Guest post by David Cameron

Look, you know, when I said Lets Have National Citizen Service For 16-Year-Olds I wasn't conveying the full import of our radical new proposal. OK, you may point out national service was abolished in 1960. It's hardly fair that all the baby boomers who profited from it's end escape their obligations. We in the Conservative Party believe in fairness, sunshine and lollipops. We will introduce national service for everyone who escaped it for the last fifty years.

That's right, after our emergency budget is passed every single adult in Britain under retirement age will now be expected to work for free for the next 18 months. Some may call it slavery. I call it the big society.

"All these Eastern Europeans, where are they coming from?"

She went on: We keep spending most out lives, livin' in a nazi paradise. Yes, you can't even call a bigot a bigot anymore. It's political correctness gone mad. Ok, maybe you half-deserve it if you're too cowardly to say it to their face.

The latest Tory poster (apparently an example of positive campaigning), neatly parodied here, set me back on an old bugbear of mine. Why is 'discipline' only good enough for the unruly? Why not apply it to everyone, if it's so great? If it's so great we can have caning everymorning, for all children, in the face. Then the slackers will become taught, the dreamy will be attentive, the ones doing just enough to get by will race ahead. Lets raise a generation of kamikaze pilots, say what you like about the mikado, their fighter pilots did as they were told... everyone did as they were told.

Expand this further. The death penalty is apparently a deterrant to murder. If it's a deterrant why not use it for all crime, all the time? We need summary executions for everything... except for murder, which is the one crime that's never weighed up rationally before being committed.

Everyone's indulging their inner fascist. Let's indulge our outer partisan.

The road to slavery is paved with Liberals: part deux

Lets start with the end, the Liberal Democrats are a capitalist party, not a reformist party, not a bourgeois workers party, a straight up capitalist party. As such it should be obvious they are not a substantial alternative to current mainstream orthodoxy.

Due to their intellectual inheritance as well as their recent past they are capable of showing a left face. Labour’s rightward drift has made it easier for them to manoeuvre this way. The most obvious example was their presence on February 15th. Despite barely gracing the anti-war movement they were its chief beneficiaries (we're talking about you, Sarah Teather).

The Liberal Democrats have become Britain’s third party thanks to the quirks of the current electoral system, which they have long promised to get rid of. They were born from the SDP-Liberal Alliance. In 1983 the Alliance threatened to electorally eclipse the Labour Party. In 1988, after more disappointing results, the bulk (so to speak) of both parties decided to merge.

The reasons this happened are not important (or interesting). The Liberal Democrats held on to several of their seats in 1992. Their strength was based in mostly in rural constituencies and 1997 they benefited from the wave of anti-tory tactical voting, doubling their size in parliament. They tacked left, at least in rhetoric. Promising a 50% top rate of income tax to pay for improvements in education gave them a nice, well defined left face (although today we have a 50% top rate of tax that pays for nothing).

The Labour Party, however, won a thumping majority of seats, depriving the then leader Paddy Ashdown of his time in the sun (don’t worry, he was made the uncrowned king of Bosnia). The Liberal Democrats proved themselves in local council chambers. In the 21st century, as the Labour Party’s base crumbled they often governed in coalition with the Tories, which should have belied any left-wing reputation they had.

They have been enthusiastic privateers and service slashers. A good example, with a happy ending, is in Leeds, where the council attempted to rob £6,000 each from bin workers wages. The bin workers struck back. The council risked public health by holding out in the face of a solid, well-supported strike for several weeks, before admitting defeat. If David Cameron makes them junior partners in government this is what they’d do on a grand scale.

But this is not surely why they are enjoying a surge in support. We have had thirty years plus of neo-liberal government, both Labour and Tory. Despite being deeply unpopular, neo-liberalism has resisted all formal democratic attempts to change or remove it. Democracy as we know it today is broken.

For several years now Gordon Brown has been a lame duck and David Cameron Prime Minister in waiting. All the smooth calculations of the political class have been thrown off by one TV show. The Liberal Democrats will probably lose a fair chunk of their new support before votes are cast, but I reckon they will hold onto a significant number of those who agree with Nick.

There’s no point predicting a surge of Bolshevik magma beneath a thin Liberal crust. Bolshevism is our business and our responsibility (“our” in the broad sense). But the surge in Liberal Democrat support represents, in its best instants, a healthy desire to twit the ruling class.

News and Spews

Less than a fortnight until its over, less than a fortnight and civilisation as we know it will crumble and the bestial walphurgisnight of pent up bigotry will be released, like pandora's box, crammed with nazipotatomen, and philmitchell clones who'll roam the earth killing and spraying acidblood, all the while chanting "fweedom of speesh, I've got fweedom of speesh".

Some people are acting shocked that there's no single definition of the safe amount of ash it's possible to fly through (how about, if it's enough to put out four engines then maybe, just maybe you shouldn't fly).

The police are braced for criticism over Blair Peach's death, yes people are still critical of murder, give it time, though.

The rich are getting richer:

The collective wealth of the country's 1,000 richest people rose 30% last year in the wake of the economic crisis.

Their combined wealth rose by more than £77bn to £333.5bn, the biggest annual increase in the 22-year history of the Sunday Times rich list. The number of billionaires rose by 10 to 53.

Mind you:

Last year's list showed how the economic crisis wiped £155bn from the wealth of the UK's richest people, with the number of billionaires down from 75 to 43.

So they're clearly not rich enough. Stick 'em up you filthy proles.

George W Bush's first book, a fictional work called "Decision Points", will be published in November. It's a very Bush-ian title, from the man who popularised you "regime change" and brought you "I am the decider". It's limp and strange, and yet what's the betting decision point will be in most 2011 journalist stylebooks?

In case you gave a stuff

The runaway winner and official Shape of the Crisis is [drumroll] Suspicious Turnip.

Moving pictures

Maybe I pay too little regard to what goes on in the world. Maybe I just can't scan movie posters and get the gist of the film anymore, I'm losing my mojo. On the other hand maybe other people have been caught off guard by Kick Ass.

It is not a comedy, although it is funny. It is not a genre exercise, although it is very aware of itself as a film. You would have to be dumb or a sadist not to be disturbed by it.

The first disturbing aspect is how aware the characters are. There is an uneasy blend of realistic protagonists moving through insane circumstances. Dave Lizewski/Kick-Ass is bright enough to understand the danger he puts himself in, although he still puts himself in it. He pits himself against America's worst (and most stereotyped) nightmares, street criminal superpredators, deranged drug dealers, organised gangsters; you end up very afraid for him.

This brings his mental stability into question. This is, of course, a staple plot drive of superhero films. But the question is writ even larger when he is saved by the Real Thing, the crack team of Big Daddy and Hit Girl.

After scanning a few links, I found a few reviewers (the predictable ones) picked up on Hit Girl especially as a debasing childhood. It's not compulsory to like any particular film, but it's also perfectly fine to shock and disturb, provided there is clear intent, a point being driven at. The right-minded audience member would not have any trouble concluding that what happens in Kick Ass is literally wrong and insane. That much is clear, surely.

Big Daddy is as psychotic as his arch enemy Frank D'Amico, who guns a total stranger down in an alley. He is plainly abusing his daughter Hit Girl/Mindy Macready (he isolated her from society, warped her mind and turned her into an outwardly willing victim).

But, by way of amelioration, firstly, their particular part of universe is completely fantastic. They are both ridiculously brilliant, graceful warriors (mainstream media never have a problem glorifying ultra-violence, in the form of war). The final fight scene involving Hit Girl is particularly brilliant. Finally, they are fighting the bad guys (gosh, I hate that phrase). Big Daddy pays dearly for his obsessional struggle.

To begin with Kick Ass deals up staple nightmares, the kind any Daily Mail reviewer can understand. But suggesting the pursuit of a clean, sanitary capitalism through superhuman control (which is the aim of superheroes, police and politcians alike) will inevitably distort people, in particular children, mentally and emotionally... that is a nightmare too far and too deep.

Kick Ass is a brilliant, brilliant satire. Go see.

Real things happening in the world... and stuff

David Cameron has been hit by an egg. Though the incident seemed unremarkable, concern grew after it was confirmed the egg is in a critical condition and may not survive.

Willie Walsh finally won an injunction against nature allowing airtravel to resume. We do not yet know if the volcano will pursue a reballot. Derek Simpson described the insurgent magma as a bunch of clowns.

Overconfident man wins £1,200: Mark Thomas, believed to be influential, was stopped and searched under suspicion of Contempt of Cop (the foulest of all crimes). He was released it was discovered he was in fact famous and white (and not Pete Doherty).

World gets lighter as another fascist dies.

And finally, just in case you forgot, there's still a recession going on.

(Mildly) Interesting Times

Indeed. George Monbiot is always wonderful to have around. Slightly frustrating, usually interesting but often brilliant. In his latest Graun piece he's all three.

Complex, connected societies are more resilient than simple ones – up to a point. During the east African droughts of the early 1990s, I saw at first hand what anthropologists and economists have long predicted: those people who had the fewest trading partners were hit hardest. Connectivity provided people with insurance: the wider the geographical area they could draw food from, the less they were hurt by a regional famine.

But beyond a certain level, connectivity becomes a hazard. The longer and more complex the lines of communication and the more dependent we become on production and business elsewhere, the greater the potential for disruption. This is one of the lessons of the banking crisis. Impoverished mortgage defaulters in the United States – the butterfly's wing over the Atlantic – almost broke the global economy. If the Eyjafjallajökull volcano – by no means a monster – keeps retching it could, in these fragile times, produce the same effect.

Some might call this a dialectical reversal. The drive of capital to spread and settle across the globe, into all corners of life means at certain points a local crisis can become a general one. The closure of subprime mortgages becomes a global depression. A vocanic eruption in the middle of the Atlantic becomes a global transport crisis, which may well feed back into the economic downturn. There is no such thing as a natural disaster. Five, six years ago it would have just been an interesting sideshow, armageddon lite.

I almost agree with Monbiot when he uses the metaphor of the Roman Empire. The matter is not so much simplicity vs complexity. Given this we are facing a general crisis we are looking for a systemic solution, a complete rebalancing of our society dealing with social and environmental conflicts at their root (which Monbiot suggests). But this solution can be reactionary, progressive or an unstable combination of the two: see for example the various solutions to the Great Depression of the 1930s.

More Future Legend

I heard the Bank of England go up. We were out collecting bits of metal for the workshop when it happened. Everyone heard it. You could hear it miles away. It was just this huge boom. Then we heard what had happened, I admit I thought it was great. I didn’t think, like, who might be there. Then we started seeing all these buildings catching fire. Soon all the skyscrapers in the city were on fire and there was all this smoke rising up, this huge black cloud, miles high.

We, all the neighbourhood, we went down to see what was happening, see if we could help. Me and Anna and a few others, we went down on our bike and managed to get to Old Street, but the road was blocked off. We got told to get back, which pissed me off, but then…you know. We stayed to watch. I remember Anna was very keen. It was quite exciting, I suppose. All sorts were going on. There were ambulances, people rushing everywhere, some body bags, loads of nice fire fighters trying to pump water but they were saying pressure was just too low.

It was hot, I mean really hot. There was fire at least about 200 yards away, but you could feel it like that. It was pitch-black overhead. Then we noticed it was getting hard to breathe. Sometimes bits of, like, ash would fall out of the sky. You could see down the road flames catching the wind and bending between buildings. Then another one catch fire. It got less exciting and more frightening. I think people realised once a building caught there wasn’t much to stop it burning down. You had to stop the fire from spreading.

They said it took three days to damp the whole thing down. The smell lasted for another week.



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The issue, the real issue, was prisoners. I mean they’d come up with all sorts of outrageous crap. They said we had gangbangs, drug orgies, satanic rituals, mass conversions to Islam, silly stuff they knew wouldn’t stick. The thing they’d pummel, the thing they returned to again and again was the prisoners.

To some people’s shock the prisons were reopened. London was never safe. It was an open city, effectively, for a long time. What justice you had you had to make for yourself. But even so there was very few people who you’d want locked up, permanently. Then there was the campaign of fire, these… gentlemen arsonists. If they were caught they couldn’t be just let free.

Some of them were, eventually put to work. I liked that, but, of course, we were accused of being slave drivers and torturers. They had some cheek as well, knowing what was going on in his little kingdom.

So, anyway, it was like ping-pong, back and forward with these accusations, denials, insults and threats. Our policy at least was to hold back with what we knew until we could prove it, you know, we actually wanted to convince people, not just whip them up.

Oh, I remember the day when we got footage and pictures… This idiot… spy I suppose he was, they sent to infiltrate a factory group, I think it was a weapons workshop. He was caught before he could do any damage. He had on him, on this phone camera, footage and stills of torture, beatings and waterboarding. Thinking about it now it was pretty grim stuff. But these were clearly Bishops’ soldiers dealing out the punishment.

We had them over a barrel, not the best metaphor perhaps, anyway. We put the pictures online and put the film on public show, for information, at about a two-dozen cinemas, we announced this on air, repeating it for a day or so. We had them. I know because they stopped broadcasting for at least 48 hours. The broadcasts were definitely coming from within the Bishopric.

The next thing we heard from the Government Network they were accusing us of being violent pornographers by showing the film publicly. There’s just no accounting for taste.




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The President was a good man. I campaigned for him. I was there for the inauguration. My whole family went. My Dad cried. He was a civil rights marcher. For him this was the fulfilment of everything he believed in, fought for. But the President was alone, I always thought. As soon as he stopped campaigning they locked him up in the White House and surrounded him with suits.

That’s why they fought against him, they thought he was weak, they thought he’d give in. When they started their war they thought they’d have a clear march on the capital. There wasn’t a strike in the east, but even so, everyone was proud to stand by their President. I tried to join the army. Loads of us did. I offered to join the National Guard, but they said they had enough help. The President went on TV and said the best way to serve the Republic was to get to work, work hard, work, work, work. I know some of the unions out west tried to call off the strike.

But you know, these were the good old boys, the power system, Skull and Bones, Wall Street, talk radio, the KKK. You knew what would happen if they reached Washington DC. By the time of the coup things had gone from bad to worse, the drought, the epidemic, shortages, always shortages. There was nothing left to lose. That’s why we came out to meet the Rebels.




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I can’t really call myself a soldier. I suppose I am, but I still don’t feel like one. In all my time now I’ve learned a few things. The worst thing is fighting someone who will never surrender, no matter what. Even though you’ve won they’re gonna make you kill them, you cannot stop until every last one of them is dead. Archway was like that.

These bastards had been on the rampage. They knew, they knew they’d never get away with it. It was, what’s one of those… Japanese… kamikaze missions. I don’t know how many people they’d already injured or killed, but when we had them surrounded, they barricaded themselves in this skyscraper.

I thought at the time some of them must have pistols, there were plenty of gunshots going off, although they couldn’t hit a thing. But they all still had their firebombs; I think someone found out later they were a combination of flares, grenades and some Molotov cocktails. They said they had hostages with them, which quickly turned out to be a lie, so then threatened to burn down the building.

They ignored everything we offered, so we had to fight our way in. You know, they were given time, several hours.

Anyway there was about a thousand militia; nearly all of North London that was on duty was there that night. It was a big thing. The plan was we basically had to rush in, three groups of us, across fifty to a hundred yards or so of tarmac (road, pavement and so on). We knew the gang was mostly on the third and fourth floors. We’d go under cover of fire. Once we got inside we’d cut the lift and take the stairs, secure each floor as we go.

That was the plan.

It turned out at least one of them had a semi-automatic or a submachine gun, and it was pointed at my group. We were making good progress when twenty yards from the entrance there was this huge ripping sound. I saw at least four people around me hit. I don’t know how it missed me. The rest of us dropped to the floor, like you’re trained to do, but people were still getting hit. It was coming from at least the seventh floor. We had to keep going.

Then there was a bang, a huge explosion round the other side of the building. They were chucking as much they could at us.

Of course they couldn’t stop us getting inside. All the way up they had the advantage of the high ground. Barricades, street fighting is mostly hand to hand, but for some reason this felt close, if that makes sense? Guns, torches flashing round doors, through rooms, up stairs.

It turned out it took only an hour and a half to finish them off, but it felt much longer. The building nearly went up twice, where they set fire to stuff. We chased them up to the eleventh floor in the end. I mean, we still kept going, clearing every floor right up to the roof. You couldn’t be sure.

We lost at least five hundred that night, a total waste. We should have let them burn it down.

Are you saying Boo or Boo-urns?

Like Shakespeare, there is a Simpsons quote to fit every life situation (like the works of Shakespeare, The Simpsons is a rich, intricate text). Some Simpsons quotes have, of course, become part of mainstream culture:

I for one welcome our new (X) overlords

Think unsexy thoughts

Save me, Jeebus!

D'oh

But what else is there, prime ripe for use? Let us consider:

Here’s to alcohol, the cause of — and solution to — all life’s problems.

Let's start again, remember You're you and I'm me.

I prefer a vehicle that doesn’t hurt Mother Earth. It’s a go-cart, powered by my own sense of self-satisfaction.

Me fail English? That's unpossible.

Take that, Maynard G Krebs!

Are there any jive talking robots in this play?

I've sold monorails to Brockway, Ogdenville and North Haverbrook and by gum it put them on the map!

Dental Plan...

Dear Mr President, there are too many states these days, please eliminate three. I am NOT a crackpot.

For all the latest medical poop/Call Surgeon General C Everett Koop.

I'm in television now. It's my job to be repetitive. My job. My job. Repetitiveness is my job.

Mayor Quimby supports revolving door prisons. Mayor Quimby even released Sideshow Bob - a man twice convicted of attempted murder. Can you trust a man like Mayor Quimby? Vote Sideshow Bob for mayor.

All eminently useful quotes.

Blur, not old Blur, NEW Blur

Try to ignore the faint melodic resemblance to Cutting Crew's Died in your Arms Tonight.

Wow, I never knew space was so boring

Barack Obama's unveiled his plans for space exploration:

The plan includes an extra $6bn for Nasa over five years; $3.1bn for "vigorous new technology development" that could result in a pioneering heavy-lift rocket to take astronauts to Mars, with future "stepping stone" missions into deep space to help get them there; support for those losing jobs when the 30-year-old space shuttle programme ends this year and the salvaging of Constellation's axed crew capsule for use at the international space station.

He said he expected the first crewed missions beyond the moon by about 2025, and to orbit Mars by the middle of the following decade. "A landing on Mars will follow. I expect to be around to see it," he said.

Vigorous new technology you say? Manly new vigorous bristling tumescent technology........ exciting. The detail is:

Yet Nasa will still have to rely on Russian Soyuz craft to take American astronauts to the space station until commercial spaceships are ready, a main criticism of Obama's opponents.

Obama believes that investment in the commercial sector will provide more than 10,000 new jobs nationally, but detractors point out that Constellation was expected to provide 25,000 jobs in its lifetime.

It's the early privatisation of the solar system. If space exploration up until now has been bureaucratic, it may soon be bureaucratic and profit hungry, with doubleplus inefficiency. Everything of course hangs on the most difficult aspect of space travel, which is simply getting off the planet.

You need to reach a little over 11.2k/s to escape Earth's gravity. The majority of weight on a launch pad is fuel. Roughly 9/10ths of the fuel in the average spacecraft is fuel to lift the fuel. The cost of putting a human being in space is roughly $10,000 per pound of weight. Imagine an astonaut made of solid gold.

Once the gap between astronauts and space is bridged things get a lot simpler and cheaper. The search for potential life and/or geological activity on Mars (given that plume mixtures of methane and water are being produced below ground) is made much easier by putting actually existing scientists on the surface.

Though Obama's critics came at his original policy from the standpoint of technochauvinism (maintaining America's technical-scientific superiority), they were not so far wrong. Good timing (and an element of luck) is always of the essence if you want to explore the solar system.

New Horizons is currently racing across the outer solar system to reach Pluto before its winter arrives and its atmosphere freezes to the ground. The Cassini probe is still exploring the Saturn system. Though the Huygens probe found many fascinating and wonderful things about the moon Titan, the true revelation of the tour has been Enceladus, with its giant plumes of water (mixed with organic compounds), a good indicator of life in a totally unexpected place.

Similar conditions also prevail on Jupiter's moon Europa. The next realistic launch point for any mission there is 2020, who knows how long it might take to get back to Enceladus?

The difficulties of exporing both moons shows how such a project can be a stimulus to development here on Earth. To successfully explore Europa's ocean you need a probe that traverse half a billion miles, operate in the extreme cold and high intensity radiation of the Jupiter system. It has to melt and/or dig down through several miles of ice before reaching the ocean. Once there it needs to operate with a high degree of autonomy, there is a 40-50 minute signal delay between Earth and Jupiter, so it's no good telling the probe to go left right, up down. Finally, it has to be totally sterile. It's no good looking for life on Europa if you've already brought it from Earth.

The road to slavery is paved with liberals

T'is true. But, first read this article by Alex Gordon of the RMT, primarily about the anti-union laws in Britain:

Mrs Justice Sharp's judgment in Network Rail v RMT increases the scope of anti-union laws by invoking "proportionality" (a remarkable new development in UK law imported from recent European court judgments, allowing judges to assess effects of strike action) since Network Rail emphasised the disruption that rail strikes will cause. This will have huge repercussions for public sector workers opposing post-general-election spending cuts and is a Trojan horse to outlaw effective strike action to defend key services.

It is very interesting, to say the least concerning. Our rulers now live in a parallel universe (all those years dismantling elementary democracy), where even the suggestion of a strike is liable to throw them into fits of oh-its-just-like-the-70s-when-even-train-drivers-refused-to-bury-the-dead. It's not, and it's a pity, because it's the little things that just keep adding up to a depressing picture.

Devon and Cornwall police like to burgle people's homes to demonstrate the risk of... burglary. What's worse is, apparently, their victims were fine about it.

9 out of 10 Britons are happy with full body scanners at airports (this is the dawning of the age of aquarius). Also, apparently:

The survey also found 91% of the Britons asked would be happy to provide biometric data - such as iris scans and fingerprints - to identify them at airports.

Give it a year, there'll be an bill in parliament asking for police powers to fly a helicopter up people's arses as part of 'random' stop and search... and 91% of people polled will probably support that too.

Sergent Delroy Smellie was cleared of assault (apparently colleagues 'feared for his safety'). Ian Tomlinson's killer is still at large. Hey, small mercies, the man who shot Jean Charles de Menezes probably still has a gun.

This is what a police officer needs to do to be sent down.

Meanwhile, this is the quality of the terrorist wing of Britain's trade unions:

Derek Simpson, joint general secretary of the Unite union, and John Prescott spoke at a “Unite 4 Labour” election meeting in Edinburgh on Thursday of last week.

It was a political disaster for both the Unite leadership and the Labour Party.

Derek Simpson admitted that Labour has lost millions of supporters.

He then said, “We must have Labour re-elected, as it will be easier to change the Labour Party in power than out of power.”

He called union leaders like Mark Serwotka of the PCS “idiots” for making comments against Labour.

Unite members questioned Simpson about his leadership of the British Airways dispute.

His response was breathtaking. Simpson called the BA strike committee “clowns” for calling for 12 days of action.

And he described strikers as “deluded” for thinking they could win.

Unbelievably he said that the vote for strikes was not strong enough – despite the vote being 90 percent .

OK, that one's a bit easy. But, what about fighting fascism, another important issue? The MP for Dudley (no more, of course) trusts in Basic British Decency (tm). The General Secretary of the Association od School and College Leaders thinks teacher racism is rare... Not rare enough.

I digress. It's rather impressionistic scan, but can't you see the cringing, hear the slavishness, feel the deference and purposeful stupidity creeping back into public life? Think of the blatant horseshit that David Cameron is peddling as icecream and remember 36% of people are still going yum-yum... and that amounts to 'change'. Ye gods!

Shape of the crisis

We at TtSD love to love, and we love to help. Our erstwhile comrades of the Continuity SWP are holding a forum concerning The Shape of the Crisis. But why waste time? Let's answer the question now. What shape is The Crisis?

Triangle



















Cube





















Spiral
























Yo-yo



























Stick-Man































Blobs






















Suspicious Turnip



























Vote now and we shall determine once and for all The Shape of the Crisis.



Roobin's Note: The Internet is Made of Cats:

News and Spews

In an unlikely universe where Gordon Brown is Prime Minister on May 7th 2010 he will end take it or leave it public services.

More than 1,000 mediocre or failing secondary schools will be taken over to drive up standards, Gordon Brown promises today ahead of a manifesto launch centred on a pledge to end "take it or leave it" services in education, the NHS and police.

Taken over, by whom, the Swedes, the Russians, the Venezuelans, the Martians?

He promises that inadequate schools, hospital authorities and police forces will all be subject to forms of takeover if either objective results or parental ballots demand new leadership. In education this could mean being taken over by successful state or private schools, education chains, or universities.

Neo-liberalism lives on, like Jason or Rasputin, you have to kill it dozens of times before it actually succumbs. Now drink the koolaid and keep telling yourself that privatisation works. A lot of this nonsense has been justified by 'choice', we're giving the consumer (ahem...) choice of services. Who chooses poor services? People who have no choice.

Quite right, it's the Worst. Election. Ever.

Take that, Maynard G Krebs!

People still talk about The Beat Generation. They mostly refer to a generation of authors, although, as it is a very flexible credo, you could easily include various contemporary painters, musicians and so on.

Why do people refer to The Beats so often? In terms of an empirical legacy there’s plenty to point to Pop music: prime Bob Dylan, stream of consciousness lyrics with long breath lines or David Bowie’s persistent sci-fi fascination and adoption of Beat language (listen to Ziggy Stardust... and think Beat Generation). Literature: JG Ballard, William Gibson, The Liverpool Poets, Irvine Walsh, Charles Bukowski, Douglas Coupland, Hunter S Thompson to name but a few.

Method: cut and paste, recontextualising old material, dead phrases, to create something new. Add nihilism and/or anarchism a la Burroughs, what do you get? Punk. The terms “rap” and “riff”, central to popular culture today, were crucially developed by the Beats. Before the Beat Generation the riff was the obligatory part of a song. After the Beats it meant to improvise and generally build on a foundation. The Beats would meet and “rap” long, improvised, semi-poetic monologues. A fine, recorded example is Jack Kerouac’s narration to the film Pull My Daisy or Lenny Bruce’s stand up (virtually all stand up comedy comes from Bruce).

Random names and references: The Soft Machine, Steely Dan, The Subterraneans, Interzone, The Subliminal Kid, Exterminator (XTRMNTR), Howl of the Unappreciated by Lisa Simpson (the line "I saw the best minds of my generation..." has been recycled so many times), The Dharma Bums, Pretty Girls Make Graves, and, never forget, The BEATles.. But that doesn’t answer why.

They were the first definite example of a fundamental shift in popular culture, noticed by cultural commentator Marshall McLuhan (and used as the basis of many of his theories). Put simply, Western popular cultural values had shifted away from linear, literate and sequential, toward non-linear, visual and instantaneous.

Example; in is collection Understanding Media he made a comparison between American and Russian culture:

In the special Russian issue of Life magazine for September 13th, 1963, it is mentioned in Russian restaurants and nightclubs, “though the Charleston is tolerated, the Twist is taboo”. All this is to say that a country in the process of industrialisation is inclined to regard Hot Jazz as consistent with its developing programmes. The cool and involved form of the Twist… would strike a culture at once as retrograde and incompatible with its new mechanical stress.

He came close to the Marxist understanding of the relation between culture, society and change (although Marxism, for him, was not the life and works of Karl Marx but the official dogma of the Soviet Union).

In his 1859 Preface to a Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy, Marx laid out his reasons for switching to a critique of economics from philosophy. The first function of any society is to reproduce itself. Human beings work collectively, all the more so since the advent of capitalism. In doing so they not only generate what Marx called “forces of production” but also “relations of production”, the way in which human beings consent to come together.

People labour consciously, and so have the ability to change and refine what they do. Once any society has produced surplus wealth it frees people from constant work, gives them time to think and to play, to be active in a way that’s not immediately productive. This is the basis of culture (in its broadest sense). The rise of culture meant human beings no longer had to relate to each other on the basis of raw necessity but on their rationality. It goes without saying the level of rationality could be no greater than the amount of surplus wealth and the way it was generated.

Though every social upheaval is different, rich and varied, they have come down to a clash between the forces and relations of production.

The Beat Generation was a reaction against the infamous military/industrial complex; the hideous, bureaucratic machine that rose out of World War Two, which by the fifties and sixties not only threatened to engulf civil society but incinerate in nuclear fire. Everything they did, from their free-poetry to their spontaneous prose to their deliberately ‘obscene’ provocations, whether it was overtly political or not, amounted to a critique of and solution to the problems of their society.

More Future Legend

I can’t really call myself a soldier. I suppose I am, but I still don’t feel like one. In all my time now I’ve learned a few things. The worst thing is fighting someone who will never surrender, no matter what. Even though you’ve won they’re gonna make you kill them, you cannot stop until every last one of them is dead. Archway was like that.

These bastards had been on the rampage. They knew, they knew they’d never get away with it. It was, what’s one of those… Japanese… kamikaze missions. I don’t know how many people they’d already injured or killed, but when we had them surrounded, they barricaded themselves in this skyscraper.

I thought at the time some of them must have pistols, there were plenty of gunshots going off, although they couldn’t hit a thing. But they all still had their firebombs; I think someone found out later they were a combination of flares, grenades and some Molotov cocktails. They said they had hostages with them, which quickly turned out to be a lie, so then threatened to burn down the building.

They ignored everything we offered, so we had to fight our way in. You know, they were given time, several hours.

Anyway there was about a thousand militia; nearly all of North London that was on duty was there that night. It was a big thing. The plan was we basically had to rush in, three groups of us, across fifty to a hundred yards or so of tarmac (road, pavement and so on). We knew the gang was mostly on the third and fourth floors. We’d go under cover of fire. Once we got inside we’d cut the lift and take the stairs, secure each floor as we go.

That was the plan.

It turned out at least one of them had a semi-automatic or a submachine gun, and it was pointed at my group. We were making good progress when twenty yards from the entrance there was this huge ripping sound. I saw at least four people around me hit. I don’t know how it missed me. The rest of us dropped to the floor, like you’re trained to do, but people were still getting hit. It was coming from at least the seventh floor. We had to keep going.

Then there was a bang, a huge explosion round the other side of the building. They were chucking as much they could at us.

Of course they couldn’t stop us getting inside. All the way up they had the advantage of the high ground. Barricades, street fighting is mostly hand to hand, but for some reason this felt close, if that makes sense? Guns, torches flashing round doors, through rooms, up stairs.

It turned out it took only an hour and a half to finish them off, but it felt much longer. The building nearly went up twice, where they set fire to stuff. We chased them up to the eleventh floor in the end. I mean, we still kept going, clearing every floor right up to the roof. You couldn’t be sure.

We lost at least five hundred that night, a total waste. We should have let them burn it down.

----------------

The issue, the real issue, was prisoners. I mean they’d come up with all sorts of outrageous crap. They said we had gangbangs, drug orgies, satanic rituals, mass conversions to Islam, silly stuff they knew wouldn’t stick. The thing they’d pummel, the thing they returned to again and again was the prisoners.

To some people’s shock the prisons were reopened. London was never safe. It was an open city, effectively, for a long time. What justice you had you had to make for yourself. But even so there was very few people who you’d want locked up, permanently. Then there was the campaign of fire, these… gentlemen arsonists. If they were caught they couldn’t be just let free.

Some of them were, eventually put to work. I liked that, but, of course, we were accused of being slave drivers and torturers. They had some cheek as well, knowing what was going on in his little kingdom.

So, anyway, it was like ping-pong, back and forward with these accusations, denials, insults and threats. Our policy at least was to hold back with what we knew until we could prove it, you know, we actually wanted to convince people, not just whip them up.

Oh, I remember the day when we got footage and pictures… This idiot… spy I suppose he was, they sent to infiltrate a factory group, I think it was a weapons workshop. He was caught before he could do any damage. He had on him, on this phone camera, footage and stills of torture, beatings and waterboarding. Thinking about it now it was pretty grim stuff. But these were clearly Bishops’ soldiers dealing out the punishment.

We had them over a barrel, not the best metaphor perhaps, anyway. We put the pictures online and put the film on public show, for information, at about a two-dozen cinemas, we announced this on air, repeating it for a day or so. We had them. I know because they stopped broadcasting for at least 48 hours. The broadcasts were definitely coming from within the Bishopric.

The next thing we heard from the Government Network they were accusing us of being violent pornographers by showing the film publicly. There’s just no accounting for taste.

While I'm thinking about it: The Crazies

T'was an interesting film, good enough. It was made by the same crew who revamped another George A Romero production, Dawn of the Dead. It has a similar obvious feature. The characters are virtually stand-ins, cardboard cut outs. This is made up for in Dawn of the Dead by sustaining a breathtaking, relentless pace from the very first scene.

The Crazies builds fairly quickly, though more like a more conventional horror/thriller. The lead characters a fleshed out enough so you care about their eventual fate (Dawn of the Dead rides entirely on the spectacle).

The story takes one fairly amusing short cut, when trying to figure out why two unexplained violent incidents have happened in quick succession, the sheriff suddenly remembers that a plane disappeared a week before over the lake which supplies the town's water. Couldn't some kind of conveniently poisonous cargo have leaked out? Well, that'd cut about 15 minutes explanation.

The other thing of note is the Crazies are almost indistinguishable from zombies. There's only one scene where they are portrayed as anything like sentient (which they are). Interestingly, for a waterborne disease, the same sheriff manages to mash his open, bleeding palm into a crazy's wound and not get sick.

The final thing about it (most important) was when we talked about the movie afterward a friend of mine described it as grim. For a moment I was surprised. Then they pointed out that almost everyone dies in the most industrially gruesome manner possible, which is true.

I didn't find the film grim, however, due to, I think, the basic rules of realism in film. The only remotely realistic characters are the Sheriff and his wife (the Doctor). If you are taken along by the film it's because all your hopes are invested in them. A grim film is a hopeless film, but they survive to the very end.

Stuff for future think? Possibly Kick Ass or Clash of the Titans.

Nazis love violence and lying

Tell me something I don't already know. Nick Griffin has apparently been recorded suggesting white people have the right to take up arms if they see fit:

Mr Griffin is captured saying: "If the state won't, when people have a genuine grievance, if the state not only doesn't care, but actually, in everything it does and says, puts them down, then what choice are people left but to do something which is outside the parliamentary system.

He then says: "They don't have the right to hurt people, to maim and blow things up or whatever," before qualifying this by adding: "People only have that right when they are not allowed any other way of expressing a legitimate grievance."

He's clearly doing two things. There's plenty of room for him to back out of the implied meaning of that statement (although you'd only fall for that trick if you were unbelievably credulous or already thinking the same way). There's an election on, don't you know?

But it's clear what Griffin actually means. Who, firstly, thinks they are adequately represented by the British political system? Certainly not BNP supporters. Of course everyone's grievances are legitimate, at least to them. This statement is a green light for nazis to start terrorising their neighbourhoods.

If this interview gets out into common knowledge (and we should spread it far and wide) it will cost the nazis support. However, we can't just counter the nazis on the same level as mainstream politicians. Griffin works in the same groove as Jean Marie Le Pen, who continually makes 'gaffes' that are actually thought out statements intended to harden up his support.

In the last instant fascists don't care about elections, they are not democrats, they intend to destroy all democracy through mass violence.

Hysterical Materialism

General election, meh, I'm voting for Kodos. Here's some comedy:

Guys Named Todd



It's Just Fucking Television



Gun Control



Queen Victoria Handicap



Shark! Dog! Attack!

Future Legend

This stuff, this controversy about some of our members, it was… ridiculous. It’s telling, the fact the Squatters never dared put their accusations directly. They’d always get their friends on the ultra-left or the anarchists to do the really dirty work. I was a member of the Labour Party, back in the day. I mean, so what? The Squatters, the Root and Branch, they’d just insinuate stuff about how we had all this secret access to money and power or even just, you know, equipment. They were fanatical about their communal principles, nothing got away from them.

That was the secret of their power. They were never in the majority but wherever you went they were just… there, you know? Alex and Dave from work were typical. I had a look back. I found we actually kept records of meetings, the staff at Radio Free London. They were the only ones to have attended every recorded meeting, but they were everywhere else as well.

For example, I came back for my second shift on the station. I was in a pretty bad way, personally speaking, and had taken some time out… get myself back on my feet. I got back to find the place, Broadcasting House, turned upside-down.

The front had been completely repaired. In two days Dave had got together a team of builders together with some engineering and design students. All the glass was put back in. I don’t know where they got in from. The brickwork was patched up. The rubble and metal outside had been sent off for recycling.

Inside was even more amazing. There was fresh new carpeting down. The taps were working. Light and power was back in most parts of the building (there was a generator out back and someone had installed solar panels). I got there and there was a new telephone system was being installed. While all this was going on Dave had put these guys in the building itself with beds confiscated from a furniture store/. He wasn’t even supposed to be working there.

The building by now was under siege, a different kind of siege. Everyone wanted to use the station. It was a hive of activity. Alex was now effectively the station manager. It wasn’t really like the good old days, drive time, news, sports, weather, traffic, music and chat. There was some of that, but lots more in the way of public announcements, appeals or debates. The broadcasting time was a joint effort between the survivors here and some guys from the private stations. They shared equipment. Bush house I was told was still open, foreign language broadcasting. Carl was part of the team running the show there.


---------------

I don’t know about you but if I was in an organisation, in a commune, and found out there were Liberal Democrats hanging round I’d be… Well, I don’t know, maybe I’m a blazing sectarian, but I think I’d be concerned.

This… it’s not 100% proof, you know, you’d meet Restoration members or supporters who were talented, honest, doing a good job, whatever that happened to be, but there were some cases, you know, a few too many incidents. An example: you’d get refugees coming to London, people, country folk asking for help.

There was this delegation; in fact it was one guy, on behalf of an agricultural commune south way of Norwich. It was a collective growing sugar beet. They wanted protection from the Bishop’s men. A friend of mine told me about the tactical discussion in the militia, which he shouldn’t have done, really. The conclusion was it’d be difficult to maintain a permanent presence, but as much aid as possible would be sent.

So the guy sticks around for a week or so. He comes to a few central meetings and ends up registering with a Constitutional group. In time a train is sent out, two-dozen militia, a dozen or so wombles and a load of supplies. A month down the line they’re back. It turns out he’s not a delegate of any commune but a gentleman farmer with fifty pairs of hands in his employ. They even put on farm meetings for our benefit… I can’t think how they could have kept it up for a month, but anyway. The trouble was we needed that sugar beet. It was only after he was caught selling to the Bishop that the farmer was arrested.

There were always little… things going on, lecturers who turned out to be deputy chancellors, journalists who were actually senior editors or engineers who were really managers. You have to watch them all the time.



--------------


Oh, I remember a load of them coming to London for the assembly. They were sharp. It was like you could cut yourself just by looking at them. I was afraid of them. They were frightening.

The council decided to have a big welcome meeting each day for the new delegates in this hall round the back of the palace. There was this huge red and black banner over the front of the stage with slogans written in all different languages. I can’t remember what the English one. I couldn’t get the Arabic… bit out of my head. I think it was meant to say “welcome, free citizens of the world”, something like that, but whoever wrote it got the, like, the grammar all wrong.

The Poles (not all of them were Poles, were they?) they sat together in a block. They were all young, hardly any of them looked over thirty. They had these special uniforms on that looked like they were adapted from old sports clothes, Lonsdale, Reebok, Stone Island and that.

You got closer you could see they each had these badges sewn on. I couldn’t work out what they were. One of them showed me his later. He told me later the badges were to do with job, rank and accomplishment. He had a badge on the front of his jacket, two snakes wrapping round each other, meaning he was a medic. There were also three stripes sewn onto the left sleeve. This meant he had over 25 confirmed kills.

In the meeting two of the Poles got up to speak. They were both kind of slow but powerful speakers. Every word meant something. They said how Britain was lovely but the locals kept asking them when they were going home, so it quite a change to be begged to stay. They made this point several times. Large parts of Eastern Europe were under the control of warlords. Communal Britain should act as an inspiration to all those suffering under fascism.

It was quite a love-in, I admit, but everyone was, like, just happy to be happy. The whole room got up and applauded and the Poles started singing their marching song (which everybody loved but nobody could understand the words to).

After the meeting the Poles had a caucus. I was on a team of people tidying up, setting the room for another load of people. They were still debating half an hour later about something. We had to hustle them out. They were still arguing as we closed the door.

Some think...

It's arguable but I would say that somewhere between the anti-poll tax movement and the campaign against the 1994 criminal justice act (taking in the Strangeways riot, the closure of the pits and Black Wednesday) working class Britain pitched left.

The last three Labour governments were given a mandate to heal the damage of the Thatcher/Major governments (it was beyond most people's reason that they could do so themselves). But it was of just at that point Britain's democratic socialists abandoned their missions. The Labour Party spurned that mandate every time.

What passes for democracy in Britain has failed in front of everyone. Absolutely everything about out current predicament stems from two days, February 15th 2003 and July 7th 2005. The first was the peak of Britain's left shift. It was an extra-parliamentary movement, an attempt to get very raw, vital democracy (two million demonstrators) and executive power to meet. Despite what it could have been, it was an appeal to the people ruling Britain. Despite everything it had to make do with shaming Britain's official 'democrats', being its guilty conscience, the ghost at the feast.

In his video message the leader and spokesman for the 7/7 bombers Mohammad Siddique Khan justified their actions by pointing out that the electorate had recently returned the Labour Party, led by Tony Blair, to power. Britain is an ostensibly democratic society. Taken at face value the British people had endorsed the suffering of millions of Afghans and Iraqis, therefore the bombers consciences were clear; they were simply leveling up the balance of death and misery.

The holes in that argument are clear, if nothing else the anti-war movement itself should be sufficient proof. As we write there are local councils using their budget for anti-extremist propaganda to deter young muslims from participating in anti-racist demonstrations, i.e. from partipating in democracy.

So-called radical islam is nothing of the sort. To be radical means to literally go to the root of a problem. There was nothing radical about the 7/7 bombings. All they have effectively done is provide a counterpoint to a ruling class campaign to roll back the actual latent radicalism in our society, a current of opinion that is anti-imperialist, anti-racist, for redistribution of wealth and power.

We still need to fight for space for muslims, young muslims especially, to participate in a renewed, better democracy (connected to social justice, the workplace). That's the political struggle ahead.

Wonderful, wonderful news...

Ha Ha! Dead Nazi!

More actually existing news...

We have rolling news, oh yes, from the Dudley anti-EDL protest.

Elsewhere, Margaret Hodge, mighty intellectual, is worried about women with young children who become MPs. Yes, for those outside of London constituencies it will become impossible to be with their children and do their job if plans to restrict MPs rent claims to £1,450 go ahead. They'll have to cope on the basic wage of £64,000 a year. Before you know it they'll be doing favours and odd jobs just to get by.

Attacks on the Pope for covering up child abuse are like anti-semtitism, apparently... Ahem, no they're not.

Only one in five 24-35-year-olds are saving for old age. First things first, you need some actually existing money.

A good spot

Now, I'm sure judges don't need much encouragement to come down heavy on trade unions, however, check this out.

Justice Sharp, who slapped an injunction on the RMT this week, is the sister of Richard Sharp. Who he? Well, for a long time he ran Goldman Sachs European private equity investment fund. Why should we care? Goldman Sachs is a principle dealer for Network Rail's £34 billion Debt Issuance Programme.

You'd be a fool or a communist to make any kind of connection (well done to The Sauce).

And finally, it's also worth sharing Bob Crow's duel with the all-of-a-sudden-dense John Humphrys.

Don't blame me, I voted for Kodos