22 October 2009 – 10:45 am
June? June?
Oh well – I’m back, probably.
What’s been happening? Looking back at the last two posts, both those papers got rejected; in one case it was more of a “revise and resubmit”, so I’m not particularly distressed. The other was more of a “hit the back wall without bouncing” rejection, which did stop me in [...]
A quick post to register a rather striking piece of news (via), which didn’t seem to get much notice in the British media. First, here’s the complete text of a piece on torture from the January 2008 Washington Monthly:
According to the latest polls, two-thirds of the American public believes that torturing suspected terrorists to gain [...]
20 November 2008 – 9:42 pm
Airmiles was quoted in the LRB the other week:
it was clear soon after 9/11 that the Bush administration … believed that the awesome demonstration of American military muscle would intimidate present and potential enemies everywhere. The administration had its own intellectual cheerleaders and experts on the Middle East: Bernard Lewis, for instance, whose pet conviction [...]
Eliot Weinberger’s Obama v. Clinton: A Retrospective was clearly written in the heat of (interim) triumph:
Just when you thought [Clinton] had hit bottom, she went even lower. She tried to cast Obama as a scary black man who, as subliminally suggested in her infamous (and mercilessly parodied) ‘3 a.m.’ ad, would break into your house [...]
Counting films on TV & video, the last five films I’ve seen (from most recent) are
The Spiderwick Chronicles
Pride and Prejudice
High School Musical 2
High School Musical
Vantage Point
You may sense a theme emerging. Spiderwick is certainly a film I wouldn’t have seen if I weren’t a parent, but as such it was much better than I’d expected [...]
Andy draws our attention to this statement by Alex Callinicos (‘for the SWP Central Committee’):
as we put it in our ‘International Perspectives 2005’, ‘if the movements are most advanced in Latin America, the most important front in the struggle against US imperialism is in Iraq.’ It is the resistance in Iraq that is in the [...]
13 September 2005 – 12:20 pm
Katrina update. Back here, I wrote:
Louisiana, we now know (thanks to China at Lenin’s Tomb) was one of the areas where the ‘free market’ reforms of FEMA took effect: in 2004, a private consultancy called IEM was paid half a million tax dollars to develop a ‘Catastrophic Hurricane Disaster Plan‘. It’s not clear whether this [...]
6 September 2005 – 10:30 pm
One possible reason why the aftermath of Katrina has been so dreadful is provided by the piece by Jamie I quoted earlier. There’s something weirdly soviet about all this. We’re seeing this immensely powerful country which has somehow stopped working. Perhaps we should take this image literally: perhaps the reason why it looks as if [...]
Here’s a depressing thought. As I write, Electoral Calculus is predicting, on the basis of opinion polls to date, that Labour will win a majority of 142. Where in 2001 they took 42% of the vote and 403 seats (61.2% of the House), they’re currently set fair to take 38.8% of the vote and 394 [...]
