http://www.thisislondon.co.uk/standard/article-24038413-new-sale-battersea-power-station.do

If it cannot be sold, what a perfect place to re-direct all the coaches bringing in the thousands of spongers planning to claim for every benefit we nationals cannot get anywhere near. 

Hang thousands of hammocks across and around the big empty cavernous building with massive signs reading in every language all down the walls. 

ACCEPT IT and some SOUP - OR NOTHING. 

Then again, as the political HR brigade will complain, the alternative is to oblige every MP & Peer to use the same bunks instead, as Inner London accommodation for everyone of them, with free transport to work across Westminster Bridge provided by Red London Buses OR ABSOLUTELY NOTHING ELSE. Solved.

- Concerned Observer, Harrow, 24/02/2012 12:54

Proof you can get from absolutely any topic to immigration in one move. It's a really boring board game. 

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http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2012/feb/12/nick-cohen-twitter-facebook-screcy?CMP=twt_gu

"Now, potentially anyone with access to the web can find embarrassing photos, evidence of minor crimes and foolish Facebook updates or tweets. The gawky girl is no longer bullied only by her vile classmates but vile strangers too. Iranian revolutionaries learn that the apparently liberating web allows the secret police to monitor them and discover their contacts. An employee such as Adrian Smith, a Christian working for the Trafford Housing Trust, finds that opposition to gay marriage on his Facebook page allows his employers to lop £14,000 from his salary. They do not try to argue with him or warn him that he must not let his prejudices affect his work. He has uttered "controversial" opinions his colleagues do not like and that is enough to damn him.

The utilitarian philosopher Peter Singer says we should welcome the exponential increase in the possibilities for surveillance. If others know more about us, we know more about them. We will move to a free and open society. We will be less ashamed of our secrets and less censorious of our neighbours. Disclosure will bring the greatest happiness to the greatest number.

Although many want to share details their ancestors would have regarded as private, Singer does not understand that western democracies remain hugely hierarchical. The managers of private and public bureaucracies justify their elevated status and salaries not only by attempting to run efficient organisations (a task that is often beyond the poor dears) but by monitoring and intimidating those beneath them. The web gives them unprecedented power to police information that once would have been beyond their reach."

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http://www.scotsman.com/news/cartoon/peter_jones_england_learning_to_fly_its_own_flag_1_2073701

Not surprisingly, when you dig down through the IPPR report, you find that around four-fifths of English voters reckon that some parts of England are looked after better than others, with London and the south-east being seen as the main beneficiaries. And when you consider what might be the political answer that would deal with that problem, it is not at all clear why it would be an English parliament or even voting on English-only matters at Westminster being confined to English MPs

I think hidden in there is an assumption that an English Parliament would have to be based in London. That there's quite strong arguments against putting it there is why the idea is radical in terms of ideas of England as well the ideas of the UK. 

Full report here:http://ippr.org/publications/55/8542/the-dog-that-finally-barked-england-as-an-emerging-political-community.

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Spectator commenters can be so zen sometimes

http://www.spectator.co.uk/coffeehouse/7595783/libdemarama.thtml

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http://coreyrobin.com/2012/01/19/from-the-slaveholders-to-rick-perry-galileo-is-the-key/

Stephens, vice president of the Confederacy, famously invoked Galileo in defense of the slaveholders’ conviction that “the negro is not equal to the white man” and “subordination to the superior race is his natural and normal condition.”

The comparison between Galileo and the slaveholder was as far-fetched as Perry’s, but like Perry, Stephens defended it on the ground that his position was a fugitive knowledge, a heresy that would one day become orthodoxy.  “This truth has been slow in the process of its development, like all other truths in the various departments of science.”

Other slaveholders (Josiah Nott, John C. Calhoun) made the same comparison; Calhoun also invoked Francis Bacon, Stephens also invoked William Harvey. Their point was that like those great heresies of early modern science, the southern science of race would one day triumph and be recognized the world over. It’s the way the white southerner has always negotiated his contradictory self-understanding of being both victim and victimizer. Again, Stephens:

As I have stated, the truth of this principle may be slow in development, as all truths are and ever have been, in the various branches of science. It was so with the principles announced by Galileo it was so with Adam Smith and his principles of political economy. It was so with Harvey, and his theory of the circulation of the blood. It is stated that not a single one of the medical profession, living at the time of the announcement of the truths made by him, admitted them. Now, they are universally acknowledged. May we not, therefore, look with confidence to the ultimate universal acknowledgment of the truths upon which our system rests?”

And so, I assume, says Rick Perry to himself and his followers about their equally dubious science of climate non-change.

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http://www.shirky.com/weblog/2012/01/newspapers-paywalls-and-core-users/

To understand newspapers’ 15-year attachment to paywalls, you have to understand “Everyone must pay!” not just as an economic assertion, but as a cultural one. Though the journalists all knew readership would plummet if their paper dropped imported content like Dear Abby or the funny pages, they never really had to know just how few people were reading about the City Council or the water main break. Part of the appeal of paywalls, even in the face of their economic ineffectiveness, was preserving this sense that a coupon-clipper and a news junkie were both just customers, people whose motivations the paper could serve in general, without having to understand in particular.

...

Paywalls held out the possibility, however illusory, that if all readers could be treated as customers, the organization wouldn’t have to pay much attention to them, except in aggregate. Threshold charges blow that up; a single fee-paying user will generate hundreds of times the revenue of the median, ad-viewing reader. This subjects the logic of the print bundle — a bit of everything for everybody, slathered with ads — to two new questions: What do our most committed users want? And what will turn our most frequent readers into committed users? Here are some things that won’t: More ads. More gossip. More syndicated copy. This is new territory for mainstream papers, who have always had head count rather than engagement as their principal business metric.

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http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/cifamerica/2011/dec/15/facebook-timeline-social-media-giant

While I'm sure that privacy concerns will again be raised (it's good people care about their privacy), the new timeline doesn't make any more of your content available, it just makes it easier to access.

This is a frequent comment from facebook justifying changes, but privacy through obscurity is a form of privacy in itself. 

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http://digbysblog.blogspot.com/2011/12/imposing-political-correctness.html

I guess I just don't see why that is considered to be libertarian. Just because you break up state power into fifty entities instead of one, it doesn't make their infringements on liberty ok, does it? On a philosophical and ideological level, libertarians should be clear that infringements of people's rights should never be subject to the whims of the state --- whether it's Hawaii or the United States of America. So why doesn't Ron Paul say this? There's no reason that his quixotic career couldn't also entail a drive to change the constitution, or ensure that all 50 states overturn drug prohibition. He has nothing to lose by stating the libertarian principles and saying that basic individual rights are inalienable.

But he doesn't. He defends states' rights to infringe on individual liberty as being under the Constitution but what he's really defending are the Articles of Confederation. This isn't libertarianism. It's "tentherism" disguised as libertarianism.

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http://www.emptywheel.net/2011/12/28/oddly-passive-in-the-world-of-drone-killing

But I am interested in the implication Greg Miller leaves as a result. Obama is passive, and so his senior aides control the program (perhaps one of the aides denying that Obama is passive?), and they, in turn, basically support the “the institutional agendas of the CIA and JSOC.”

Here’s what that senior aide had to say to try to deny that we’re letting a fondness for drones drive our counterterrorism policy.

“People think we start with the drone and go from there, but that’s not it at all,” said a senior administration official involved with the program. “We’re not constructing a campaign around the drone. We’re not seeking to create some worldwide basing network so we have drone capabilities in every corner of the globe.”

It seems there’s a third option, an alternative to “we’re building so many drone bases because we like drones” and “we have so many drones because there are so many possible targets for them.”

That third option is that JSOC and CIA have certain “institutional agendas” that center on wielding the power of drones anywhere in the world to implement a policy they’ve dreamt up rather than their civilian Commander-in-Chief. There’s a hint, at least, that drones not only take the human out of the cockpit, but also take the Commander-in-Chief out of the cockpit as wel

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http://www.grist.org/climate-change/2011-12-16-brutal-logic-and-climate-communications

There's this pretense among Very Serious People that the vast and wise middle "tunes out" the intense on both ends -- that the extremes cancel each other out to no effect. That's about half true, but it doesn't mean what VSPs think it means.

VSPs tend to think the middle is full of commonsense folk looking for calm, measured, and sensible messages. But there's no evidence for that at all. The great mass of Americans believe all sorts of crazy, wrongheaded, and mutually contradictory sh*t. What the average person wants is simply to take the path of least cognitive resistance, to believe what's socially acceptable to believe, to believe what People Like Us believe. In a world filled with more information than any human being can absorb, it's a sensible enough heuristic: believe with the herd. (I don't mean that pejoratively; the vast bulk of my beliefs, and yours, are developed this way. There's no other way to do it.)

The reason climate is such an uncomfortable topic for so many Americans is that it's unresolved. There are these two opposing camps battling it out and it's not yet clear what Normal People are supposed to think. That, not the "extremity" of any particular view, best explains why public opinion is shallow and fickle on the subject.

So it very much matters who wins that battle of intensity. That is how the Overton Window is shifted, how views from outside the mainstream come to be inside. The right gets this. Forty years ago, supply-side economics and opposition to basic social safety net protections were crank, extremist views held by a small minority of hardcore conservatives -- the folks who rallied behind Goldwater in 1964 and lost. But as historian Rick Perlstein recounts in Before the Storm: Barry Goldwater and the Unmaking of the American Consensus, they didn't stop. They kept organizing and pushing, organizing and pushing. Then came Nixon, Reagan, GW Bush, Sarah Palin. Now extremist conservative views are part of the mainstream fabric.

What if they'd given up after 1964? What if they'd looked at surveys, concluded the American middle didn't favor their views, and spent the next decades trying to tone down and soften those views?

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http://blogs.independent.co.uk/2011/12/25/review-of-doctor-who-%E2%80%98the-doctor-the-widow-and-the-wardrobe%E2%80%99/

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http://badassdigest.com/2011/12/25/film-crit-hulk-smash-hulks-xmas-present-hulk-vs-the-hulk-movies/

TREVOR LA PAY (WHO ACTUALLY A VERY GOOD WRITER! CHECK HIM OUT!): People say that Science Fiction is a great vehicle for ideas because it's estranging, and helps us get enough distance from those ideas to view them more clearly. Hulkspeak is estranging in a similar way. It's very neat, I think. This was a great article as usual, but as a bonus, I learned that Miles Straume was in X-3.

AND...

MATTHEW LEGARE: And, without getting too deep into WHY THE ALL CAPS AND HULK SPEAK ANYWAY I can't help but think there's a variation of the principles put forth in "The Mechanics of Laughter" - HULK SPEAK WHEN COMBINED WITH DETAILED INSIGHT BREAK BONDS OF MECHANICAL THINKING THUS ENABLE READER TO APPROACH SUBJECT MATTER IN NON-REFLEXIVE MANNER AND JUDGE ESSAY BASED ON CONTENT RATHER THAN PRE-ESTABLISHED CONTEXT. Phew.  Now I have to find another pair of pants. This pair's all split now. Where does one find a pair of purple stretch slacks anyway?

 

TWO GREAT COMMENTS. AND WHILE WHAT THEY DESCRIBING MAY SOUND LIKE SOME HIGHFALUTIN NONSENSE, BUT IT'S ABSOLUTELY AND COMPLETELY TRUE. HULK HAS SPENT A LONG TIME TALKING ABOUT THIS CONCEPT WITH SOME OF THE BRIGHTEST MINDS ON THE PLANET (THAT IS NOT AN UNDERSTATEMENT. HULK WAS LUCKY). MORE IMPORTANTLY, HULK SEE THIS EXACT THING HAPPEN EVERY DAY IN COMPARISON TO "BANNER-MODE." SO TRUST HULK, IT WORKS. PEOPLE CONNECT TO THE IDEAS AND THEIR DEBATES HAVE NOTHING DO WITH HULK'S PERCEIVED INTENTIONS OR AGENDAS, BUT THE MERITS OF THE IDEAS THEMSELVES. AND THAT'S EXACTLY HOW IT SHOULD BE. HULK STILL IMAGINE THERE A BUNCH OF YOU WHO DON'T BUY THIS EXPLANATION AND THAT'S FINE. THE ONLY ONE WHO REALLY HAS TO ATTEST TO IT'S VALIDITY ARE HULK AND THE FINE PEOPLE AT BADASS. BUT LUCKILY, MANY OF YOU READERS IMPLICITLY OR ACTIVELY REALIZE THIS AND IT HAS BECOME SO MUCH FUN TO TALK TO YOU ALL. REALLY AND TRULY. ESPECIALLY THOSE OF YOU WHO KNOW THAT HULK A REAL HULK!

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http://jackofkent.blogspot.com/2011/12/why-are-lawyers-hated.html

The stuff of law consists of words and coercion. Lawyers, like wizards and witches with spells, believe that certain words when set out in formal and learned ways can have particular consequences. 

For lawyers these words are contained in contracts, statutes, writs, wills, questions and speeches in court, and so on. 

But unlike magical folk, the lawyers’ words can and do lead to real-world effects: for example, the bailiff at your door, or the guard taking you to the cell. 

The job of the lawyer is deal with special forms of words, and the worldly implications that those words can have in any given situation.

This, of course, is generally lost on the client.

http://jackofkent.blogspot.com/2011/12/why-are-lawyers-hated.html?showComment...

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http://walt.foreignpolicy.com/posts/2011/12/23/peace_piece

And what is equally striking is that the goal of peace plays a miniscule role in contemporary political discourse. As my colleague Nicholas Burns points out in a must-read column in today's Boston Globe, with the exception of libertarian Ron Paul, none of the current presidential contenders have made peace a central theme in their campaign. It was not always this way: our first president, George Washington, once said that "My first wish is to see this plague of mankind, war, banished from the earth," and Abraham Lincoln understood that "war at the best is terrible." Woodrow Wilson may have lent his name to the sometimes overweening U.S. effort to spread democratic ideals around the globe, but he also warned his countrymen to exercise the "self-restraint of a truly great nation, which realizes its own power and scorns to misuse it."  And let us not forget that Dwight D. Eisenhower, who knew as much about war as any American, once remarked that "America's leadership and prestige depend, not merely upon our unmatched material progress, riches and military strength, but on how we use our power in the interests of world peace and human betterment."

Yet such sentiments seem notably absent in the hearts of those who now seek to be commander-in-chief, including the present incumbent. As Burns observes, even Obama's speech accepting the Nobel Peace Prize was mostly a defense of the necessity of force. And today, most of the presidential aspirants seem more interested in convincing voters that they know how to channel their inner Rambo and that they will not hesitate to use force wherever and whenever they deem it necessary. Frankly, I'd be happier thinking that they would hesitate, and think twice -- or even thrice -- before sending the nation to another war.

Part of the problem, as the former president of the Council on Foreign Relations, Leslie Gelb,admitted a couple of years ago, is that a reputation for tough-minded hawkishness has become a prerequisite for advancement and credibility in the foreign-policy establishment. Think about it: even though the United States is probably the most secure great power in history, an ambitious up-and-coming policy wonk in D.C. is more likely to advance rapidly if he or she is a vocal proponent of using American power than if he or she is seen as skeptical or even somewhat averse to flexing U.S. military might at every occasion. And God forbid that someone who aspires to rise in Washington gets a reputation for being seriously interested in peace. That might get you a job at AID or at some left-wing think tank, but you aren't going to make a lot of short lists for State, Defense, or the NSC.

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http://www.forteantimes.com/features/articles/220/ghostwatch.html

Ruth, the producer, and I discussed how we both felt we could no longer trust what we were seeing, what we were being shown or told by TV. The lines between the once distinct languages of factual and fictional TV were becoming dangerously blurred. Even the CNN Gulf War reports on Newsnight (with the infrared camerawork we duplicated in Ghostwatch) felt suspect, somehow unreliable. What was drama and what was not?

Yet, paradoxically, television had also become the arbiter of reality, as John Waite exemplified on hearing of the release of his hostage cousin Terry in November 1991: “I won’t believe it until I see it on TV.”

This makes me think back on my Black Mirror review and 'aribter of reality' is probably better langauge to talk about the kind of power I was arguing UKN chose to abdicate to prove they had any at all. 

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http://www.lawyersgunsmoneyblog.com/2011/12/the-unbearable-lightness-of-hitch

No matter how lively the prose, avidly supporting “Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld and Wolfowitz while continuing to insist that Henry Kissinger was a war criminal” is not the mark of any kind of serious thinker. 

http://crookedtimber.org/2005/02/10/me-and-christopher-hitchens/#comment-60678

“If you wanted more Iraqi support,” Atiyyah bellowed at Hitchens,” you should have given us more money and food once you got there!” “So you’re saying, sir, that you can be bought,” Hitchens shot back. If I didn’t deeply dislike Hitchens already, that would do it. He’s talking to one of the leaders of one of the liberal Iraqi institutions upon which the future of Iraq depends. There’s no way that the guy has the resources he needs. And Hitchens has the gall to talk about humanitarian aid and support for his projects as if it was some sort of bribe that Atiyyah should have the self-respect to refuse.

http://www.thenation.com/blog/165222/regarding-christopher

It wasn’t just the position itself, it was his lordly condescending assumption that he could sort this whole thing out for the ladies in 1,000 words that probably took him twenty minutes to write. “Anyone who has ever seen a sonogram or has spent even an hour with a textbook on embryology knows” that pro-life women are on to something when they recoil at the idea of the “disposable fetus.” Hmmmm… that must be why most OB-GYNs are pro-choice and why most women who have abortions are mothers. Those doctors just need to spend an hour with a medical textbook; those mothers must never have seen a sonogram. Interestingly, although he promised to address the counterarguments made by the many women who wrote in to the magazine, including those on the staff, he never did. For a man with a reputation for courage, it certainly failed him then. (Years later, when he took up the question of abortion again in Vanity Fair, he said basically the exact same things, using the same straw-women arguments. Time taught him nothing, because he didn’t want to learn.)

That was the bad side of Christopher—the moral bully and black-and-white thinker posing as daring truth-teller. It was the side that reveled in 9/11, because now everyone would see how evil the jihadis were, and that rejoiced in the thought that the Korans of Muslim fighters would not protect them from American bullets. Some eulogists have praised him for moral consistency, but I don’t see that: he wrote tens of thousands of words attacking Clinton for executing Ricky Ray Rector, but seemed untroubled about George W Bush’s execution of 152 people—at the time a historical record—as governor of Texas. He was so fuelled by his own certainty he claimed that the failure to find weapons of mass destruction in Iraq only proved they were there.

http://flyingrodent.blogspot.com/2011/12/not-on-their-own-merits-but-according.html

His writings throughout the decade were chock-full of such banalities.  How important were Hussein's supposed weapons of genocide as a war aim?  It depended on how Hitchens was feeling on any given day.  "Just you wait", he famously told doubters.  When no weapons were found, he announced that this proved the righteousness of the operation.  Later, the sound of scurrying would announce that Hitch had moved the goalposts again - now, the invasion and quest for mythical WMDs was Hussein's fault, since he pretended to have weapons. 

...

Long after the neo-conservatives themselves fell silent on Hussein's supposed weapons programmes, Hitch was still flogging the corpse of the Niger uranium claim.  When the Bush administration fell prey to its own idiocy in the Plamegate affair, Hitchens was there to defend its honour once more.  

...

He travelled to the far-flung places of the Earth, only to discover upon arrival that he was even more right about everything than even he had previously suspected.  He spent the decade building himself a platform with rebellious, outsider indignation, from which to better side with the most powerful people on the planet.  The type of man who non-ironically denounces "Iranian interference in our affairs" when he means American-occupied Iraq, Lebanon and Palestine.  

http://www.salon.com/2011/12/17/christohper_hitchens_and_the_protocol_for_public_figure_deaths/

One of the last political essays he wrote in his life, for Slate, celebrated the virtues of Endless War.

http://coreyrobin.com/2011/12/16/christopher-hitchens-the-most-provincial-spirit-of-all/

On the announcement of his death, I think it’s fair to allow Christopher Hitchens to do the things he loved to do most.

Speak for himself:

[On the use of cluster bombs by the US in Afghanistan] If you’re actually certain that you’re hitting only a concentration of enemy troops…then it’s pretty good because those steel pellets will go straight through somebody and out the other side and through somebody else. And if they’re bearing a Koran over their heart, it’ll go straight through that, too. So they won’t be able to say, “Ah, I was bearing a Koran over my heart and guess what, the missile stopped halfway through.” No way, ’cause it’ll go straight through that as well. They’ll be dead, in other words.

Speak about himself:

I should perhaps confess that on September 11 last, once I had experienced all the usual mammalian gamut of emotions, from rage to nausea, I also discovered that another sensation was contending for mastery. On examination, and to my own surprise and pleasure, it turned out be exhilaration. Here was the most frightful enemy–theocratic barbarism–in plain view….I realized that if the battle went on until the last day of my life, I would never get bored in prosecuting it to the utmost.

Hitchens had a reputation for being an internationalist. Yet someone who gets excited by mass murder—and then invokes that excitement, to a waiting audience, as an explanation of his support for mass murder—is not an internationalist.  He is a narcissist, the most provincial spirit of all.

Only a writer of Hitchens’s talents could do justice to the culture that now so shamefully mourns him.

http://www.theatlantic.com/national/archive/2011/12/hitchens-and-the-war/250177/

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