New Year's Eve

The Beatles: Twist and Shout.



Stellastarr: My Coco.



The Breeders: Cannonball.



The Dandy Warhols: Not If You Were the Last Junkie on Earth.



Stone Roses: Elephant Stone.



New Order: Blue Monday.



The KLF: What Time is Love.



Pet Shop Boys: Always on My Mind.



Sly Stone: I Want to Take You Higher.



Cornershop: Candyman.



BRMC: Spread Your Love.



The Strokes: Last Night.



Talking Heads: Psychokiller.



LCD Soundsystem: Daft Punk is Playing at My House.



Daft Punk: Around the World.



White Stripes: Fell in Love with a Girl.

Something small

Frankie Boyle's rather infamous routine (the Ministry of War routine I shall now call it) sees a white comedian using the P- and N- words. These are understandably shocking and should be generally off limits for a white comedian. The exception is... was Bill Hicks, whose routines incorporated racist epithets, coincidentally in exactly the same way as Frankie did, to illustrate the brutality of racism. Bill Hicks is a secular saint, however. The amount of raw, slightly bewildering cynicism that has come from Frankie means people are liable to miss when he's being sincere.

French lists

The French revolution was a great thing, a grand achievement. The Republican Calendar looks fun, but in Republican France you only got one day off in ten (a very, very bourgeois revolution). Still, living there and through those days your months would have been:

Autumn:
Vendémiaire in French (the month of grape harvest), starting 22, 23 or 24 September
Brumaire (the month of fog), starting 22, 23 or 24 October
Frimaire (the month of frost), starting 21, 22 or 23 November

Winter:
Nivôse (the month of snow), starting 21, 22 or 23 December
Pluviôse (the month of rain), starting 20, 21 or 22 January
Ventôse (the month of wind), starting 19, 20 or 21 February

Spring:
Germinal (the month of blooming), starting 20 or 21 March
Floréal (the month of flowers), starting 20 or 21 April
Prairial (the month of grass), starting 20 or 21 May

Summer:
Messidor (the month of harvest), starting 19 or 20 June
Thermidor (the month of heat), starting 19 or 20 July
Fructidor (the month of fruitfulness), starting 18 or 19 August

The rest of the year is made up by the Sansculottides, which happened in mid-September (as we would know it), and were national holidays.

Lists, oh, lists

Great/terrible band names:

Reginald Sexfield and the Radiochair
Radiosexchair and the Floorpie
Gladys and the Groovy Mules
Solid and Gas
10 Stupid Questions
The Passion Knob
Christmas Ape
The The The
The The The The
Hugh Dennis Pennis
Shagnasty Rollerdisco
1,000 Typewriters
Semen in Durango
Bob Dylan Does Dallas
Whose Hose?
The Cooking Soap
Mumbly Joe and the Muhmuhmuhmunuh
Provisional Chicken and the Rotating Pizzas
Monkfish!
Five Bean Harmony

Take this, Brother; may it serve you well.

This year saw the 70th anniversary of John Lennon's birth and, of course, the 30th anniversary of his assassination. By way into what I want to talk about, I will go on the record and say one of my favourite songs of his is Revolution 9. Yes I am a bit contrary; how many times will Revolution be downloaded off Apple I Tunes compared to... Strawberry Fields Forever?

I will clear up a few things about the song:

(1) It is not a random collection of noises, no more than any song written by a musician who cannot read music. It is in the key of B flat/E flat, the two-chord shuffle that The Beatles settled into as they recorded the original version, unnumbered of Revolution. Revolution 9 is in fact rock and roll extended to its outermost limits, where a very simple harmonic formula is extended by improvisation and intuition
(2) It is more directly about revolution than its more famous version, whose lyrical pay off is nothing more than a rich (and slightly guilty) hippie fobbing off requests for money and support.

John Lennon is an icon, a figure drawn in strong outline but lacking in fine detail. People fill in the Lennon they want to see. The same applies to his personal and political journey. The common British left narrative would go, Lennon was left-wing but not revolutionary, Lennon went a bit hippy-dippy, then he became a proper revolutionary (hey, he nearly joined the IMG), then he went to America, became a bit Maoist, then he got drunk, then he locked himself in his room for five years, then he got shot, the end.

Lennon's socialism, such as it was, was initially inspired by a hatred of dusty, arbitrary authority, which there was a lot in the forties and fifties, a democratic impulse. At school it was a case of a bright but wild mind refusing to bend to the academic factory. Lucky for him (and several other well known British musicians) the British education system was headed in a liberal direction, Art School opened the eyes and minds of thousands of young men and women who otherwise would not ever be touched by fine arts and intellectualism.

On an immediate, personal level the stark contradiction between the positive and negative aspects of his self-image drove his often extreme behaviour. At a grander level his encounter with LSD simultaneously inflated his self-importance and his sympathy for the underdog, which combined to produce his late-sixties messianic tom foolery, jetting around the world selling love and peace like he and Yoko had personally invented the concepts.

What is consistent about Lennon's revolutionism is the idea that revolution comes from within, revolution is inseparable from personal release. Lennon's finest work is tinged with a sense of anger, pain and above all bondage, whether hidden by cliché, such as Yet It Is, or Tell Me Why, or blatant and obsessive, as in I Want You (she's so heavy).

Revolution 9 is a positive to Revolution's negative; what was 'revolution' in his mind's eye? Revolution for John Lennon was a force within, dwelling in a person's past. OK, we would add that revolution is about much more, but no true revolution has happened without millions of people discovering new and unforseen things about themselves, previously latent and hidden.

In this regard whenever John Lennon addressed the idea of social change (which he stopped doing shortly after he was removed to America) he was a consistent revolutionary. Ian MacDonald describes Revolution 9 as a melange of the sounds a post-war infant would have heard wandering about their home on a summer's afternoon. Of course we wouldn't want to hold the song down to one simple meaning. It is clear the listener is being guided through vivid sound images and emotions which can only be half-comprehended in the instant.

Revolution 9n takes the listener to the very bottom of John Lennon's mind, the basis of an imagination which has moved millions.

Mo' Monbiot

Another issue the Monbiot article shows up is the question of education. How many people have a basic understanding of what global climate change involves and concerns? A fair few, but probably fewer than you think. How many people could explain clearly and concisely the relationship between the diminishing Article ice sheet and potentially colder winters in Britain? Probably very, very few.

This is a matter of education. Popular scientific understanding is already too low. This government's eager vandalising of the education system will reduce this even further. How much scientific endeavour provides immediate profit? Well, there is no immediate profit without years and years of research.

The three crises of capitalism, recession, war and long-term ecological damage require democratic solutions. Even with all the popular confusion regarding class and class struggle (economics made manifest) if the potential in our society is unlocked by a mass upsurge in democracy, I think we could quite easily and quickly solve our economic problems. The struggle against climate change will be much more long and difficult.

Relevant to yr interests

Check out this week's Monbiot article. Our favourite loose cannon has hit the target, what does all this cold weather have to do with climate change? Quite a lot. Firstly, this is why we emphasise climate change, not global warming. The global climate is a fascinating system, which we only roughly understand and certainly can have no hope of controlling, especially if we drastically alter it.

Britain, the landmass, is in an especially interesting place. London is roughly parallel to central Canada. Our local climate is temperate, not subarctic, because of systems of heat distribution; most important is the Gulf Stream, which picks up heat in the Gulf of Mexico and forces it through the 90 mile straits between Florida and Cuba, ending up on the European coast.

In the winter we generally sit between warm air from the Azores and cold air from the Arctic. When there is a large pressure difference warm air advances toward the British Isles, when there is little difference in pressure cold air from the north tends to dominate. A key input in this system is artic ice. Ice reflects heat while seawater absorbs and re-radiates it. The arctic ice pack is shrinking. This is reducing the temperature difference between Azores and Artic air, allowing cold air to dominate.

The point about a changing climate is the relative unpredictability of the effect of changing even a single input, such as the amount of sunlight reflected by ice, has. Most human civilisation is based on or near water, either rivers or seas. We are dependent on a reliable climate for reliable food and water. If we mess with our climate we will introduce a number of radical and potentially dangerous variables into the other great system, human society.

As a final note, it is testament to how relatively abstract this subject still is to many people, the fact that climate change deniers are able to obfuscate, confuse and throw up smokescreens. It is still perhaps an issue for propaganda rather than agitation.

Smash the EDL

Make that a new year's resolution...!

Chris Renton (holding the placard) is a member of the BNP and is racist. Renton and his scummy ilk are still prowling our streets. On February 5th they intend to launch a pogrom in Luton (as they did in 2009). Be there to stop them.

Merry Christmas - we know where you live, luv, yr police force

If any picture sums up why the British police are rushing headlong toward murder it's this picture, near midnight, on Westminster Bridge, 10 days ago. Thank goodness no one was crushed or forced off the bridge. It is still an outrage, however:

Student Danielle Smith, 21, from Dagenham, studying creative and professional writing at the University of East London, said she was squeezed so tightly during the kettle that the day after it felt "like I'd been in a car accident".

"I couldn't move, and it hurt to laugh, breathe, sleep, sit down and eat. To do anything just really hurt. For days after I took as many painkillers as I could a day. I had real trouble standing in such a tight space. Again people were getting crushed. I had a shield in my face a few times. The police just hit those closest to them, they weren't really thinking about who was in the wrong or right."

The police must be stopped.

The music of Planet Camden

O'Xorgonax Canon,
The Aldebaran Symphony,
The Martian Lament,
March of the Yanqui,
Eine Kleine Chopstick Music,
Requiem for a Drone,
Gesang der Junglinge,
Moonlight in Gory,
Carmen Rides Out,
Carry On Up the Choir,
Rhapsody in Grey,
I Was a Teenage Biologist,
Dance of the Skeletons,
The Rites of Sprung,
The Circle of Loaf,
The Old Grey Thistle Whistle Test
Three Blind Mice,
Bodger and Badger,
The Ballad of Somesuch, ]
Ziggy Sawdust,
Baby on Board,
Nuts in May,
Limestone Blues,
On the Toad Again,
Let it C,
Who Put the Arsenic in the Cookie Jar?
The Chicken Song,
The Galaxy Song,
The Blobby Song,
Song of the Corn,
Can I Borrow (your girlfriend's A to Z)?
I Don't Like (fax machines),
Hannah Montana (Makes Me Wanna Smoke Crack),
911 is a Joke and 537 is a Prime Number.

Merry Christmas: Love, Your Government

xxxo.

The BBC vs democracy

The interview on BBC News of Jody McIntyre by Ben Brown was incredible, for several reasons. First of all lets pay a little homage to Jody for his calm but forceful reasoning. We should also take time to be aghast at the smarmy flannel peddled as robust questioning by an alleged professional journalist. The BBC is little more than Tory Pravda these days.

But third and nerd, I was reminded by Brown's inflammatory suggestions regarding McIntyre's being a revolutionary (or not), of a small but very refined argument in Lenin's The Proletarian Revolution and the Renegade Karl Kautsky. It's an old argument filed under a dusty title for sure, but it holds an excellent definition of dictatorship, which, amongst other things, sheds light on the true infamy of the Brown/McIntyre interview.

The first definition, a colloquial definition, is that dictatorship is arbitrary rule. This is a reasonable day to day definition; on the face of it everyone prefers democratic rights to arbitrary state force. But there is another definition of dictatorship, one which starts to clear up confusing aspects of our society.

Dictatorship also means the primacy of one part of the population over all others. We currently live in a capitalist dictatorship. This means, for example, this year after a four week splurge of democracy culminating in a national day of voting, when the votes were being counted and seats in parliament being assigned, every pundit and newscaster was asking whether this result will satisfy “the markets”.

This is the polite word in our free and fair media for capitalist class, who are deliberately confused a mysterious force and/or angry god called “the markets”, so as we can all pretend our society is democratically run, it's just these unavoidable crises and contingencies which demand we do this, cut that and abolish the other. As so many people have been realising, the democratic right to peaceful demonstration is the right for our representatives to ignore the people and plough on with their pre-determined agenda.

There is another, even better definition, which crops up in the previously mentioned pamphlet. Lenin contrasts rule by law, which involves formal rights for all members of society, to rule by dictatorship, which is synonymous with rule by force, civil war, revolution. This is where in the course of struggle one part of the population denies formal rights to another for the purposes of winning that war. Working class dictatorship is formalised by workers councils or communes, which grant rights to the poorer sections of the population, but excludes the rich from even voting. This is, of course, a progressive form of 'dictatorship'. For reasons of clarity and politeness we'd probably now call it workers power...

At this very moment the police are sounding out ideas regarding the application of water cannons and the banning of demonstrations in Central London. This is all justified with proper Whitehall technocratic logic, the alleged strain of these demonstrations is inhibiting the police's ability to fight crime. That's right, we're back to the second definition of dictatorship, private property trumps democratic rights.

When Ben Brown suggests that Jody McIntyre possibly being a 'revolutionary' could negate his right not to be assaulted by police officers (who, by the way, are also supposed to be subject to the rule of law), he is proposing rule by force. In Ben Brown's world if you are deemed a revolutionary your rights end. If rights do not apply equally to each and all in a society you don't have a democracy, you have a dictatorship, a regressive dictatorship in this case.

For no raisin!

That's the single.

New hash for old beans

I think Nicholas Copernicus' revolution in astronomy illustrates a common moment in the development of science and humanities. People see the new and original overwhelmingly in the context of the old. As more and more was discovered about the motion of the planets the more astronomers had to develop increasingly convoluted and fanciful ways to explain this motion within the ptolemaic system. By assuming something very simple (and to us now very obvious), that the Earth went round the Sun, he was able to cut a swathe through old ideas to reach the truth.

I am currently re-reading Isaac Deutscher's biography of Leon Trotsky. It is excellent literature. In particular it shows how the revolution, or two simultaneous revolutions as Trotsky correctly predicted, pulled in opposite directions. Therein lay the tremendous drama of the revolution. In the absence of an international development the Bolsheviks, who rose to power because they were the only group to recognise the dual nature of the revolution and act accordingly, were forced to suppress this contradiction. The longer Russia's isolation went on the further they were compelled subdue all independent forces, and in the end themselves.

They killed the goose that laid the golden egg. How you deal with this fact is actually fairly indicative of who you are, politically and philosophically. Deutscher's biography is friendly to Trotsky. He certainly seemed to wish the revolution had gained a stronger basis by becoming international. It is an honest account but gets caught in the web that trapped the real-life opposition in Russia.

It is like a discussion I had recently about the notional aims of the French revolution. The revolution, especially the long revolution of 1789-1871, did indeed centralise the French state, which in turn gave room to French capitalist development. But it was not the 'aim' of the revolution, far from it. Centralisation is not a marker of a bourgeois revolution. The are powerful capitalist countries that did not centralise but federate, example the USA, Germany. The marker of a bourgeois revolution is the replacement of feudal and/or colonial rights with bourgeois rights.

Just the same as a socialist revolution is not completed because private property is replaced by public/state property. It is a funny point when the Russian Opposition can critically support Stalin's “left turn” of 1928 because it attacked small-scale private farming in favour of state-led industrialisation but did not allow working class democracy. If the state owns the means of production but the working class does not own the state in what sense is this “left turn” socialism in action? Of course, if we leave the matter at "private property" aren't we guilty of the same abstraction Marx accused Proudhon of making. What kind of private property are we talking about? In British history the destruction of small-scale private farming is associated with the rise of capitalism.

This is not to knock Deutscher or his subject, that would be very silly, but just to point out how lucky we are, in a sense, to be able to have a clearer perspective.

All together now: "It's not a long way to a police state, not a long way to go!"

Home Secretary, Theresa May wants police to use water cannons on demonstrators (and, who knows, maybe strikers as well). In actual fact they already do, in Northern Ireland. Yes folks we're going to be policed RUC style until we learn our place in society (to suffer and lose out, apparently).

Water cannons are not safe, they are not a cuddly alternative to rubber bullets. Take this example:

The man whose bleeding eyes shocked Germany in the wake of last week’s clash between Stuttgart 21 protestors and police has been identified as 66-year-old Dietrich Wagner. The pensioner was hit full in the face by a water cannon blast...

Wagner was part of a large crowd of protestors who blockaded the Baden-Württemberg capital’s Schlossgarten last Thursday in an effort to stop developers cutting down trees as part of the Stuttgart 21 rail project. In a dramatic escalation of tensions, at least 116 people were injured when police turned water cannons, pepper spray and batons on the crowd.

Egon Georg Weidle, senior doctor at Stuttgart’s Katharinen Hospital, diagnosed Wagner with “serious eye injuries.”

As well as suffering major bruising on both sides, Wagner's eyelids were torn, and on one side, part of his orbital bone – which encases the eye – was fractured. The retina on the same side also suffered suspected damage.

The lenses of his eyes were damaged and will need to be replaced by artificial lenses.

Yep, it's come to this...

Anti-terrorist officers descend on a school, pluck a 12 year old boy out of class and (without informing his parents) threaten him with arrest. Why? Because he tried to organise a lobby of David Cameron's office.

Nicky Wishart, a pupil at Bartholomew School, Eynsham, Oxfordshire, organised the event on Facebook to highlight the plight of his youth centre, which is due to close in March next year due to budget cuts.

The protest, which was due to take place today, has attracted over 130 people on Facebook, most of whom are children who use youth centres in Cameron's constituency, Witney.

Wishart said that after the school was contacted by anti-terrorist officers, he was taken out of his English class on Tuesday afternoon and interviewed by a Thames Valley officer at the school in the presence of his head of year. During the interview, Wishart says that the officer told him that if any public disorder took place at the event he would be held responsible and arrested.

Yup, the lad wanted to stop his youth centre from being closed. If you want to know just how innocent this event was going to be:

Speaking about the youth club, [Virginia] Phelps, [Nicky's mother] added, "Over the last few months, the kids have been trying to keep the youth club open, raising money by cleaning cars. They've raised £140. Through the club they've been had all sorts of experiences that I couldn't afford to give them myself."

But the good news is:

Despite the police visit, Wishart said he would continue with the picket today and he would be delivering a letter to Cameron's staff about the youth centre closure.

Well done Nicky, and I hope it goes well and plenty of people attend. The Thames Valley Police should be ashamed. Yet more evidence, I afraid, the thin blue line see themselves as being here to protect 'democracy' from the people. For shame.

The season of goodwill to all men (and students)

Police body armour and shields being prepared right now at Westminster to protect 'democracy' from the people. Isn't it a wonderful world?

Aliens on Earth

Not quite, although NASA has found an organism unique in biology:

A bacterium discovered in a Californian lake appears to be able to use arsenic in its molecular make-up instead of phosphorus – even incorporating the toxic chemical into its DNA. That's significant because it goes against the general rule that all terrestrial life depends on six elements: oxygen, hydrogen, carbon, nitrogen, sulphur and phosphorus. These are needed to build DNA, proteins and fats and are some of the biological signatures of life that scientists look for on other planets.

Something new and interesting to add to the algebraic calculation of life in the universe. Our likely first contact will be with microscopic alien life, probably an extremophile, a creature that enjoys vastly different conditions to (what are considered to be) normal lifeforms. The generally agreed formula for life on Earth, may well be quite narrow compared to the rest of the universe. Is it possible for nature to create a complex, even intelligent extremophile?

Discoveries such as this certainly lower the odds on finding life on a place such a Titan. It has prebiotic conditions, a dense, stable atmosphere, rainfall and large liquid bodies (of a certain type). The only trouble is Titan's average surface temperature is -179 degrees centigrade and the flowing liquid is mostly methane and ethane. Could life thrive and survive in a medium other than water? It's a nice thought.

May I recommend

Roobin's Tales of Interest.

Thoughts on language

I recently took a copy of Socialism: utopian and scientific for journey reading. It is a fine book. My particular copy was an Bookmarks reprint. There is a phrase in the (non-Engels) introduction that has been bugging me for a while. Apparently what's so impressive about the pamphlet is its "deeply historical structure". Its structure is three short chapters; a "deeply historical" structure? Surely what the introducing author meant was method, or perhaps subject matter.

It got me thinking about the tension in language between language as expression and language as system. The author was probably thinking of Fred Engels thought as a three-dimensional object, a compliment no doubt, but slovenly language. A monolingual culture, such as ours, is much more inclined to regard language as a form of individual expression, rather than a system of rules. If there is one word to use then you use it. A multilingual person has to compare the relative positions of various words (in conversation they often slip between formal languages as and when it seems appropriate). They experience language much more as a system of rule.

Hence, for example, its common for English people to find linguistic pedantry either humorous or annoying. Rules don't matter, so long as you get the drift of what I am saying etc... It is also hard for them to explain what very basic, heavy duty words mean, words like "what" or "very" or "the". The word "set" apparently takes up to 60,000 words to define in the OED, could you even give one precise definition without looking it up.

More humour, who'd've thunk?

A diverting little piece on international humour. The basic theory is if you want to learn about a particular culture the quickest way is to learn the humour. The author is a Middle East correspondent:

People in the Arab world have to be careful about telling such jokes, and also about laughing at them. You need to make sure the joker is not in fact an agent provocateur for the secret service. But people joke anyway, and this resilience is a great thing to watch, whether the joke is good or bad.

I have always felt that the foreign pages of a good newspaper should feature a jokes section from all over the world as a humanising counterweight to all the reports that stress the differences between there and here. Jokes make you realise: of course, these are people like me. They have to survive in very different circumstances, but they are people all the same. A reporter friend who works in Afghanistan tells me that underneath their burqas Afghan women trade very cruel jokes about the size of the male reproductive organ of the Taliban...

That is perhaps the most striking thing about humour in the Middle East. Most of the time the joke is not on the enemy. As far as I could tell, Palestinians rarely make fun of Jewish settlers, nor the other way around. Instead, people seem to prefer irony...

There's then a list of correspondents and their favourite local jokes. They're not offensive, although some are pointed. For example, from Pakistan:

Robber: "Give me all your money."

Zardari: "Do you know who I am?"

Robber: "No."

Zardari: "I am Asif Ali Zardari, president of Pakistan."

Robber: "OK, give me all my money."

The theory seems quite sound. Human beings are the intellectual species. The subject of our enquiry is pretty much the gap between theory and practice, between our perceptions and ideas and reality. This is also the basis of comedy, see above, the President of the Republic has less honour than a common thief. The local variety of humour shines a light on the local way of thinking, understanding, closing the gap between theory and practice.

Sick humour

I watched the first episode of Frankie Boyle's Tramadol Nights a few nights ago. It was a strange mess, neither stand up nor sketch show, which I think showed up Frankie as the most talented, as opposed to best, comedian in Britain. There were a few good sketches (Untitled Street was excellent) and a few good bits of stand up in the first half. The second half slipped downhill rapidly with an astonishingly racist spoof of The Green Mile. Not good, especially for a supposed devotee of Chomsky and Monbiot.

Taken at face value Frankie Boyle would seem like a skilled shock-jock. I am of the belief, however, that Frankie Boyle (or at least the man we see on TV) is a character. If you miss this you miss a lot of the point. His shtick is corrosive frustration, a lot like another toxic act Derek and Clive.

Unlike, say, Jimmy Carr (who Boyle used to write jokes for), Frankie's act is three dimensional. Whenever he refers directly to himself it's always about how abject his condition is. The most obvious example would be his notorious joke about footage of Saddam Hussein's execution; is there nothing he won't masturbate to? It was the same with Derek and Clive, two toilet attendants mired in endless frustration.

Comedy of this type treads a fine line. If it gets aimless then it does become offensive. If the character of 'Frankie Boyle' is developed his comedy will come on leaps and bounds, in my opine. Then again he's probably making fat piles of cash now. Why would he change?

Planet Camden - an interview

Many people puzzle over just how it started. What's your take?

There's no 'take' as far as I'm concerned. The managers at the Central Library wanted to put all the cleaning staff on half-time. We were all paid by the hour. None of us could possibly live on half-wages, could you? No. So, we had to do something about it. My Daughter, Lucy started it all.

But, what prompted her to act?

Haven't I just explained to you...?

As opposed to doing nothing. No one's compelled to fight back, are they?

Well, she'd, um, she'd discovered something, a pamphlet about the Old Philosophy. I mean she's a reader, she always was, but didn't I didn't know she'd been reading up on, on that.

Can you tell me more about the Old Philosophy?

It's much more common that people, people not in the know, if you know what I mean, it's much more common, widespread than you'd think. It came from Earth, of all places. Can you believe it? It's about work and exploitation and how people can fight back and assert their dignity. That's how I saw it, anyway.

The way we found out about it was typical, I think. When we were young, my Husband and I, we couldn't afford to go to any fancy college. We went to a Working Educational Society, it was in a community centre, back on Erin. Only a small thing. It all happened after work. You had to pay for the books, the room and so on, but the lecturers were volunteers, usually amateurs, though sometimes we'd get university professors come down. I remember, once, we had a professor from the local university, a respected chemist, do An Introduction to Biology. We paid for him to come, although he agreed to halve his hourly rate. He started by saying what a privilege and an honour this was but how sorry he was the meeting would be a makeshift:

“This is not my subject of expertise, please excuse me if I vulgarise or gloss over anything”.

Someone in the class immediately shot back.

“You're paid to know. Get on with it”.

That was the attitude we had. The right attitude, I think.

Back to the point. I had a history class. We were studying with a book called A People's History of the Galaxy. It was an inspiring read, how ordinary people not only stood up to empires but started to build the world afresh, in their own image. When your husband to be is out driving a bus while you're still fruit picking on an asteroid it's... it's a mind blowing thing... Well, it made me look at the world differently.

I told the lecturer this, she was very pleased. Eventually John and I got in with a reading group. There were fragments of this stuff, branches all over the galaxy, which amazed me even more. There were only a few dozen of us, but the discussions we had were amazing. John, I remember, he gobbled up all this stuff about economics. He became something of an expert on it.

When the recession hit Erin we tried to put some of this into action. We were naïve, so green. Some of the group got arrested for “industrial incitement” (our leaflets were blamed for a strike in a brewery). John got blacklisted from the transport system. Then I was pregnant with Lucy. Things were pretty bleak, so we decided to leave Erin and take our chances elsewhere.

We never really found anything like the Working Educational Centre on Camden. There was a whole different culture here, although there was that movement for a while, Java-Borneo solidarity. People here seemed quiet and subservient. We kept some of the books but we both dropped out, effectively.

Of course now I know we were wrong. Lucy showed us.

Child of Thatcher or Son of Brown...?

Or freaky mutant cross-breed of both?

Something completely else

Remember this guy, remember the sushi and the polonium 210? Ah, it takes me back... 2006, when people had things like 'jobs' and 'money', and Russia was undergoing an oil-based renaissance.

Well, Daniel Fried, the assistant secretary of state at the time thought this couldn't have gone ahead without Vladimir Putin's OK. Well, duh, you might say. Bit this is the benefit of the Wikileaks episode. Diplomacy is not a dangerous, high-flown business. It is was and always will be low level spying (so long as it it continues). What's truly upsetting the US government is people no know the extent of their cynicism in international affairs.

Other news. The racist EDL are putting out faked Unite Against Fascism leaflets, suggesting the coalition supports Muslims Against Crusades (another Anjem Choudhary front). Beware.

Elsewhere, Hugo Chavez has told citizens of Caracas forced out of their homes by flooding they can stay in the presidential palace until they are found new homes. He also ordered the buildings inside Tiuna Fort, Venezuela's military nerve centre to be turned over for the same use. Whatever you might think of the Bolivarian revolution, are these the actions of a supposed dictator?

Still the only topic in town

Yesterday student demonstrators stormed Oxford County Council offices as part of a national day of action against tuition fees. Tory councillor Keith Mitchell described them as "ugly and badly dressed". This is he. Pot meet kettle.

Speaking of kettle here's an edited version of yesterday's London demo; imperial stormtroopers were left floundering.



This is the demo remixed Benny Hill style.