January 2011
26 posts
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Pay attention to the man before the curtain
The pig of empire is sometimes enlipsticked, a few decorous phrases thrown in: freedom; concern; restraint; &c. These codes are so well-worn, so universally understood, as to make their decipherment a simple, if bleakly amusing, task.
Often, however - increasingly - no make-up is applied. Thus, breathtakingly, this.
‘Where it’s best to end up is in free elections at a...
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State-sponsored thuggery provokes imaginary...
Those excitable natives & their conspiracy theories again. Democracy’s all very well but they need a strong hand, is what they need, & they know it. The Financial Times dutifully intones the in-no-way-utterly-slanderous-bullshit claim that ‘[s]ome’, in Egypt, ‘say the insecurity is already making them yearn for the law and order that the regime had imposed’,...
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From Bailiwick: Bristol’s Independent Listings Magazine
The Clay’s the Thing
Mark Bould talks to playwright Jerry Corn about filming, feminism – and working with Ray Harryhausen.
Local playwright and university lecturer Jerry Corn is just back from Hollywood, where stop-motion animation legend Ray Harryhausen is putting the finishing touches to an adaptation of his play, Consciousness Rising....
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Some argue for ‘restraint’ - oh, ‘on both sides’, if you please.
Up from the streets comes different counsel.
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Revolutionary decor
Half-faced Mubarak.
Here’s to this most beautiful & brave guerilla redecoration being wrought in Egypt. Let such magnificent images stand. That way, in the future, in the Alexandria, Cairo, Tunis, Paris, Detroit, London, Nairobi, Moscow &c we deserve, we can take our daily constitutionals below such shreds & remnants of defeated enemies.
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Perspective
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Among the 15 stories on 9 pages today’s print edition of the NYT considers more important than conclusive proof of the craven perfidy & collaboration of the Palestinian Authority & the unremitting & explicit rejectionism of Israel supported by the US are:
- A team of American football players defeating another team of American football players.
- Ruminations on what...
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At first it was formality, the recitation of imperial platitudes. Smug, yes. Vile certainly. But predictable. An almost quotidian ghastliness. Was loathing for him to become merely rote? Built on reminiscence?
Such little faith.
Only wait. Only hear him announce that ‘the West has got to get out of this wretched posture of apology’. & there! There it is.
Oh, it’s...
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Where you from? (You sexy thing)
‘The government believes’. &c &c &c.
Rejectamentalist manifesto believes the government believes no such various things, in no such miracles. Not that its plans will be simpler & fairer, nor that a hard-headed approach requires focusing on disclosure, nor that academies will raise standards, that raising rents on social housing will help social housing, nor that the...
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"He is a Haitian and, as such, is free to return...
Oh dear god.
Well, at least his nationality-based Right to Return must be good news for, oh I don’t know, any other Haitians ready to come back but having unaccountable administrative difficulties with the process. If Duvalier can but this other person still couldn’t, that would bespeak creepy imperial shenanigans, right?
How could fucking Duvalier, a man responsible for certain...
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Pas devant les domestiques
It is not a secret.
‘Last april, when the SEC filed suit against Goldman, the bank could have fought back. The suit complained it had sold fancy mortgage securities without disclosing that a hedge-fund manager, John Paulson, was betting that those same securities would blow up. To which Goldman could have answered: so what? … A bank’s first loyalty is to its profits, not those...
“[T]hat organisms are as they are, that apart from the members of our own...”
– William Morton Wheeler, ‘Entomologist in Hades’
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New worlds of play
The Globestone™ entertains while stimulating your children’s geographic curiosity, allowing for greater creative play than jigsaw or wipe-clean globe toys. Traditionally, rotatably mounted, the Globestone™ is a featureless blue magnetised sphere, & comes in a box containing all the countries of the world (larger states on a piece each, smaller ones grouped into handy-sized coagula such...