Prepare The Whitewash

"Whitewash can breath new life in to tired, unsightly or shoddy surfaces.It is a lime-based chemical that will change the colour and bring a bit of sparkle to your walls, fencing, flooring and even unwanted inquiries. You can apply it to brickwork or other badly tarnished surfaces as well - such as an immoral and corrupt ruling elite. The procedure of adding whitewash is not difficult, but it may take some time and many coats to cover up lingering stains, especially if a great deal of bloodshed or loss of life proceeded the application of the your whitening substance."

From Seán's very own, DIY Made Easy.


Chilcot inquiry into the Iraq war incapable of deciding on legality:

"The Chilcot inquiry is incapable of addressing the key issue of whether the invasion of Iraq was legal, senior judicial figures have said, adding to the controversy surrounding the inquiry's legitimacy.

The inquiry into one of the most contentious political decisions of modern times begins...and its chairman, Sir John Chilcot, has insisted that the legality of the invasion in 2003 will be one of the key issues it addresses."

Oh, more may be required for this too:

'Cruel, Illegal, Immoral'

"The attorney general was under intense pressure tonight to order a wider series of police investigations into British complicity in torture after one of the world's leading human rights organisations said there was clear evidence of the UK government's involvement in the torture of its own citizens.

After an investigation spanning more than a year, Human Rights Watch (HRW) today condemned Britain's role in the torture of terror suspects detained in Pakistan as cruel, counter-productive and in clear breach of international law."

Be careful, however, thinly spread whitewash has a habit of revealing what once lay beneath the surface. Also, whitewash can be a hazardous substance and must be disposed of correctly; preferably it should be stored out of the reach of children and marked with a warning: toxic.

Nice Noughties Albums - Yoshimi Battles the Pink Robots

"Do You Realize - that happiness makes you cry
Do You Realize - that everyone you know someday will die

And instead of saying all of your goodbyes - let them know
You realize that life goes fast
It's hard to make the good things last
You realize the sun doesn't go down
It's just an illusion caused by the world spinning round"

Yoshimi Battles the Pink Robots.(2002) Not my favourite Flaming Lips album, but their best of the decade.(I've not heard their latest release yet.)

And the stand out track has to be Do You Realize?? It was voted the official rock song for the state of Oklahoma earlier this year. However, the vote had been controversial and has been opposed because:

"band member Michael Ivins had worn a red T-shirt with a yellow sickle and hammer when the band came to the state Capitol for the announcement in March. Governor Brad Henry subsequently announced that he would issue an executive order in lieu of the resolution rejected by the Oklahoma House."

Lead singer Wayne Coyne, said about the song, "Whenever I analyze the scientific realities of what it means to be living here on Earth – in this galaxy – spinning around the sun – flying through space – a terror shock seizes me!!! I'm reminded once again of how precarious our whole existence is..."

Utopianism

"Utopia is on the horizon. I move two steps closer, it moves two steps further away. I walk another ten steps and the horizon runs ten steps further away. As much as I may walk, I'll never reach it. So what's the point of utopia? The point is this: to keep walking." Eduardo Galeano

"A map of the world that does not include Utopia is not worth even glancing at, for it leaves out the one country at which Humanity is always landing." Oscar Wilde

"A world without utopia is a world without hope." Bertrand de Jouvenal

Forty Years of Lies

Forty years of reaction.
Forty years of anti-working class politics.
Forty years of sexism and degrading women.
Forty years of homophobia.
Forty years of bigotry and racism.
Forty years of lies.

DON'T BUY THE SUN!

This is a very good and very concise history of The Scum:

Hagley Road To Ladywood: The Sun: 40 years of crap

Hagley Road To Ladywood: The Sun: 40 years of crap (PART TWO)

Nice Noughties Albums - You Are The Quarry

In no particular order - and to make it look like I blog more than I actually do, here are a selection of my favourite albums from the first decade of the 21st century.

Firstly, You Are The Quarry - Morrisey, 2004. Not sure he'll ever produce another solo album so consistently good again. Stand out track, First Of The Gang To Die:



And NO, it wasn't me who threw a bottle at him at last weekend's concert in Liverpool.

Teacher, Diversity Officer, Soldier, Spy – The Frank and Full Confession of A Cultural Marxist

“But what is perhaps less obvious is that communism did not just vanish in a puff of historical smoke. The Soviet Union was defeated and fell apart, for sure. But the communist ideology that fuelled it did not so much disintegrate as reconstitute itself into another, even more deadly form as the active enemy of western freedom.”

Melanie Phillips, Daily Mail 10 November 2009.


I think we’ve been rumbled. And when I say we, I mean you too. You who blog at your liberal left website, you who openly avow your socialist revolutionary credentials upon your mastheads, you who call for the withdrawal of our troops from foreign climes, you who support the tyranny of New Labour, and you who simply wish us to enter into a larger and more integrated Europe Union.

Back then, when thousands upon thousands of us first began our journey of joyous subversion, began our all-encompassing conspiracy to destroy Western values - we had no idea that there was such a gifted intellect, such a seer of our manipulative practises, monitoring our every move.

“But as communism slowly crumbled, those on the far-Left who remained hostile towards western civilisation found another way to realise their goal of bringing it down.”

Let's face it, we had not bargained nor planned for one such Melanie Phillips, comrades.

My story is probably similar to many of yours. It began twenty years ago this week. I had just left Berlin - giddy at how we had tricked the east Germans and indeed the western Germans that the wall’s fall would mark the end of communism. Little did they know our real aim was, as ‘cultural Marxists’, to bring down the wall and make those prisoners in the eastern block suffer from real tyranny, real Marxism, rather than the abject and insipid Stalinism which barely made a crease in their daily lives.

On the 14th of November 1989, I travelled from Berlin by train to Cologne and from there I travelled to the Belgian port of Ostend - bound eventually for London, England. Incognito, I sat at the bar onboard the ferry sipping an expensive European larger, and met my handler. He congratulated me on our tremendous work in the east, but warned that the hardest part of our plot was still to be completed. He handed me a copy of Antonio Gramsci’s Prison Notebooks and compelled me to not just read, but to subsume every word into the core of my very being. What would be our next mission, I had enquired hesitantly. He simply told me that once I had read the text, there would be no further need for him to deploy or to direct me personally. I would be free to live my life as I chose, like hundreds of thousands of specially chosen others - in quiet subversion: taking drugs, listening to music, reading The New Left Review or The Guardian, eating muesli and veggie curries and watching Channel 4 News.

However, my first task was to join other Marxists and Marxist-inspired Christians as well as an assortment of liberal left fellow travellers to continue and indeed speed up the destruction of the democratic process in South Africa. Through marches, petitions and vigils we overthrew the white and democratically elected Apartheid government in South Africa. Next we destroyed the fair and equitable poll tax - through encouraging the placid masses to a state of riot and mass disobedience; and we also danced in abandoned warehouses in the middle of nowhere in the hope of undermining the Criminal Justice and Public Order Act 1994.

Throughout the 1990s we dispersed throughout the schools, universities and other educational establishment the length and breadth of Britain, armed with politically correct nursery rhymes, non-sexist, non-racist behaviour codebooks and thought-crime charge sheets. We invaded the town halls with plans to print leaflets and forms in a variety of language, gave council homes to people with brown-coloured skin and, most effectively, destroyed the morale of the British people through undermining Christmas by still calling it Christmas and making it an even greater consumerist festival than ever before.

We took over strategic positions in the media and propagated the cause of feminism through The Girly Show, How To Look Ten Years Younger and How to Look Good Naked. We made gay and lesbian kisses a nightly occurrence on popular soap operas and subverted small children’s minds through the creation of a gay teletubby. Through the BBC, we subverted the only democratic nation in the Middle-east – Israel – through deliberate distortions and our plant Jeremy Bowen; we revealed our anti-semitism by continually failing the Phillip’s Test: ‘if you disagree with me – then you are a Jew-hater!’

We made the Labour Party electable once more by the addition of a catchy prefix (New) and by ditching any policy that was even remotely socialist. And through pretending to surrender to neo-liberal orthodoxy, just as (Red) Margaret Thatcher had done in the 1980s, we conned a nation. We brought about social engineering policies such as the minimum wage and Sure Start programmes, as a way to bring about the patina of social justice, enabling the feckless to greater consumer purchasing power. In the process we unsettled the comfortable lives of the nervous and weakened middle classes.

Next we allowed refugees fleeing from countries we had recently bombed (a great pretext to enable them to flood the country, I’m sure you’ll agree!) to come to Britain and sap the wealth and resolve of the nation through issuing them with food vouchers; in the process making indigenous caucasians everywhere queue even longer at supermarket checkouts, while the unfortunate asylum seekers scrambled about in their pockets in search of enough vouchers for a half a dozen eggs, a loaf bread, milk and pasta.

At the turn of new millennium we tried to bring the whole world to its knees by infecting all the worlds computers with the millennium bug. However, the filthy capitalists and government organizations across the world over discovered our devious plans and checked, fixed, and upgraded their computer systems to avoid the collapse of civilisation, thus thwarting our attempts at a world Marxist government which would enslave the globe. Our plans to tax the middles classes through spreading the lie of global warming have also been uncovered by Melanie Phillips, thus putting an end to the green camouflage covering our deep red souls.

Our greatest ploy, however, was our alliance with radical Islam. We cheered as the suicide pilots flew their planes into the twin towers. Rejoiced in Bush’s folly as he embarked upon the war on terror, knowing it would further degrade the prestige of the Anglo Saxon world. We even got Barack Hussien Obama elected to the highest office in the USA and armed him with a Marxist-Islamo-fascist master plan to bail out the rapacious financial institutions while offering moderate health care reforms to the poorest.

But I fear our journey is now at an end.

We were daring. We were brave. We almost completed our mission. We thought at one point we had gotten away with. And we would have, if it wasn’t for that pesky Phillips.

Damned you Phillips!

Our pejorative labelling of her as ‘Mad Mel’ didn’t work either. For she had a far greater force on her side than we. She had the reactionary masses of the Daily Mail giving her sustenance throughout the years of our onslaught upon her and those treasured British values. One of Phillip’s readers, like the lady herself, saw through our feigned cries that the left in Britain was about as productive as a Byelorussian tractor factory circa 1976. Dave Smith’s comment on Melanie’s article, has exposed our secret agenda:



It is all over (for now) comrades. Go back to your loved ones, your families, your workplaces, your trades unions, and your non-profit organisations and prepare for obscurity.

Hat Tip: Gramsci for beginners, Melanie Phillips-style (Dave's Part)

Remembrance Day 2009

Hat tip to Mick at Organised Rage.

A Song For The Weather

I don't know about the rest of the country, but the weather in the North West of England has been fucking abject of late. I can't remember when a day last passed without torrential rain. Not just the odd shower but the stuff that wakes you up at 5.30 in the morning through the sheer ferocity of its pounding upon the windows.

Thom Yorke knows how to bring a bit of well-needed cheer, however:

A Song For Alan Johnston

"Professor David Nutt is an expert in his field: a professor of psychopharmacology at Bristol University and head of neuropsychopharmacology at Imperial College London. He knows more about the brain's responses to anxiety, addiction and sleep than any politician or media commentator. He is precisely the sort of man who should be helping the government shape its drugs policy, which is why he was appointed and then reappointed to serve as chairman of the Advisory Council on the Misuse of Drugs. That is also why it is such a disgrace that Alan Johnson, the home secretary, sacked him late yesterday afternoon for having the temerity to point out some obvious truths about the government's populist and unthinking handling of the issue."

Drugs policy: Shooting up the Messenger, The Guardian, Saturday 31 October 2009




Possibly my favourite, best worst song ever. When I heard this song, I knew it was time to knock Grange Hill on the head. I, like Zammo, had become too old for the series.

It was the mid to late 1980s - smack had decimated the area in which I lived and grew up. Boys from school had died or were rotting away in prison, dealers moved in, many others moved out, blocks of flats were pulled down in a feeble attempt to address the problem. Yet the problem had somehow grown worse. My Ma was scandalised by drug deals openly going down in broad daylight at the bus stop at the top of our street. Smack heads, like zombies, prowled around the local shopping centre in search of something to nick to feed their habit. Thatcher offered us perpetual unemployment, Tebbit urged us to put our arses upon the seat of a bicycle and piss off down south.

And fucking Grange Hill wanted us to take up the simplistic mantra 'Just Say No!' We said no to unemployment, poverty and the fact we had no future.

So I eventually fucked off down to London.

All subsequent drug policies have been a complete failure. But that is to be expected for a drug policy that has never addressed the issues of poverty, despair or addiction in any meaningful way. Apparently a sign of insanity is doing the same thing, over and over again, but expecting different results. UK drug policy has continued for over twenty years down the same one-dimensional route. And guess what, it has been a complete failure.

Everything you need to know about drug policy failure was addressed in Series 3 of The Wire. This clip from the series contains a massive spoiler for those of you still to watch the programme.

Watching: Couscous (La Graine et le mulet)

A working class, North African man (Habib Boufares) living in the town of Sète (southern France) comes to terms with unemployment, a new restaurant venture and his wide and extended family in this wonderful human drama. The director Abdel Kechiche serves up a warm-hearted but unsentimental slice of Mediterranean life; a combination of Ken Loach and Mike Lee with a pinch of post war neo-realism.

Habib Boufares, as the divorced, shipyard worker Slimane is the ice to the fire of the wonderful Hafsia Herzi, who plays Rym – the daughter of his current love interest. Although seemingly not biologically related, theirs is the strongest relationship in the film. (See image above) Boufares, as Slimane, has a wonderfully stoic face and the years of hard work and unfulfillment seem to be etched upon it like tree rings – as day in day out he contends with work, dreams of a better life for his family, and the never ending commitments arising from his two families. Meanwhile Hafsia Herzi (Rym) gives a screen-stealing performance as the young, belligerent and manipulative stepdaughter. Her stunning looks are not the only thing that light up the screen, for this is a young actor of immense talent and promise. Her character Rym is resourceful, machiavellian and caring in equal measure. She simmers away throughout the film with both barely concealed contempt and dynamic sex appeal – a difficult combination to pull off. Her energetic belly dance at the end of the film is juxtaposed with Slimane’s hopeless endeavours to retrieve a stolen moped. She all vibrancy, he literally clapped out.

The story is straightforward – sixty year old Slimane, loses his job in the shipyard and wishes to invest his savings in a North African themed restaurant, housed upon a derelict boat abandoned in the local dockyard. To get the project off the ground requires the input of his new family, (primarily Rym) his large and extended biological family and his many friends within the local community. It is a collective effort but he still must overcome financial restraints and local bureaucracy. This is not a film about intricate narrative twists or devilish plot devices, however. This is a film where the camera observes the characters and the verisimilitude of the actors’ performances makes you believe that people like this genuinely exist. There is nothing odd or out of place in this story. It is a real, realist masterpiece.

The film runs for over two and a half hours and yet is completely consuming. It is only after a mere two hours or so that we witness anything remotely dramatic – this when a pan of grain (couscous) goes missing on the opening night of the restaurant. I know, not a gun shot or car chase or violent confrontation of any kind. For this is a film of the ordinary and the everyday and eschews anything even hinting at the melodramatic. Yet in the two hours running up to this ‘dramatic event’, you feel like you know Slimane, his struggles, his pain, his family. Thus what seems like an insignificant event carries much weight and meaning – revealing the great subtlety of film. Indeed, we too are absorbed into Slimane’s family unit, much like the water is into the grain of the title. And this is the brilliance of the film-making: the small details are slowly built up and the intricate nature of contemporary family life shown in a way which lets us see the similarities and differences between those lives portrayed on screen and our own lives. Also Slimane is never judged for the life he has lead. Nor is his dream of owning and running the restaurant ever sentimentalised or mocked. He is a practical and pragmatic dreamer.

Furthermore I also found it refreshing to see a story of a Muslim family whose priorities are dominated by the everyday, the mundane even. You know, the many messy relationships we construct or attract through circumstances; the economic difficulties and the hardships we all endure - not just migrant workers. Couscous contrasts greatly with many narratives dealing with ‘issues’, especially the obvious ones which we now expect when confronted with the phrase Muslim migrants; it avoids didacticism and steers clear of one-dimensional, religious concerns - which tend to dominate contemporary narratives dealing with ‘Muslim’ life. Indeed you will not witness anything of fundamentalism or terrorism. No mention of the veil, alien cultures, or of an inability to integrate. This is working class life. Their North African food, music and customs are never portrayed as exotic or even non-French - merely different. There’s no other way to say this folks, but these Muslims are as ordinary and as complex as you and I.

The best film I’ve seen this year – so far anyway. Couscous is a quiet and methodical epic that acutely observes family, work, food and migration in an understated manner.

This excellent trailer should wet your appetite:

Guest Post - Nick Griffin

Now that the BBC, through its flagship entertainment show, Question Time, have given time to the British National Party to air its views to a mass audience – I thought I would counter any detrimental effect this invitation may have had on race relations here in Britain, by giving Nick Griffin a guest post here on the left’s least read blog. To you, the 14 unique daily readers of this blog, (you are unique and highly cherished by me folks, believe me) I present to you a world exclusive by MEP Nick Griffin.

My father was in the RAF during the Second World War; unfortunately he was on the wrong side - the winning side. You can call me a Nazi if you wish, but the plain fact of the matter is I’m not a Nazi. I’m a fascist. As for my well-known admiration of Adolf Hitler, it’s true there was a dalliance of sorts when I was much younger. But I now realise Hitler went too far. He should have stopped at the Polish border and murdered the communists, gypsies and Jews on this side of Europe first. Sadly he tried to have his cake and eat it – much like myself recently - and got his just desserts: a jolly good spanking by the hordes of Russian, Jewish Bolshevik untermenschen.

However, the British National Party is no longer a ragged band of knuckle dragging anti-semites. Some of us even wear shirts, ties and suits these days. Some, however, haven’t quite mastered the finger manipulation skills required for such a complex set of manoeuvres – such as buttoning up shirts and tying knots in ties. Remember, too, we were the only party which - during the clashes between Israel and Gaza - supported Israel’s right to deal with the Hamas terrorists. Israel is a perfect state in our eye(s). Put all the Jews together in one place, surround them with hostile forces, and keep an eye (my good eye that is) on the sneaky and unscrupulous bastards. A recipe for success I think you’ll agree.

However, due to various legal circumstances, I cannot explain fully why I used to be very critical of Jewish groups and of the Holocaust in general. Suffice it to say, I won’t get into the numbers game here and now; many Jews died and that has been terrible for far-right groups everywhere. But I have the British military intercepts to prove David Irving was right – I mean wrong. I won’t deny the Holohoax, that is far too easy. I’ll just say that those who think I’m being evasive are correct. I need to make speeches across Europe to various far-right and fascist groups and I don’t want the bastards arresting me for something I haven’t done – condemn the holocaust. Might I also add, some of my best mates are Jew-haters. But you all seem to miss the point about the Jews. They are not the scapegoat we should be concentrating on at this particular moment in time. Not yet anyway. It is the pesky moooslims turn at the moment.

Yes, you know, those brown immigrants swamping our multi-cultural hell holes – or, as I think they’re called by most people, towns and cities. I’m talking of moooslims here, call them Pakis if you must – that is your word not mine. I prefer to call them Mooslims. And Mooslims don’t believe in free speech, democracy and equal rights for women. Neither do I, but that’s irrelevant and not an important part of my bigotry. As you know, Islam treats women as second-class citizens; I say we shouldn’t elevate them so highly.

Indeed, British women should be treated as third class citizens: breeding machines to recreate the master race – of which I am one of its most precious and shining examples. How will we stop the on-going British genocide? How will we get the modern, independent British, Indigenous Caucasian woman to become baby-making machines you ask? (Don’t worry fellow members we have a picture book to explain those long words above – for now, just think darky bad, whitey good) Well I say, if need be, through burglary. Rape is nothing more than extended, if aggressive, foreplay- so many of my straight colleagues inform me anyway. Let’s try and redefine what rape actually is - think of it as more like being force-fed chocolate cake. What woman is going to turn down an offer like that?

On the issue of sexuality I would just like to say that a lot of people find the sight of two grown men kissing in public really creepy. As a result, I’ve told Mark (Collet) that he can only get a kiss when I’m tucking him into bed at night from now on. On special occasions, like Valentine’s Day, there will of course be a meal, wine and Nick’s special cuddle at the end of the night; but as the highly contradictory nature of far-right politics dictates, we must keep one foot in the closet and one foot in the face of militant homosexuals.

Finally, it is true that I am the most loathed man in Britain. And if you look at some of the things I’m quoted as having said, I’d be a monster. I’m not a monster…[slurp, slurp, slurp]…I’m a hooooman being. [Slurp.]

Support The Postal Workers

Let's Hope Next Time It's As Toxic As You, Peter!

Full support to the posties! We know this dispute has been engineered over a long period of time, with the long-term goal of the government to part privitise the Royal Mail. The RM workforce have had no alternative but to fight this provocation – not only for their own future employment prospects – but also for the future of a publicly-funded/subsidised mail system; a mail system that takes need of all users, not merely to make a profit.

Mandelson without doubt is public enemy No.1, and he has acted callously and provocatively since coming back to the government, as the laughably named Business Secretary. Having failed to get the support of parliament for a part privitisation, he is now taking the scenic route à la Margaret Thatcher and the miners’ dispute. He talks of suicide, if only Peter. If only…

The ruling class, through their political lackies, are prepared to bail out the banks, screw the tax payers through fiddling expenses and still countenance spending upward of a £100 billion on an out-dated nuclear deterrent – Trident. Yet, all the while, they make workers pay for the financial crisis and run-down public services during a recession. And this from a Labour government, just imagine the pain to come when the Tories are elected next year.

Management's response to the dispute gives us a further glimpse into the future – the hiring of 30,000 scabs (temporary staff) amidst talk of modernisation. Modernise Adam Crozier’s pay-packet first!

Take a look at Roy Mayall's diary here at the LRB for a good insight into how the deluded RM management have run down the service over the years. Here's an extract:

When I first started working at the Royal Mail every postman prepared his own round. These days maybe a third of the staff are part-time. It’s the full-timers who are on the old-fashioned, water-tight contracts, with full pension entitlement, the ones whose pension fund is such a nightmare for the Royal Mail’s finances. As well as being invariably part-time, new staff are on flexible contracts without pension rights.

The pension fund deficit was £5.9 billion last year and is predicted to rise to £8 or £9 billion next year. The deficit is the main reason various people in positions of authority within the government and the Royal Mail were suggesting the partial sell-off earlier in the year. These people included Adam Crozier, the chief executive, and Jane Newell, the chair of the pension fund trustees, as well as the business secretary, Peter Mandelson. But a partial sale of the Royal Mail wouldn’t get rid of the pension deficit. No private investor would take it on. Which means that, whether the Royal Mail remains in public hands or is partly or fully privatised in the future, the pension deficit will always remain the tax-payer’s obligation.

His blog is here at Going Postal.