Jubilee!

The most interesting thing about King Charles the First was that he was five foot six inches tall at the start of his reign, but only four foot eight inches tall at the end of it.

Geography lesson with the International Olympic Committee

Yes, you're reading it right. Israel is in Europe, Palestine is in Asia. The mind boggles and yet it makes an eerie kind of sense. Palestinians of count for less than Israelis in ruling class ideology. Even though they live in the same place, they may as well be from another continent.

Adrian Beecroft thinks Vince Cable is a socialist...

The question is, with the vast number of raw idiots in the world, who cares? Well, Adrian Beecroft is a Tory party donor (according to one source, I don't know how reliable, he has donated a total of £537,000 "in recent years"). Adrian Beecroft is a venture capitalist (well blow me down, he's a rich man), meaning large-scale investor. One of his most successful ventures is Wonga.com, a payday loans company recently slammed for its aggressive collection methods.

But Beecroft is also a government advisor. Yes, this government is taking advice from glorified loan sharks. He recently advised the government to do away with employment rights, the headline being he wanted the government to allow employers to sack employees at short notice without fault. Such a move would apparently boost the economy to the tune of £50 billion. Leaving aside the obvious mistake of thinking fewer people in work would add to the general wealth of society, don't think for a moment that £50 billion would have headed your way, it would have gone straight into Adrian Beecroft's pockets, him and his ilk. But comrade Cable put a stop to all that, boo-fucking-hoo (I say "put a stop to all that" the Beecroft Bill, AKA The Enterprise and Regulatory Bill, is being put to parliament today - minus no-fault sackings, but with a whole host of other horrors, e.g. limiting unfair dismissal payments to one year's wages).

But why care? First, I think this is indicative of an attempt to import post-Regan rhetoric into Britain, partisan hysteria not just about people who exist outside mainstream political consensus, but even those who operate inside it. Secondly, we must bear in mind the Tories strategic outlook. Like Regan, who attacked the legacy of the New Deal, this government is trying to destroy all bases of social democratic opposition (not to mention further left-wing opposition). The Tories electoral base is dwindling. It was dropping away even before the effects of austerity began hitting them in the polls, hence the Tories could not govern on their own after the last general election. This is why they've been so hasty, so reckless, so provocative (not to mention so surprised when their provocations failed to rouse much practical opposition) and why they have responded to all obstacles, even imagined ones, with such hyperventilating craziness.

Vince Cable is a socialist? Oh my word, these people are in power!

David Cameron in calculated insult to logic

And all those who practice such a quaint art. From a heavily armed bunker in Chicago he said:

It's not for me to say what Greek parties should and shouldn't stand on and how the Greek elections should work.

I bet you 420 billion Euros the next word is "but..."

But it's very important that everyone is clear that...

Ha! I win. Sorry, you go on Dave...

But it's very important that everyone is clear that the choice Greece faces is maintaining its commitments and maintaining itself in the eurozone, or deciding that is not the path it wants to take... So this decision point, the Greek election, has got to become the moment where all of the right plans are put in place to secure the future of the eurozone currency.

The Euro was not good enough for David Cameron, though it's clearly good enough now for him to secure its future. Look, Greeks, stop spoiling things! Either you're going to vote for the sado-monetarist destruction of your society, or Cameron and co are going to put 'the right plans' in place to ensure it. That's democracy for ya!

For no raisin

Part one of the BBC documentary, The Planets, scored by Gustav Holst (sort of...) and narrated by a Socialist Alliance candidate. The series is actually more about the story of the exploration of the planets. Since this was made the Cassini probe has thoroughly charted the Saturn system. The our knowledge of the major parts of the solar system has slowly filled out. The cutting edge of discovery is in the Asteroid Belt and beyond Neptune. 

The BBC in its wisdom does not have this series out on DVD. Enjoy.

Mo' thoughts

Fantasy in fiction is inescapably political, and not just in the sense that all culture is inescapably political (art in the age of mechanical reproduction is no longer underpinned by ritual but politics… and so forth). Fantasy scenarios are most often based in the future or the past, or a future/past; we’re talking Star Trek or Lord of the Rings. The other not so common scenario is deconstruction of the present, near future or recent past; some titles plucked out of the air, Ape and Essence, Children of Men, The Mighty Boosh.

Fantasy can be a critique of our own society, taking modern institutions and prevailing ideology out of their context. This is satire. Satire is generally motivated by a reformist impulse, to expose hypocrisy, set wrongs right and so on. Satire, though a totally valid art-form, is actually a form of release. By focussing on specific issues it eases the pressure, ideological pressure, on our ruling class. We may be laughing at our rulers, but that means we’re not grabbing pitchforks and heading for Versailles.

But fantasy can also be experienced as a sublimated form of anti-capitalism, a desire to crack open reality in order to release the repressed potential inside. If for whatever reason the urge overthrow the current order is repressed, the drama of revolution is overlooked, instead it can come out as desire for restoration of the old order. All that is sacred is profaned by capitalism, so, goes the logic, we must restore what was once sacred. This is why we can root for Aragorn and Frodo, despite the fact their literal cause is the restoration of the King of Gondor. Lord of the Rings is a reactionary fantasy, but there is more than enough flexibility, in the film, in the book and in the genre, to allow multiple interpretations.

Further lists

A list of all your favorite words/phrases coined/revived by The Simpsons. Including:

Assal horizontology
Bemusement park
Cromulent
Decleratrix
Embiggen
Floor-pie
Glaven
Hoyven-mayven
Introbulate
Jebaditis
Killbot factory
Land of Chocolate
Malparkage
Nutty fudgekins
Okeley dokely
Postureologists
Quetezacatenago
Rageohol
Saxamophone
Tromboner
Unpossible
Velocitator
Walking bird
Yoink
Zazz

 You may also be please to know Aussie Rules fans say boo-urns.

Article of interest...

Something of interest: a short article about extreme energy. A summary: despite the ongoing recession, the price of oil is creeping back up, almost to pre-recession records. This begs the question, have we reached peak oil production? Is humanity currently extracting as much in the way of hydrocarbons as its ever going to extract. If we are not there we will shortly get there.

The input to output ratio of energy extraction is rising. It takes more energy put in to get less energy out (similar to the rise of constant to variable capital). This is because the oil fields easiest to tap have been run down. Oil companies are now looking at more remote, more inaccessible sources. The Deepwater Horizon disaster was especially catastrophic because of the difficulty in capping the well. If we continue to have a commodity economy based on fossil fuels our society will have to account for more disasters like these.

But, more significantly, if we continue to have a commodity economy based on fossil fuels, once peak oil production is passed, the price of oil will go up and will not stop. One of the key factors which broke the last boom, sending us into the current recession, was the price of oil. Without change, we face the prospect of permanent economic turmoil.

A small illustration of the Tory agenda

The next boss of the BBC must be a Tory, according to the mayor of London, Boris Johnson.

Writing in the Daily Telegraph, he said the guarantee of funding from the licence fee left BBC staff with "an innocent belief that everything in life should be 'free'".

He said: "No wonder – and I speak as one who has just fought a campaign in which I sometimes felt that my chief opponent was the local BBC news – the prevailing view of Beeb newsrooms is, with honourable exceptions, statist, corporatist, defeatist, anti-business, Europhile and, above all, overwhelmingly biased to the left."

 

On this face of it this is hairy-assed nonsense (and bloody cheeky, firstly, because he had the slavish backing of most of the mainstream press, including all the papers in London, secondly, because this is a man with a definite naive sense of entitlement, whose idea of a jolly jape is to pretend his chief election rival is a concierge). It's utter gibberish not a million miles from the hard-right guff about 'cultural marxism'. But this is the Tory agenda. Their aim is to use as much of their time in government to go about rigging the terms of political debate for the next generation. The BBC is a throughly establishment establishment, for example, a senior figure from MI5 is always on the Board of Directors. But it is not right-wing enough for the Tories.