest acknowledgment of this gruesome reality, Clemons chooses to regale his readers of his own good-natured run-in with the authorities:

I even tried to get into a major national event where vice president Raul Castro and National Assembly president Ricardo Alarcon were giving away awards for the 50th anniversary of a student revolt against former Cuban President Fulgencio Battista. I was in my running attire and tried to sneak through, telling the guard that I was an American observer (I was just a bit obnoxious to tell you the truth). The guard laughed it off and gave me credit for trying - but no man-handling, nothing of the sort that has become commonplace in American cities when mayors in DC or NY tell their police forces to arrest first and ask questions later when a WTO meeting or political convention is being hosted.

Sidney and Beatrice Webb smile beatifically on the American observer in his sweaty jogging wear. Of course, given that all opposition in the caudillo’s island paradise has either been murdered or jailed might account for the shrugging indifference with which one useful idiot was met.

Clemons is more than a bit obnoxious, to tell you the truth.

One of the questions Norm asks in his profile series is: do you have any prejudices that you’re willing to acknowledge?

The ‘willing to acknowledge’ forms a crucial part of the query. Simply to ask if one had any would be a pointless question; anything than an answer in the affirmative would be a lie because we all have them. Chris Dillow acknowledged his in this post ‘in praise of class hatred’ where he displays an animus towards posh twats that only my friend Will can match. The response, if you read the comments below the post, was almost uniformly condemnatory. This struck me as disproportionate for two reasons:

1) The blogosphere is full, on a daily basis, of barely-concealed hatred towards various groups in society - immigrants, Muslims, Jews - sorry, Israelis - the unemployed, the poor, the young… People for the most part who don’t have any power. Chris, on the other hand, chooses a representative from a group that does.

2) He was honest about this, which is more than can be said for quite a lot of other people. I’d suggest to you all that, for example, under the average post you get about education in the blogosphere you often get comments displaying prejudices of quite an extraordinary nature - ranging from the need to ensure less eligibility in the welfare system to concerns about the dysgenic breeding of the feckless poor. Persistent, Victorian, unacknowledged is what they are.

In any event, the incensed commentators missed an important point that I thought implicit in the post, which is that prejudice - if we can dispense with the narrow PSE definition of the word - does not always have a malign influence. Or at least it is something we all have and shouldn’t be understood as a phenomenon that only shows its face when confronted with foreigners or people whose lifestyles we disapprove of.

Let me give you the following example to try and explain what I mean. The death penalty: I oppose it and there has never been a time in my life when I’ve thought differently. But the thing is, I don’t find the arguments against it anything like as persuasive as I used to.

While others who know more about this will no doubt correct me, as far as I understand it most of the anti-death penalty arguments are based on utilitarianism, which I don’t agree with in general and with this particular example I don’t see why it would exclude the death-penalty anyway. It isn’t even obvious to me how a utilitarian philosophy would proscribe executing the innocent and letting the guilty go free, if that increased the happiness of the greater number.

You could argue that it is simply wrong to kill people, period. But this would require pacifism, which is to say one would have to give up any notion of self-defence - which I couldn’t agree with either.

The only argument I’m left with is that it can be, and is, unjust in its application. But this is an argument for justice - which is to say greater equality - not against the death-penalty per se and this does not, in any event, provide the emotional basis on which people passionately argue this issue.

Yet I’m still against it. Maybe this is because I dislike the sort of people who support it - people I imagine to be hangin’ and floggin’ Daily Heil readers who not-so-secretly hate the poor. No-one denounces me for being prejudiced for feeling like this. But I am nevertheless.

Shuggy Vs Intellectual Midget.

Notes:

No. 1

No. 2

Tipping point re: silly pic — Ben’s joint

Remember our Comrade Danish MP Villy Søvndal? The one with the spine?

Well — here he is again, this time giving it some welly to the clerical fascists of Hizb ut-Tahrir and all those who would give ‘religious representatives’ preferential treatment, or put them in ‘a position where they were thought to represent the views of ordinary immigrants.’

Here’s his blog here.

That’s it — I’m emailing him with an invite to blog here. Hope his English is up to scratch. Fuck it — we can always get Dr Sedgey to translate if not.

Sombrero aloft to Flea for the link to the The Copenhagen Post story.

Hitchens on the enduring contradictions of antisemitism.

A fine piece indeed.

Re the Hitch essay on antisemitism linked to — something he mentions here:

“Rezzori’s character insinuates with the greatest of subtlety that there is something feminine about the Jew, and that this is what sets him apart from the manly and robust and patriotic characters who like to roar cheery songs rather than listen to the tinkling piano, and whose chief joy is the hunt;”

got me to thinking about the well known antisemite George Galloway and his contempt for Tibetans and Buddhism — which he describes as ‘obscurantist’. Why is Buddhism any more obscurantist than any other religion, particularly his own choice of shit? It may stem from his lack of interest in Tibetan pussy … and an arrogant feeling that Buddhism, like Judaism is ‘effeminate’ or ‘feminine’, not strong and masculine like Catholicism/Xtianity and Islam where they know how to keep the bitches in check real fucking good. Just a thought… . Consider also, Galloway’s need to assure us of his virility and masculinity — repeated reminders that he has had multiple sexual partners — and his apparent disregard for ‘uppity’ women and his opposition to women’s rights to biological autonomy.

The litigious antisemitic scumbag.

Monday’s Dispatches, How the Banks Bet Your Money and Lost, on Channel 4 was a masterfully edited (OK, by my film making nephew) documentary that clearly explained the credit crunch, Northern Rock and other dodgy aspects of finance for a lay audience. For once, it concentrated on the main losers. No, not listeners to Radio 4’s Money Box, but poor, working class Americans who have lost their homes and neighbourhoods.

Watching it, it struck me that, in this case, Adam Smith’s famous aphorism should read,

… he intends only his own gain, and he is in this, as in many other cases, led by an invisible hand to promote an end which dumps millions of other people in the shit whilst he keeps the million pound bonuses he is paid for creating the whole fucking mess.