"When fascism comes to America, it will be wrapped in the flag and carrying the cross."
-- Sinclair Lewis
Friday, May 27, 2016
The Men Who Live As Dogs
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-by Noah I’ve heard of women who think all men are dogs. Even Hillary Clinton famously once said that her husband was a “hard dog to keep on the porch.” So, when my wife sent me this article from England’s Guardian newspaper today about men dressing up as dogs and going about their day, naturally, my ears perked up. It seems that in England, there are more than a few men who like to take being a good little doggie to bold new dimensions; literally donning rubber doggie suits and plastic dog face masks to dress up as dogs-- big, life size human dogs or “Human Pups,” to use the proper terminology. Read the article. Better yet, if you are extra curious, there will soon be the release of a documentary on the subject called “The Secret Life Of The Human Pups.”. To quote the Guardian’s article-
Secret Life Of The Human Pups is a sympathetic look at the world of pup play movement that grew out of the BDSM community and has exploded in the last 15 years as the internet made it easier to reach likeminded people. While the pup community is a broad church, human pups tend to be male, gay, have an interest in dressing in leather, wear dog-like hoods, enjoy tactile interactions like stomach rubbing or ear tickling, play with chew toys, eat out of bowls and are often in a relationship with their human ‘handlers’.
Far be it from me to be judgmental. After all, there are far, far worse things to be. I don’t have to name them but, having worked for four major corporations, I can tell you that the halls of our glass towers are rife with much dog-like activity, complete with an alpha male or (once in a while) alpha female in the corner office. There is lots of panting, eager to please lapping, rolling over, begging for treats, and most of all butt sniffing, lots and lots of butt sniffing; and don’t forget the quizzical, ear-twitching blank stares or those who just don’t get it, whatever it is. So, at least these Englishmen who dress up as dogs are being a little more honest about who they really are. In fact, although this activity seems quintessentially English-quirky to me, it’s just another form of happiness-inducing escapism from one’s office job or the other tedious or mundane aspects of one’s life. One man, Tom, a theatre engineer who was interviewed for the article says as much when he says of his puppy time, ”You’re not worrying about money, or food, or work.” For Kaz, another pup in the article, being a pup is more than just a fun mask. It’s how he identifies. It’s who he see himself as.
Even when I worked in PC World, I would sometimes walk up to people and nip at their shirt. I got in trouble once. Someone walked into the PC repair centre and I had part of their dad’s computer in my mouth. But other staff knew I was like that to everyone. They didn’t find it weird.
Of course, they didn’t find it weird. It happened in England! England is where weird was invented! I’m a big fan of Monty Python and I’ve always said that those genius Monty Python guys were just writing about what they saw every day, all day. Two of the companies I worked for were English. I know this first hand. I can’t imagine nipping at your co-worker’s shirt would go over at a PC World computer place in America, and, certainly, ol’ Kaz the dog should not bother applying for a job at Chick-fil-A or volunteer for a Republican Party job any time soon. But, being a natural born Snark, I do have some questions to pose. These questions came to my mind as I read the Guardian’s article. The first three are especially relevant given the current Republican obsession with all things urination. Here goes:
1) Where do people who self-identify as dogs pee? 2) Can they use human rest rooms, or must they pee on fire hydrants? 3) If they can use human rest rooms, which ones? 4) When traveling, are they restricted to flying only in the cargo compartment? 5) Would Mitt Romney tie them to the roof of the family car? 6) Eating: Do they live on Alpo and, if so, are they getting proper nutrition? 7) Has their sense of smell vastly improved? 8) If they shit on the sidewalk, must their “masters” pick up after them? 9) Are the British Queen’s famous corgis real dogs or just royal relatives in puppy costumes? 10) How long before there is a restaurant in some posh London suburb that caters to human pups?
I may not wear dog-like hoods or masks but I myself often eat from a bowl. I play with my toys. I have more than a few leather jackets and, I’m certainly in a relationship with a human handler. At least, I’m sure that’s how she looks at it. So, live and let live; dog years or human years.
Assisted-Suicide Legislation Fails In Britain But Passes In California
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There are a lot of routine questions you get asked-- sometimes over and over and over-- by hospital staff. When I first started going to City of Hope to get treated for cancer, one of the questions they asked everyone every time you walked into an office is if you had been to West Africa in the last couple of months. I said "no" every time and so did everyone else. Once I told the sleepy clerk I had been in Mali and he ignored me. (I had been there a couple of years earlier, pre-whatever the disease is they were worried about; funny that I can't even remember now.)
Another question they would ask, although in a more serious medical way, when they took your vital signs, is if you had thoughts of suicide. I always said no. I never had. Eventually-- as the chemo, which is cumulative in effect, started taking over-- I did sometimes want to talk with someone, like Roland or Digby or my sister, if it was worth it. Was going through the treatment the right decision? I didn't know it would be so bad, so painful, so debilitating. Would I ever get better? If I did, would my life me so impaired that it wouldn't be worth living? The neuropathy, nerve damage and a side effect of Velcade, one of the chemo drugs, sometimes never goes away. Would it be worth living? Sometimes I wasn't sure-- like when I went blind one day. That was temporary, but I had no way of knowing that at the time. Or when I couldn't walk-- also temporary, but again, who knew? I felt I had had a rich, wonderful, blessed and joyful, full life. Did I need to torture myself with barbaric treatments that could leave me a wreck? A lot of the time I was on heavy drugs and could barely think straight. And chemo-brain is... very real, real enough so that you don't know what is real and what you imagined. Did Michael come visit me in the hospital, or did I just dream it? How would I know without embarrassing us both by asking him?
I'm glad I didn't go down a path that led to suicide. The treatment was the right thing -- even though the neuropathy is still with me and I have no way of knowing what the future holds. But while I was questioning my decisions, I found out that gigantic numbers of our parents do opt to end it on their own terms. I never knew that my sisters helped our mother escape the torment of terminal cancer. And when I told one of my best friends, he told me that he had done the same thing for his mom, and that it isn't as uncommon as I imagined. The big news out of Britain yesterday was awesome. Labour had elected Jeremy Corbyn leader-- the furthest of the four candidates from centrist shill Tony Blair. But for many Britons there was much more profound news-- and it was really bad. The House of Commons had voted 330-118 against right-to-die legislation meant to allow some terminally ill adults to end their lives with medical supervision. 74% of MPs voted against this bill, compared with 72% back in 1997.
Under the proposals, people with fewer than six months to live could have been prescribed a lethal dose of drugs, which they had to be able to take themselves. Two doctors and a High Court judge would have needed to approve each case.
Although the Archbishop of Canterbury, Justin Welby, said the bill would mean that suicide was "actively supported" instead of being viewed as a tragedy, one of his predecessors, George Carey, backed assisted dying, saying that there's nothing dignified about experiencing pain at its most awful. And while the Royal College of Nursing is neutral on the issue, the British Medical Association, the doctors' union, opposes all forms of assisted dying. PM David Cameron opposed the bill. Polling, though, shows that as many as 82% of Britons support assisted dying.
The news on this front was much better from California, where late Friday night the state legislature passed a bill legalizing medically assisted suicide. If Governor Brown signs the bill, physicians will be allowed to prescribe life-ending drugs to Californians diagnosed as having less than six months to live. Co-author Sen. Lois Wolk (D-Davis): "Californians want us, the Legislature, to act to eliminate the needless pain and prolonged suffering of those who are dying." It passed 23-14, only one Democrat voting with the Republicans against it.
Four states-- Oregon, Washington, Montana and Vermont-- already allow physicians to prescribe life-ending medication to some patients... Brown has given little indication of his intentions. The California bill is modeled on the law in Oregon, with several notable changes. The California law would expire after 10 years and have to be reapproved, and doctors would have to consult in private with the patient desiring to die, as part of an effort to ensure that no one would be coerced to end his or her life-- a primary concern for opponents of the law. Leaders of the “death with dignity” movement said they hoped the passage of the California law could be a turning point. “It allows for individual liberty and freedom, freedom of choice,” said Mark Leno, a Democrat from San Francisco who compared the issue to gay marriage. Since Oregon approved the country’s first assisted-suicide law in 1997, supporters have struggled to expand their reach, amid opposition from religious groups, some medical organizations and lawmakers whose skepticism crosses party lines. “I’m not going to push the old or the weak out of this world,” Senator Ted Gaines, a Republican, said on the floor. “I think that could be the unintended consequence of this legislation.” ...[B]ackers of the bill have discussed bringing the issue to the voters through a ballot measure if Mr. Brown vetoes it. A Gallup poll this year found that nearly 70 percent of Americans support physician-assisted suicide, up 10 percentage points from last year.
As we mentioned yesterday, the right-of-center, Wall Street-owned New Dems are making a play to assert themselves within the Democratic congressional caucus. They are following in the footsteps of the Tony Blair New Labour wing of the UK's Labour Party, which took over the party but has more recently lost support by inching further and further right. The New Labour dominance may be ending, though. Labour Party leadership elections-- in the wake of the 2015 general election defeat and the subsequent resignation of Ed Miliband-- begin Friday (August 14) and close September 10. And the front runner is much-admired leftist icon and establishment outsider Jeremy Corbyn of Islington. From the first day he announced he would run, he said he would campaign on a "clear anti-austerity platform." Obviously, this alarmed the New Labour faction.
The poll suggests that Mr Corbyn has built up at 32 percent lead over Mr Burnham, up from 17 percent in the most recent YouGov poll one month ago. Mr Corbyn is now on 53 percent, while Mr Burnham has slipped to 21. The survey also shows that Yvette Cooper has also slipped by two points to 18 percent. Liz Kendall [a New Labour/Blair loyalist], seen as the most right-wing candidate on the ballot, is on just 8 percent. Six out of ten of Mr Corbyn's supporters were newly registered voters-- people who have signed up for a basic £3 Labour membership which allows them to take part in the leadership bid. This will raise concerns among party members and supporters of other candidates over the election process. It has been suggested that members of far-left parties, the Green party and even the Conservative party have paid the £3 fee to ensure that Mr Corbyn wins the leadership. Mr Corbyn is most popular among Trade Unions sign ups, with 67 percent of them supporting his bid. 55 percent of all new sign ups also back him, while 49 percent of Labour members do. Mr Corbyn has also proved extremely popular with women. YouGov not that women who are eligible to vote are "dramatically" more likely to back the 66-year-old. Although Mr Corbyn is still the most popular among both sexes, Andy Burnham polls better with men with 24 per cent backing him, compared to 17 per cent of women. His success comes despite a series of Labour figures lining up to attack his bid. This week Tony Blair's former spin doctor Alastair Campbell is the latest to say that a Corbyn leadership will damage the Labour party.
Like Bernie, Corbyn is packing every venue he campaigns in-- and none of his right-leaning rivals are coming anywhere close. Of course, politicians (and media) who are in the pocket of the finance sector have been on a vicious tirade against Corbyn. And predictably, the Murdoch-owned Wall Street Journal has joined the anti-Corbyn jihad. Comparing him to Hugo Chávez and using discredited Beltway framing, the Journal insists: "His rise has exposed deep rifts within Labour over whether it should vie with the center-right Conservatives for the voter-rich middle ground or take a more traditional tack to the left. The discord has spurred talk about the possibility of a party split as happened in the early 1980s-- after which Labour spent nearly two decades in opposition."
Alan Johnson, a former Labour home secretary, last week called on Mr. Corbyn’s supporters to “end the madness,” while a former Blair adviser dubbed politicians who supported his nomination “morons.” Mr. Blair-- who led the party to three national election victories-- has also weighed in. Those who say their hearts tell them to vote for Mr. Corbyn should “get a transplant,” said Mr. Blair during a speech last month. [Corbyn said that he'll wait for the release of the Chilcot Inquiry into the Iraq War before commenting on Blair's remarks.] ...Like Bernie Sanders, a socialist candidate for the Democratic presidential nomination next year in the U.S., Mr. Corbyn has drawn enthusiastic crowds of young and old to political rallies with passionate attacks on the wealthy and big business, and won support among major unions and local party branches. Composer and record producer Brian Eno has backed him as someone who could inspire the disenchanted. Hundreds of people at the Corbyn rally in North London cheered when he said the British people have had enough of being told that cutting spending on social services ultimately helps the economy.
Nobel Prize-winning economist Joseph Stiglitz has endorsed Corbyn, pointing out that "The promises of New Labour in the UK and of the Clintonites in the US have been a disappointment." Musicians Billy Bragg and Brian Eno have also been outspoken in their backing for Corbyn, who has always described himself as "an anti-poverty campaigner" and supports a living wage, higher taxes on the richest Britons, free higher education, racial equality and renationalization of the railroads and utilities. He's admired as the Member of Parliament who has claimed the smallest amount of reimburseable expenses. He told The Guardian this summer that he doesn't spend a lot of money. "I lead a very normal life, I ride a bicycle and I don’t have a car." More important, he "doesn’t buy into the idea that Ed Miliband’s Labour had moved too far to the left," which is being promoted as conventional wisdom by New Labour and Conservatives and their media allies.
“It certainly wasn’t an ultra-left manifesto,” he says. “What was it proposing? A limited amount of public ownership of the national railways, which is actually very popular, quite good stuff on the minimum wage and so on, but on the economy, it wasn’t fundamentally redistributive, which is what we need to be putting forward. We live in a very unequal society.” The biggest problem, he says, was that Labour allowed the Tories to set the agenda on the economy and never offered an alternative narrative. “We’re very bad at asserting certain things. After the 2010 election and Liam Byrne’s note in the Treasury, it became in the public mind a fact that Labour spent too much and this became repeated all the time, unchallenged. And by the time we actually got round to an election five years later, there was an assumption that we admitted we’d spent too much. Actually, what did we spend too much on? The banking system collapsed because of a combination of a sub-prime mortgage crisis and deregulation. There was a lot of money spent buying out bank shares and buying out banks, a lot of money spent on quantitative easing to keep the money supply going, and now Osborne is selling off RBS shares at a loss and calling it a triumph for him and his government. So I think we have to be much more assertive as to what actually happened.” But he is unimpressed with the attacks on Miliband by New Labour’s old guard. “I obviously didn’t agree with everything he did or said in the campaign, but he stood up well and worked very hard and should be thanked for that. I’m not joining in personal attacks … I don’t do personal attacks.” It’s true, he doesn’t. Try as you might to get him to badmouth an individual politician, he won’t. Everything is about the policy.
Questions Remain: CNN Saw an ISIS flag at London's Gay Pride Parade and Wondered Where the Outrage Was
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"[T]he only bad mimicry I could see was CNN's impression of a reputable news organization."
-- Paul Coombs, creator of the London Pride dildo flag
by Noah
CNN wonders where the outrage is? I've got your outrage right here, CNN. I'm outraged that you exist, and I have been for over 20 years! Yeesh, and some people think that FOX is the only cable news outlet that sees things that are not there, jumps the shark, and reports on them.
Sure, FOX is the master of such things. What can you say about a "news" outlet that uses The Onion as a source?
Or uses the Duck Dynasty guy and Rudy Giuliani as experts on foreign policy? Not to mention using Nevada welfare rancher Cliven Bundy as its race relations correspondent?
But last Saturday CNN, reporting from London, spent over seven minutes reporting on and showing what they said was an ISIS flag being carried in the city's Gay Pride parade. The only thing was, the flag was not an ISIS flag but a black flag covered in depictions of dildos and butt plugs. And I still have some questions about the incident.
By COREY CHARLTON for MailOnline
CNN has mistaken a flag displaying sex toy symbols for that of terrorist organisation Islamic State in a report it aired on London's Gay Pride parade.
In an 'exclusive' report which ran on Saturday, a CNN correspondent went on air to claim she was the only one to notice an ISIS jihad flag being waved among gay pride crowds.
But to the broadcaster's embarrassment, the satirical flag was adorned not with Arabic lettering, but symbols of sex toys.
The report cut live to correspondent Lucy Pawle, who told viewers: 'This man dressed in black and white was waving what appears to be very bad mimicry, but a very clear attempt to mimic, what is the ISIS flag - the black and white flag with the distinctive lettering.'
She continues: 'If you look at the flag closely, it's clearly not Arabic, in fact it looks like it could be goobledegook, but it's very distinctive - the ISIS flag.'
Pawle then states that she appears to be 'the only person' to notice the extremist flag being waved on London's Regent St.
'I seem to be the only person who had spotted this, and nobody seems to be raising any questions or pointing it out, so I immediately went to an events organiser who said he didn't know anything about it.
'I also spoke to the police nearby, who weren't aware either.'
Eagle-eyed viewers were quick to castigate both the journalist and the broadcaster for being fooled.
Immediately following the gaffe, her Twitter page was inundated with viewers' pointing out the mistake.
I created the Isis dildo flag at London Pride to start a dialogue, not get a laugh
Paul Coombs
Guardian caption: "Paul Coombs knew his 'Dildosis' flag might inspire a little controversy at London Pride. He never expected that it would go viral. Photograph: Paul Coombs"
I spent the morning of London’s Pride parade hand-stitching dildos onto a flag.
I’d been using the sex-toy motif in my work before I made a flag of Isis out of them and brought it to the march. Previously, I’ve attached dildos onto postcards from each country where homosexuality is still illegal to point out that the laws of these places regards its gay residents as mere sex objects.
The decision to make the flag was a simple one: a sense of outrage at Isis’s brutal advance across North Africa, Libya, Syria and Iraq. Medieval ideologies and barbarism were being spread and recorded through that most modern of expressions, social media, with that flag ever-present. It has become a potent symbol of brutality, fear and sexual oppression. If I wanted to try and stimulate a dialogue about the ridiculousness of this ideology, the flag was key.
It was important that I didn’t try to replicate the writing on the flag, because the words and their subject – Islam – are not the target. But if I showed as little respect to this flag as Isis shows to the religion and people they claim to represent so that when people saw it they would think, “dildos”? Would that be a crazy idea?
The Pride festival is a pure celebration of the finest aspects of humanity: of tolerance, togetherness, acceptance and liberation, the polar opposite of what Isis stands for. If there was anywhere where my flag had a voice, it was there. And I had an invitation to march in the parade with a friend involved with “Alien Sex Club”, an art project exploring the HIV syndemic by John Walter.
We agreed we would gauge reaction to the flag from fellow marchers before we hit the main streets and the crowds, but the reaction was so good humored and understanding that any worries were dissipated in minutes. The tragedies in Tunisia, Kuwait and Lyon made the case for protesting against these murderers even stronger; defiance is the best form of remembrance. The flag was so clearly made of dildos that I never thought it could be mistaken for an actual Isis flag.
But 1.5 miles (2.4km) into the march, a gust of wind suddenly snapped the flagpole in two. I was wrestling with it when three or four police officers calmly appeared beside me.
Three policemen held out the flag and inspected it, grinning, acknowledging immediately that these were definitely dildos and butt plugs. They explained that they were getting reports that a man was carrying an Isis flag through the streets, a misconception that could easily put me in danger. They asked if I would keep the flag concealed. So I put it away.
Several hours passed before I noticed spreading news that CNN reported on the flag as though it was an actual Isis banner, not a piece of cloth covered in sex toys. #DildoIsis quickly started trending online. People made tribute dildo flags. But how could a report so hysterical and so clearly false possibly get onto the air, discussed by a terrorism expert? CNN correspondent Lucy Pawle described my flag as a “very bad mimicry” but the only bad mimicry I could see was CNN’s impression of a reputable news organization. What does this say about every other report that they broadcast? And why have they not mentioned it since? They seem to think that if nobody says anything about it then it can’t have really happened.
But oh, it did. On a message board someone posted: “Whenever I see the Isis flag anywhere, all I can see is dildos!” Mission accomplished.
BUT SOME QUESTIONS REMAIN
Was CNN just trying to outdo FOX or beat FOX at its own game? What does this say about the mindset at CNN that can equate the Gay Pride movement with ISIS and see a world where gays and terrorists are working together to take over the world? Especially since ISIS is known to kidnap gay people and toss them off of buildings.
In what universe would this CNN reportage make sense? No matter to the folks at CNN. They ran with it, even bringing in their terrorism expert, Peter Bergen, for commentary. The best satirists in the world would have trouble topping this one.
How did CNN's London reporter, Lucy Pawle, not see the dildo- and butt-plug-covered flag for exactly what it was?
This story inspires me to ask: Isn't the dildo one of the top two national symbols of England anyway? Second only to an empty case of Watneys Beer?
Note that part of the story where Pawle, explaining to the CNN audience that she seemed to be "the only person" to notice the extremist flag that wasn't there, managed to toot her own fool horn, saying,
[N]obody seems be raising any questions or pointing it out, so I immediately went to an events organizer who said he didn't know anything about it. I spoke to the police nearby, who weren't aware either.
Damn! You go, girl! What are they paying you? Good thing CNN was on the case!
Was CNN just trying to outdo FOX or beat FOX at its own game? What does this say about the mindset at CNN that can equate the Gay Pride movement with ISIS and see a world where gays and terrorists are working together to take over the world, especially, since ISIS is known to kidnap gay people and toss them off of buildings
In what universe would this CNN reportage make sense? No matter to the folks at CNN. They ran with it, even bringing in their terrorism expert, Peter Bergen, for commentary. The best satirists in the world would have trouble topping this one.
How did CNN's London reporter, Lucy Pawle, not see the dildo and butt plug covered flag for exactly what it was?
This story inspires me to ask: Isn't the dildo one of the top two national symbols of England anyway? Second only to an empty case of Watneys Beer?
Explaining to the CNN audience that she seemed to be "the only person" to notice the extremist flag that wasn't there, Pawle managed to toot her own fool horn by saying --
[N]obody seems be raising any questions or pointing it out, so I immediately went to an events organizer who said he didn't know anything about it. I spoke to the police nearby, who weren't aware either.
Damn, you go, girl! What are they paying you? Good thing CNN was on the case!
But from what I know of England, through working at a couple of English music companies, I would think that every English woman has at least some familiarity with dildos, if only out of necessity. I expect that England even has a Museum of Royal Dildos, or something over in their Parliament building. I hear the "Dildos of the Upper Classes" display at the House of Lords is very comprehensive, as is the "England: 1000 Years of Dildos and Butt Plugs" exhibit.
You know how much the English love tradition. They celebrate their queens so much that I believe I even once heard something about a dildo called the Victoria Specia, "available in a numbered LTD edition."
Did someone have to explain to Lucy Pawle what a dildo is? Was she just auditioning to replace Sarah Palin at FOX, or get a gig on Fox and Friends? Was her mission just to make Wolf Blitzer look intelligent by comparison?
Final thought on this: We now know that Rafael "Ted" Cruz and Mike Huckabee don't watch CNN. For if they did, they would be railing for weeks to come against the merging of Gay Pride activists with ISIS on Hannity, O'Reilly and the rest, smashing CNN's coverage of ISIS teaming up with gay activists to dust.
In the end, CNN needs to learn that there is only one FOX News and that, try as they might, they are just a pale, feeble imitation.
This pseudo-"scientific" way to cut a cake is the sort of thing that makes people think scientists are idiots
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Is this what happens when you've never had a birthday party?
by Ken
"Is This A Scientifically Superior Way To Cut Cake?" asks Elite Truong on WNYC's "Sporkful" blog ("It's Not for Foodies, It's for Eaters"), and while I undoubtedly wouldn't have seen this crackpot video if not for the blogpost, which can therefore be held to task for actually giving this sad person the attention he seems to crave so desperately, now that I have seen it, I have to say I'm glad someone blew the whistle on it.
This Alex Bellos is supposed to be a mathematician, which grieves me, because I have always thought highly of mathematicians, who in my experience have seemed highly sensible and creative people. In this video he dredges up an old crackpot idea about cake-cutting, and at every step shows himself to be possibly the stupidest and most clueless as well as most pretentious twit on the planet. For cripes' sake!
In this video, Alex -- if that's his real name (and if I were Alex, I would be doing everything possible to conceal my identity, because it's just a matter of time before the torch-bearing villagers descend on him) -- claims to have discovered a problem with the normal way of cutting a round birthday cake, which is to cut triangular slices from the center of the cake. The problem, he says, is that if you cut one slice out and then put the cake in the refrigerator overnight, the cut-away sides get dry.
Already I think we can guess at one of the sources of Alex's problem. He is such a pathetic loser that he has never had a birthday cake -- or, perhaps sadder still, has bought himself a birthday cake and, since clearly no one would be caught dead eating birthday cake with a yutz like him, got it in his head that birthday cakes are eaten at a rate of one slice per day, since apparently his was. Is it any wonder that he has no clue as to the actual behavior of birthday cakes in the real world?
The scientifically arrived-at solution to this "problem," as you'll learn from the video, is to cut out a long sliver along the diameter of the cake, producing an alleged "slice" of cake that has never been, and will never be, served at any birthday party attended by people of at least low-to-medium intelligence. Left unaddressed is the question of how two of these alleged "slices" of cake might be cut in the apparently unlike event that more than one person was on hand to celebrate the alleged birthday.
The alleged genius of this method is shown when, after the alleged slice has been cut and removed, the remaining severed halves of the cake are rudely shoved together. One additional precaution has to be taken, however. After all, whereas in the traditional cake-cutting method only the two edges of the removed first slice are exposed to the air (and remember, only one supposedly "dry" edge is going to be part of the next slice, which is the whole problem this madness claims to be counteracting), now two entire nearly full-diameter surfaces are exposed. The "solution"? Put a rubber band around the shoved-together cake halves!
For the Day 2 slice, Alex crosscuts a perpendicular diametrical sliver, which produces not a "slice" but two half-"slices." Yum! And he proposes that the procedure continue for each succeeding single-person no-longer-birthday celebration, until there's nothing left but a cake "center," which, it must be said, will be abundantly frosted.
In the "Sporkful" blogpost, Elite Truong writes:
Eater Azara Golston of Denver strongly objects to this method and emailed us, attempting to debunk Bellos' layers of madness: “One of the best things about cutting a round cake is that the cake-to-frosting ratio will always be consistent,” she writes. “In the case of the proposed method, the ratio would be absolute chaos.”
Golston also opposes rubber-banding cakes together unless the cake is covered in fondant or sugar-paste. “Trying to rubber band a buttercream cake would end in tragedy,” she argues.
Well, yes! And yes! Obviously! These are things that poor Alex, in his perpetually friendless and likely cakeless existence, apparently has no way of knowing about. I suppose pity rather than scorn is called for. But it's hard to shift smoothly into sympathy gear when you're being told by such a dumb-ass that you're a dumb-ass for cutting a cake the obvious way.
I DON'T HATE THE ENGLISH, BUT --
One last thought. If you've watched the clip, you'll have noticed that Alex is conspicuously English. I don't say this in an automatically critical way. There are many English people past and present for whom I have great admiration and/or fondness. But boy, have we come a long way from the days when we Americans assumed that anything side to us in an English accent was consummately wise. Just listen to what silliness can be dished out in an English accent.
Which leads you to wonder, reflecting on the events of the past week, whether the course of history might have been altered if the Scottish nationalist partisans, in approaching Thursday's vote on separation from the United Kingdom, had thought to do everything possible to saturate their fellow Scots with this video. Who in his/her right mind wouldn't have jumped at the obvious strategy of voting "yes" just to formally dissociate him/herself from this yo-yo?
Also, if you've watched the clip, you'll have noticed that Alex -- if, again, that's really his name -- has had a book published. You'll have noted too that it has different names in the U.K. and the U.S. They're both pretty stupid names, but then, wouldn't you assume it's a pretty stupid book?
You don't mean to say you fell for this "royal baby" hoax?
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by Ken
The woman in the alleged photo above is alleged to be a certain "Duchess of Cambridge," aka "Princess Kate," who is alleged to have given birth to a royal prince just 89 days before this photo was allegedly snapped. As gazillions of women all over the world will tell you, "No way, José."
Next they'll be telling us that men have walked on the moon. And Hillary Clinton didn't have all those people murdered.
Naturally the alleged British press is all over the alleged story.
For all those who were wondering whether Kate has snapped back into shape following the birth of Prince George, there was a definitive answer yesterday.
There can’t be many photocalls which offer a chance of glimpsing the Duchess of Cambridge’s midriff.
But in one volleyball shot, the royal tummy was fully on display in all its svelte glory.
As mothers marvelled at Kate’s lithe figure -- 89 days since the birth of George -- there was widespread speculation at how she did it.
It is understood the Duchess got back her trim figure through long walks with her dog, Lupo, and the odd burst on a rowing machine. She also took part in ante-natal yoga classes, which are believed to help new mothers regain their figure afterwards by ‘training’ their muscles to snap back into shape.
Admittedly they weren't the most suitable footwear.
Still, the Duchess of Cambridge didn't let a pair of towering wedges put her off trying her hand at a game of volleyball today.
Dressed in a pair of skintight 'jeggings' by J Brand, a Ralph Lauren breton-style top, a one-button blazer by Smythe, £695 diamond earrings by Kiki McDonough and, of course, those Stuart Weitzman for Russell and Bromley ‘corkswoon’ wedges, Kate gamely stood at the net and slammed back a few decidedly passable shots.
That said, the sporty Duchess missed what one onlooker described an 'absolute sitter', as she wasn't able to jump up high enough in the five inch heels.
Kate was taking part in a sports workshop at the Queen Elizabeth Olympic Park in East London run by SportsAid, a charity which supports young athletes at the start of their careers.
The Duchess became patron of the organisation last year and was, said aides, keen to meet the athletes it was helping face-to-face and get a 'detailed insight into the challenges they face'.
It was Kate's first solo public engagement since the birth of her baby son Prince George.
It is believed that she left her three-month-old son at home in Kensington Palace with her husband, Prince William.
On her arrival she was greeted by Tim Lawler, chief executive of SportsAid, who then introduced her to a selection of its trustees.
Then it was straight down into the Copper Box arena where she began by chatting to a group of young badminton players with whom she had been expected to have a game.
Disappointingly she declined, but told them she had tried her hand at the sport before.
Eliza Cottingham, 17, said: 'We had been told she would have a game with us, but she didn't. She said she had played before as she wanted to try and see whether it was like tennis, but she said she found it much harder.'
At the wheelchair volleyball the Duchess chatted at length with Ade Adepitan MBE, himself a bronze medallist the Athens 2004 Paralympic Games.
The sportsman said: 'She was very keen to learn more about the difference SportsAid meant to these young players and asked whether we had any more players coming through as a result of last year's games. I told her we had more than ever before, it's been remarkable.
'It's a shame she didn't join us as its one of the few sports that able bodied and disabled can play together. I think she'd be great -- she's got the height and is very naturally athletic. But she said she had only ever played netball at school.'
Note that the alleged mum of the alleged prince has left the alleged three-month-old baby at her alleged home with its alleged father, so she could play volleyball. Right!
It's a boy! (Come on, you're burning up with Royal Fever. You know you are!)
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Let's leave Krugman on Detroit for tomorrow
Guardian caption, posted early today: "A correspondent for Mother and Baby magazine sets up a tent outside St. Mary's hospital in London, where the Duchess of Cambridge will give birth."
by Ken
As I write, we don't know what the name of the new little prince, eventual heir to the throne of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland, will be. So what do you say we call him Thurman? Or maybe Pete? How about Lamont? Or Francis?
What, you mean we don't get a say? Come on, Kate and Will, wouldn't a Prince Calvin be, like, a cool change of pace?
Here I was, all set to write about Paul Krugman writing today about "Detroit, the New Greece," the impending campaign of disinformation to be expected from the Deficit-Hawk Wing of the Village School of Economics. ("So now the deficit scolds have a new case to misinterpret.")
But here we have it -- history intervening. How often is an infant born destined to be king of England. Okay, make that the United Kingdom. Actually there is a correct numerical answer to that question, and somebody can certainly come up with it. But you can't just go fishing in Wikipedia for a list of Kings and Queens of England. First, because a whole bunch of those kings weren't destined to be king when they were born. And then because there were a whole bunch of baby boys who were born destined to be king, only things didn't work out, so you'd have to add them to your total.
(The future queens of England don't come into this discussion, because none of them were born destined to be queen. They only ascended to the throne because the royal line at that point found itself devoid of suitable male heirs.)
I know this is another occasion for anti-royalists to point out what a ridiculous institution is this monarchy, whereby some kid, or rather some boy kid, is born to be king just 'cause he arranged the circumstances of his birth fortuitously. But I ask you, do we really want to go making a king out of some kid who didn't know how to get his birth right?
Oh, those royal ears!
It's also an occasion for me to once again trot out my best Royal Family story, with apologies to those who've already heard it. It goes back a few decades, to a time when the current heir apparent, Prince Charles, paternal grandfather of the new prince, wasn't yet an old duffer waiting around for his mum to kick off. He was just a sort of middle-aged duffer waiting around for . . . . And my mother, as she told the story after returning from that trip, was visiting the English cousins. These are people, you need to know, who were and are highly sophisticated and worldly, with a prominent streak of, you know, lawyers. So they were sitting around one evening watching the telly, and who should appear on the screen but the prince of Wales himself? And my mother piped up: "Wouldn't you think with all their money they could co something about his ears?" And there was dead silence in the room. Shock-and-horror silence.
From which you might guess that my mother wasn't overly respectful of the institution or personages of the British monarchy. And you would be wrong. She really cared about the Royal Family. Which probably explains why it bothered her that they didn't do anything about those damned cartoon ears.
My mother actually subscribed to a glossy magazine called, as I recall, Royalty, at a time when the magazine itself was going through its share of troubles. In those last years, when I was taking care of matters like my mother's magazine subscriptions, her renewals were being dispatched more regularly than issues of the magazine.
She even managed to stretch the usefulness of those magazines. She was living at the time (which I would describe as her last good years) in a senior residence where he was, as she once put it, "happier than I imagined I could be," not far from where she had lived for the previous 25 or so years, since she and my stepfather moved to Florida for his health. And among the staff was an activities director who was an ex-pat Brit, and when she finished with each issue of the magazine she passed it on to him and his wife, and for them, for a bit, it was like being back in England. Never mind that they had both left the place for what surely seemed to them good and sufficient reason. They loved their queen.
Here's to you, Prince Rufus! And hearty best wishes to the whole family.
Alan Grayson: "Does Anyone Know Who Alan Turing Is?"
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Several years ago, Blue America invited Alan Grayson to speak at the Brave New Films studio in Culver City. For many of the attendees, myself included, that was the first introduction to the 20th century's greatest mathematician, Alan Turing. You can watch the 4-minute Turing part of the chat above. A couple of years before Grayson's talk, British Prime Minister Gordon Brown did it in an OpEd in The Telegraph apologizing for the British government having driven Turing-- one of the most important heroes of World War II-- to suicide because of his homosexuality.
Turing was a quite brilliant mathematician, most famous for his work on breaking the German Enigma codes. It is no exaggeration to say that, without his outstanding contribution, the history of the Second World War could have been very different. He truly was one of those individuals we can point to whose unique contribution helped to turn the tide of war. The debt of gratitude he is owed makes it all the more horrifying, therefore, that he was treated so inhumanely. In 1952, he was convicted of "gross indecency"-- in effect, tried for being gay. His sentence-- and he was faced with the miserable choice of this or prison-- was chemical castration by a series of injections of female hormones. He took his own life just two years later. Thousands of people have come together to demand justice for Alan Turing and recognition of the appalling way he was treated. While Turing was dealt with under the law of the time, and we can't put the clock back, his treatment was of course utterly unfair, and I am pleased to have the chance to say how deeply sorry I and we all are for what happened to him. Alan and the many thousands of other gay men who were convicted, as he was convicted, under homophobic laws, were treated terribly. Over the years, millions more lived in fear in conviction. I am proud that those days are gone and that in the past 12 years this Government has done so much to make life fairer and more equal for our LGBT community. This recognition of Alan's status as one of Britain's most famous victims of homophobia is another step towards equality, and long overdue. But even more than that, Alan deserves recognition for his contribution to humankind. For those of us born after 1945, into a Europe which is united, democratic and at peace, it is hard to imagine that our continent was once the theatre of mankind's darkest hour. It is difficult to believe that in living memory, people could become so consumed by hate-- by anti-Semitism, by homophobia, by xenophobia and other murderous prejudices-- that the gas chambers and crematoria became a piece of the European landscape as surely as the galleries and universities and concert halls which had marked out the European civilisation for hundreds of years. It is thanks to men and women who were totally committed to fighting fascism, people like Alan Turing, that the horrors of the Holocaust and of total war are part of Europe's history and not Europe's present. So on behalf of the British government, and all those who live freely thanks to Alan's work, I am very proud to say: we're sorry. You deserved so much better.
On Friday, Britain's Conservative government-- which, it's worth mentioning, backed LGBT marriage equality legislation that many of its members opposed and oppose-- announced that Turing would be granted a posthumous pardon.
The announcement marks a change of heart by the government, which declined last year to grant pardons to the 49,000 gay men, now dead, who were convicted under the 1885 Criminal Law Amendment Act. They include Oscar Wilde. [Lord Ahmad of Wimbledon, a government whip] told peers: "Alan Turing himself believed that homosexual activity would be made legal by a royal commission. In fact, appropriately, it was parliament which decriminalised the activity for which he was convicted. The government are very aware of the calls to pardon Turing, given his outstanding achievements, and have great sympathy with this objective … That is why the government believe it is right that parliament should be free to respond to this bill in whatever way its conscience dictates and in whatever way it so wills." The government threw its weight behind the private member's bill, promoted by the Liberal Democrat peer Lord Sharkey, after a debate that featured a contribution from a peer who worked at Bletchley Park. Lady Trumpington told peers: "The block I worked in was devoted to German naval codes. Only once was I asked to deliver a paper to Alan Turing, so … I cannot claim that I knew him. However, I am certain that but for his work we would have lost the war through starvation." Turing broke German ciphers using the bombe method, which allowed the code-breakers to crack the German Enigma code. His colleague Tommy Flowers built the Colossus computer. Ahmad described Turing as "one of the fathers, if not the father, of computer science." Sharkey has campaigned for a pardon after being taught mathematics at Manchester University in the 1960s by Robin Gandy, Turing's only doctoral student, who became a close friend and was the executor of his will. Sharkey said: "As I think everybody knows, he was convicted in 1952 of gross indecency and sentenced to chemical castration. He committed suicide two years later. The government know that Turing was a hero and a very great man. They acknowledge that he was cruelly treated. They must have seen the esteem in which he is held here and around the world."
And some people said they couldn't ever replace Larry King! Say hello to Piers Morgan (see no. 2).
by Noah
1. Back in September, Fox’s Monica Crowley, former Nixon PR flak, subbing for Bill O’Lie-ley, interviewed Scooter Libby and called the investigation of his role in exposing Valerie Plame an outrageous “ordeal” and went on to say that Libby deserved a pardon and -- get this -- called him a class act! Hell, all he did was out a CIA agent and her network, many of whom are probably missing by now, at the least. Had Libby done what he did during World War II, he would have ended up swinging from a gallows in a penitentiary yard. Funny how it’s conservatives who yap about the degradation of our country’s “moral fiber” and things like that. I guess at Fox treason in the service of greed and politics is no vice.
2. CNN has announced, without a trace of shame, that British tabloid veteran and America’s Got Talent panelist Piers Morgan is the replacement for Bush Crime Family groupie Larry King, thus answering the question “Can it get any worse?” If they wanted to go the lowbrow, vulgar TMZ-paparazzi route, why didn’t they just get Jerry Springer? Personally, I’d rather see Simon Cowell interview today’s politicians and celebs. Or me. I’d make sure to always have a hatchet at the ready.
CNN might do better if it just ran Larry King’s reruns. In reality, watching CNN is like watching a spycam and waiting for something to happen. I gave up in 2004.
3. Would you like eggs with that? Prince Charles, “The Man Who Would Be Tampon” ("I want to be reincarnated as your tampon," he's been quoted as saying to his better half), and his Mrs. Prince went out for a night on the town in the Queen’s Jubilee Rolls. Here, take the keys! The Roller got splattered with paint and eggs. Some of the windows were broken, and Mrs. Prince got poked with a stick, while at least one rioter repeatedly yelled, “Off with their heads.” Didn’t Mummy warn them not to go downtown?
Naturally, the old folks and the upper crust got all in a tizzy about the incident. As a measure of how genteel and polite British youth are, there was a time in England when the Prince would have met a far worse fate.
I bet his dad didn’t even make him wash the car when he got home. Spoiled, I tell you! Spoiled brat!
4. The French government, under rightist Nicolas Sarkozy, wants to raise the retirement age in France two years. In France, you've been able to retire as early as age 60, with a real pension and real health care, if you earn enough work credits over, say, 40 years. Now it would be 62. This would also increase the number of people in the workforce. More people would be competing for what is only a finite number of jobs, which would, it almost goes without saying, lower individual wages. All part of the plan, lower wages and fewer pensions monies disbursed.
Next, due to wages being driven down, tax revenues coming into the French treasury go down. The result? Social services and benefits go out the window. You work all those years, and you’re left holding a bag that has a great big hole in it. You can almost hear the laughter. These government clowns and pranksters! “You’re old. Die now!” Not even a "please."
See if this all sounds familiar when President Obama, his Alan Simpson-led Catfood Commission, and the entire Republican Party talk about raising the retirement age in our country by not two but five years! Nice folks we have in Washington, eh? As I said, you can almost hear the laughter.
In France, they have general strikes. In England, students riot and throw eggs. Here in the U.S., everyone is too busy watching crap “reality shows” and things like American Idol while eating junk food and getting too damn obese to get up off the couch and out into the streets to throw some eggs, for starters.
5. Tiger Woods: The media always offers up as an excuse for the lack of investigative journalism that they don’t have the staff and money to look into what far more serious chicanery politicians and corporate types and bankers are up to, but when it comes to sports figures and celebrities, and their sex lives, the checkbook is wide open and we get assaulted with things like months of Tiger’s idiocy. If the media spent a third as much on uncovering and informing the public on what real ne’er-do-wells like those in Congress, Wall Street, and our corporate boardrooms are up to, we’d all be better off -- and many of them would be in prison for life.
6. Imagine Glenn Beck as a nutbag scoutmaster leading his troupers deeper and deeper into the dark woods, so deep that they’ll never be able to find their way out.
7. Republicans like to consider government services socialism. Their followers belch on about how they don’t want their taxpayer dollars benefiting anyone else. It’s all about the greed and selfishness. But they have no problem saying, “Hands off my Medicare," and they have no problem collecting Social Security. They also have no problem driving on interstate highways or calling the police or local fire department, all of which are funded by taxes somewhere along the line. So what happens when tax revenues go down so much that your local town asks you to pay a fee if you want fire department service? You have to pay the money one way or the other if you want the local FD to put out a fire in your house.
Recently in Tennessee a family and their local fire department watched their home burn to the ground because the additional charge had not been paid. This family lost their four pets and everything else in their house.
What happens when a whole block or town burns to the ground due to Republican greed and wealth redistribution? Where does the money go? Not for local education, that’s for sure. New York tried it this way back in the 1700s, a time the Repugs would like to take us back to. What happened then? The whole city burned and burned and burned. Such a policy may go into effect in your town, but it won’t be changed until that local mansion on the hill complete with its stolen art collection and all the Republican master’s closet full of high heels are reduced to ashes.
8. One of my favorite quotes of the year came from Stephanie Miller:
“Rich people pay Fox people to get middle class people to blame poor people.”
9. You can’t make this stuff up, but Fox does. The L.A. jetpacks for cops story was a case in point. Sourcing the Weekly World News supermarket tabloid, Fox ran all the way with a story about the city of Los Angeles buying $1 billion worth of jetpacks for its police, fire department, and emergency services people. Nothing seemed odd about this story to the brainectomy patients at Fox & Friends. Only when a couple of callers called in to tell them the story was a joke did they correct themselves. One has to wonder who hired these morons. Could they have even filled out applications?
It all reminds me of Delaware’s Christine O’Donnell’s (a Fox favorite) claim that the government was making mice with “fully functioning human brains.” Apparently, though, someone is doing the opposite and making humans with fully functioning mouse brains, then giving them jobs at Fox.
Then there was the “Obama Is Cracking Up” story. This was a great example of the inmates in the asylum accusing the sane people of insanity. In this case, Fox didn’t make it up; they just borrowed someone else's made-up news because they thought it nicely fit their wackoid agenda. Fox Nation was running with a story from The Onion, the satirical paper-website, about President Obama cracking up and sending out a rambling 75,000-word e-mail to the entire nation. The article even included a bit about the e-mail being so large, at 27 megabytes, that it couldn’t fit in the mailboxes of millions of Americans. No matter to Fox. If you want to believe something, just believe it. And we wonder where Teabaggers learned their approach to life in these times.
Let’s not forget Fox’s annual “War on Christmas” insanity. This year even the NBA was an evildoing anti-Christmas enemy to those who live in Foxworld. Why? It seems the NBA had six games scheduled on Christmas Day. Never mind that they've had games on Christmas Day since the 1950s.
Are firefighters in Foxworld supposed to stay home too, or just say, “Call back tomorrow”? I didn’t see Fox go off the air on Christmas, so does that make them anti-Christmas too? Does all of this indicate that right-wing loons will soon start consuming themselves? Sooner or later your hate has to run out of targets, when you’ve gone after everybody and everything under the sun, doesn’t it? What’s left when you only have yourselves to hate?
I’m thinking of starting a “Guns for Fox” day. My organization will collect guns and deliver them to Fox so that they can be ready when they start accusing each other of being part of the “War on Christmas.” Hey, I’m just being compassionate.
10. What’s in a campaign promise? During the 2010 campaign, Repugs pledged to ban earmarks. In a prime case of Washington follow-through, the new compromise tax bill contains $8 billion in them. Check the link to see some of the fabulous earmarks. Hey, what’s $8 billion? Also, five of the ten points in the latest Republican “Pledge to America” are violated by provisions in the tax compromise bill.
11. Finally, there’s this thought on President Obama. He might as well join the Republican Party at this point. He clearly wants to do in Net Neutrality and Social Security, and it might be nice to see the Republicans so conflicted about having to do a 180 on their 24-hour hate speech, run a black dude for prez, etc. That’s why it would never happen, of course, but the idea of seeing assclowns like Limbaugh and Hannity et al. simply explode would warm my heart.
At this point do we have to be hoping for a revolution?
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Are they starting the revolution without us? First there were the French workers, now the British students.
"It’s clear at this point that America is only the shell of a democracy, and instead is run by a self-perpetuating oligopoly whose only law, whose only imperative, is its own survival and aggrandizement."
Last night Howie shared his airport's-eye view of the confrontation between British students and the police agents of the burgeoning British-coaliltion security state.
At Heathrow passengers had been clustered around the TV sets watching the demonstrations against the move by the right-wing Conservative/Lib-Dem government to raise the cost of university tuition in the name of "austerity," the term the servants of the wealthy use instead of "concentrating the nation's wealth in fewer and fewer hands." I kept hoping the students would really go for it and spark a worldwide uprising against the international ruling elites. By the time we had to board our plane, they hadn't.
The above clip of a 15-year-old British student fighting back is getting a lot of attention, and understandably so. I should add that it's attracting a certain amount of backlash from people who dismiss him as a snotty young elitist, calling police "stupid." It's an accusation that seems to me made by people who are too lazy and/or senseless to watch what's before their eyes. The speaker is talking about police who, at least in his view, are serving as mindlessly thuggish, violent enforcers of an authoritarian regime.
It helps that the U.S. is a country now in the throes of a hatred for knowledge, education, and the pursuit of understanding of the world around us, amounting to a worship of ignorance and imbecility, all of which handsomely serves the economic interests of the people who increasingly own us, or at least act as if they do. Just how bad it's gotten was laid out in a remarkable piece our friend Ian Welsh wrote recently, called "An American Future," which I encourage you to read in its entirety. I'm offering just some bleeding chunks here, and even these without the links you'll find onsite:
So, I’m peering into my looking glass today, or rather tonight, as the snow eddies down, the first snowfall of winter, and it’s winter I see for America, and for the world.
It’s clear at this point that America is only the shell of a democracy, and instead is run by a self-perpetuating oligopoly whose only law, whose only imperative, is its own survival and aggrandizement, no matter what the cost to America, to American citizens, or to anyone else in the world who is not part of the western elite class. The same is, with America switched to Europe, true of the oligopoly who run Europe. . . .
They have created a surveillance state where they track in real time, without warrants, the movements of citizens through cameras and by tracking credit cards, debit cards and even loyalty cards. Their servants stare at the naked bodies of everyone who wants to travel by air or grope their genitals, inflicting sexual humiliation on the public as a matter of course.
When embarassed, as with Wikileaks leaks of diplomatic communiques, their response is a deranged manhunt combined with a truly Soviet-style screaming of “I can’t hear you” as they try and ban soldiers, the Library of Congress and public servants from reading information everyone has access to. This isn’t just authoritarian, it isn’t just jejeune, it is delusional. Every principal and teacher knows that if you tell people they shouldn’t read something, that will make them want to read it. If they wanted people to think they shouldn’t read these revelations, the reaction should have been muted, “ho, hum, nothing there”, not a deranged attempt to shut down anyone who mirrors the Wikileaks site and threats against anyone who dares read the information. . . .
[I]f you have to stay, make sure you’re on good terms with your neighbors, your spouse, your friends and your family. Figure out how to grow food wherever you are and how to reduce your dependence on anything but people you trust. (Don’t trust any corporation.) And, if you can, organize. Organize locally, organize at the State level, organize nationally. Understand the age of compromise is over. It is now too late to save the old system. It’s over. We tried, and we failed. It is beyond “reform”, it is going to flame out, the only question is how many people it will burn to death as it does so.
Yet, as Ian has been the first to note, there are pockets of resistance. There were the French workers striking against the high hand of the Sarkozy government. And now there's the developing support rising for Julian Assange and WikiLeaks, about which Ian has written a piece called "Why Assange and Wikileaks have won this round":
The odd thing about Wikileaks is that their success has been assured, not by what they leaked, though there is some important information there, but by their enemies.
The massive and indiscriminant overreaction by both government and powerful corporate actors has ensured this, and includes but is not nearly limited to:
* Shutting down Wikileaks servers, starting with the Amazon server * Stopping domain name server propagation * Paypal refusing to send payments * VISA and Mastercard refusing to process payments * The Swiss Bank PostFinance shutting down Assange’s account * Senator Lieberman pressuring firms over Wikileaks * The odd behavior of prosecutors in the Assange rape accusations/case
Wikileaks and Assange have now been made in to cause celebres. If corporations and governments can destroy someone’s access to the modern economy as they have Wikileaks, without even pretending due process of the law (Paypal, VISA, Mastercard, Amazon, etc… were not ordered by any court to cut Wikileaks) then we simply do not live in a free society of law, let alone a society of justice. . . .
To be just, law must be applied to both the big and the small. Thousands of executives at banks who engaged in systematic fraud were never charged, out and out war criminals are actively protected, and Wikileaks and Assange are hunted like animals?
This has enraged, in particular, the Hacktivist community, with Anonymous forming Operation Payback and shutting down both Mastercard servers and the Swiss Bank PostFinance’s website. As they themselves say, what enraged them was multiple companies attempting to shut Wikileaks down, both on the web, and financially. . . .
It has proved that the West is run by authoritarian thugs with completely twisted priorities. Kill hundreds of thousands of people and engage in aggressive war? No big deal. Cause the greatest economic collapse of the post-war period sending millions into poverty? We couldn’t possibly prosecute the people who did that, but we will give them trillions! Reveal our petty secrets and lies, and that we know the war in Afghanistan is lost, have known for years and continue to kill both Afghanis and our own soldiers pointlessly? We WILL destroy you, no matter what we have to do. . . .
Because of the massive overreaction to Wikileaks, the [rape] case against [Assange] is completely tainted. He might be guilty as sin, but justice can no longer be seen to be done, because it is far too evident that too many powerful people, corporations and governments want him taken out.
And so he has won. Whether he winds up free, in prison in Sweden or the US, or winds up dead, he has won this round. He will be a martyr and an icon, and his child, Wikileaks, whether it lives or dies, will become a rallying point and a symbol of how corrupt and unjust western society is.
Ruling Parties Being Slaughtered In Elections In England And Across Europe
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I'll bet if you ask most Americans to tell you why England is in the news today they'd say something about the Queen not being at the D-Day ceremonies in Normandy. But something far more consequential was going on in England today: vote counting in the local elections that took place Thursday. Labor was absolutely wiped out and the Conservatives only did so-so. So what happened?
The most significant numbers are the BBC's projected national shares of the vote: how Britain as a whole probably would have voted if the whole nation and not just the English counties had gone to the polls.
Labour in a Britain-wide election would have secured a mere 23 per cent of the popular vote, Labour's worstever performance in any round of modern local elections and fully ten points worse than its showing when the same county councils were last contested four years ago.
The result could have been worse for Labour-- but not much.
However, it could have been considerably better from the Conservatives' point of view. Their projected national share of the vote was only 38 per cent, down six points since their stunning performance last year.
Add the two major parties' shares of the vote together and they suggest that, had a General Election been held this week, Labour and the Tories between them would have won only 61 per cent of the popular vote.
The remaining 39 per cent backed either the Liberal Democrats (28 per cent) or one of the fringe parties (11 per cent). A mere 4 per cent of voters backed one of the fringe parties a decade ago and only 7 per cent as recently as last year.
In other words, tens of thousands of electors are so fed up with both of the two major parties that they are no longer prepared to vote for either.
Taken together, the two main parties have never done worse since the last war. Had 'None of the above' been on the ballot paper, that non-party might well have emerged victorious.
At the same time as England was picking local counsillors, vaguely analogous to state legislators here, both the U.K. and the other 26 countries in the European Union, where unemployment is at 10% (just like here), were electing members to the European Parliament-- extreme right members.
Across England and Holland, the first two countries to have voted, right-wing populists, some from fringe parties, racked up big gains. The new members are xenophobic, nationalistic, and anti-EU. Jon Kyl's neo-fascist buddy in Holland, Geert Wilders, an Islamophobic fanatic who opposes immigration, and wants the European Parliament abolished, won about 17% of the Dutch vote-- just one seat less than the ruling Christian Democrats. And in Britain it looks like two anti-EU parties, the UK Independence Party and the British National Party (a kind of a cross between the Limbaugh wing of the GOP and the KKK) will win about 20% of the seats. In all 736 seats across Europe are being voted on between Thursday and Sunday.
Final results in the EU elections won't be available 'til Sunday night but the trend looks bad across the continent but exit polls in Ireland, Italy and Hungary are all showing disasters for the ruling parties, many of which are suffering from cascading scandals coupled with an inability to do anything about a severe recession. Once final results come in on Sunday evening or Monday morning, we'll take a look at what happened across the continent.
UPDATE: Is Brown Facing A "Peasants Revolt?"
If Labor comes in third-- or even fourth-- in the EU Assembly elections, Prime Minister Gordon Brown could be facing more than a headache. There has been talk about an attempt by backbenchers to oust him as party leader. Monday Brown will be meeting with Labor parliamentarians who see the election results as a Sword of Damocles hanging over all their heads.
A leading critic of Brown said that a breakthrough for extremist parties could be the tipping point for a revolt that seemed to be faltering: "It is one thing to lose to the Tories, but actually to do so badly that we are letting in the fascists is quite another."
The BNP last night predicted, based on voting patterns in the local elections, that it should secure at least one MEP and possibly two in the north-west-- where its chairman Nick Griffin is standing-- and could even make gains in the East and West Midlands.
The party has never broken through into the European Parliament, and doing so on Gordon Brown's watch would be a damning indictment of his leadership. Alarm bells rang last week after the party won a seat on Lancashire county council, part of the north-west region.
The E.U. election could also be a death knell for corrupt, right-wing Italian Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi who is embroiled in a sex scandal with girls young enough to be his grand daughters. (He's 72 and his latest mistress and pimp is 18-- and he used a government plane to ferry her and his friends to his villa in Sardinia.) Yesterday the biggest newspaper in Spain published pictures of Berlusconi cavorting around naked with the topless girls and he called in "an invasion of privacy" and is now suing the paper.
"Berlusconi has succeeded in making the European election a plebiscite on him," said James Walston, a political science professor at the American University of Rome. "Most Italians are voting on whether or not they like the government, there is very little that is a European issue."
The far right lunatic fringe British National Party (BNP) won one seat and possibly two seats in the EU Parliament. It's the first time they've ever won anything significant. They're kind of like the Cheney-Limbaugh-Coulter segment of the GOP. Non-whites are not allowed to join. Both Labor and the Conservatives have denounced them as racists, xenophobes and neo-fascists. They demand that the U.K. leave the European Union.
