Crocodile tears

Posted on January 4, 2014 by Antigone1984.com

Editorial note: If you have not yet read our mission statement above, please do so in order that you can put our blogs in context. 

4 January 2014

я сижу на шее у человека , задавил его и требую , чтобы он вез меня, и, не слезая с него, уверяю себя и других, что я очен жалею и хочу облегчить его положение всеми возможными средствами, но только не тем, чтобы слезть с него.

“I sit on a man’s back, choking him and making him carry me, and yet assure myself and others that I am very sorry for him and wish to ease his lot by all possible means – except by getting off his back.”

From chapter 16 of the social treatise “What Then Must We Do?” (1886) by Russian writer and moralist Leo Tolstoy (1828-1910).  English translation by Aylmer Maude.

——–

 You might perhaps care to view some of our earlier posts.  For instance:

1. Why? or How? That is the question (3 Jan 2012)

2. Partitocracy v. Democracy (20 July 2012)

3. The shoddiest possible goods at the highest possible prices (2 Feb 2012)

4. Capitalism in practice  (4 July 2012) 

5.Ladder  (21 June 2012)

 6. A tale of two cities (1)  (6 June 2012)

 7. A tale of two cities (2)  (7 June 2012)

 8. Where’s the beef? Ontology and tinned meat (31 Jan 2012)

Every so often we shall change this sample of previously published posts.

——-

Posted in Justice, Literature, Politics, Russia, USA | Tagged , , , , , , | Leave a comment

Sweet dreams

Posted on January 3, 2014 by Antigone1984.com

Editorial note: If you have not yet read our mission statement above, please do so in order that you can put our blogs in context. 

3 January 2014

 

Last night I dreamed I ate a ten-pound marshmallow. When I woke up, the pillow was gone.

English comedian Tommy Cooper (1921-1984).

——–

 You might perhaps care to view some of our earlier posts.  For instance:

1. Why? or How? That is the question (3 Jan 2012)

2. Partitocracy v. Democracy (20 July 2012)

3. The shoddiest possible goods at the highest possible prices (2 Feb 2012)

4. Capitalism in practice  (4 July 2012) 

5.Ladder  (21 June 2012)

 6. A tale of two cities (1)  (6 June 2012)

 7. A tale of two cities (2)  (7 June 2012)

 8. Where’s the beef? Ontology and tinned meat (31 Jan 2012)

Every so often we shall change this sample of previously published posts.

——-

 

Posted in Literature | Tagged , , , , , | Leave a comment

Putting it all in perspective

Posted on January 2, 2014 by Antigone1984.com

Editorial note: If you have not yet read our mission statement above, please do so in order that you can put our blogs in context. 

2 January 2014

The universe has existed for about 14 billion years.

The sun and its planets, including the earth, have existed for about 4.5 billion years.

Life on earth has existed for about 3.5 billion years.

Homo sapiens, the new kid 0n the block, has been around for perhaps half a million years.

Some 12 000 years ago hunter-gatherers began to domesticate wild animals.

Settled agriculture started around 10 000 years ago.

Yesterday the earth’s conventional time clock moved forward a year from 2013 to 2014 – fireworks exploding around the globe in celebration – counting from the birth of a preacher just over 2000 years ago in Palestine.

Big deal.

——–

 You might perhaps care to view some of our earlier posts.  For instance:

1. Why? or How? That is the question (3 Jan 2012)

2. Partitocracy v. Democracy (20 July 2012)

3. The shoddiest possible goods at the highest possible prices (2 Feb 2012)

4. Capitalism in practice  (4 July 2012) 

5.Ladder  (21 June 2012)

 6. A tale of two cities (1)  (6 June 2012)

 7. A tale of two cities (2)  (7 June 2012)

 8. Where’s the beef? Ontology and tinned meat (31 Jan 2012)

Every so often we shall change this sample of previously published posts.

——-

Posted in Cosmology, Religion | Tagged , , , , , , , , | Leave a comment

The Fourth World War

Posted on January 1, 2014 by Antigone1984.com

Editorial note: If you have not yet read our mission statement above, please do so in order that you can put our blogs in context. 

1 January 2014

LA LUCHA CONTINÚA

Precisely 20 years ago today, on 1 January 1994, indigenous peasants in Mexico’s Chiapas state staged the Zapatista revolt against economic and political oppression under the leadership of subcomandante Marcos, the nom de guerre of their masked leader.

It is no accident that 1 January 1994 was the very day on which the controversial Free Trade Agreement between the US, Canada and Mexico came into force. The treaty set in stone the subservience of the Mexican economy to North American business and political interests.

The Mexican government sent the army into Chiapas but this failed to stifle the revolt and an uneasy peace agreement was eventually signed by the government in 1996. However, the terms of the agreement were allegedly not adhered to and in 1997 anti-Zapatista paramilitaries murdered 47 non-combatants, including children and pregnant women, in Acteal, a Chiapas settlement whose inhabitants sympathized with the Zapatistas’ aims but rejected violence. The peace process has stagnated ever since. The government has resumed overall control of Chiapas but pockets of indigenous resistence survive in scattered autonomous communities.

A few days ago, on 28 December 2013, subcomandante Marcos released a communiqué to mark the 2oth anniversary of the uprising. The statement acknowledged that the revolt had not achieved its aims but expressed a commitment to continued resistence:

“In December 2013 it is just as cold as 20 years ago and today, like back then, the same flag protects us: that of rebellion.”

Antigone1984:

In August 1997 the French leftwing newspaper, Le Monde diplomatique, published an essay by the subcomandante  entitled“The Fourth World War Has Begun”.

The following is a summary of Marcos’s ideas on this subject as set out in the current Wikipedia article on “Subcomandante Marcos”. In it Marcos claims that neoliberalism and globalisation constitute the “Fourth World War.”

He [Marcos] termed the Cold War the “Third World War.” In this piece, Marcos compares and contrasts the Third World War (the Cold War) with the Fourth World War, which he says is the new type of war that we find ourselves in now:

 

“If the Third World War saw the confrontation of capitalism and socialism on various terrains and with varying degrees of intensity, the fourth will be played out between large financial centres, on a global scale, and at a tremendous and constant intensity.”

 

He goes on to claim that economic globalisation has created devastation through financial policies:

 

“Toward the end of the Cold War, capitalism created a military horror: the neutron bomb, a weapon that destroys life while leaving buildings intact. During the Fourth World War, however, a new wonder has been discovered: the financial bomb. Unlike those dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, this new bomb not only destroys the polis (here, the nation), imposing death, terror, and misery on those who live there, but also transforms its target into just another piece in the puzzle of economic globalisation.”

 

Marcos explains the effect of the financial bombs as “destroying the material bases of [the nation state’s] sovereignty and, in producing [its] qualitative depopulation, excluding all those deemed unsuitable to the new economy (for example, indigenous peoples).”

 

Marcos also believes that neoliberalism and globalisation result in a loss of unique culture for societies as a result of [their] homogenising effect:

 

“All cultures forged by nations—the noble indigenous past of America, the brilliant civilization of Europe, the wise history of Asian nations, and the ancestral wealth of Africa and Oceania—are corroded by the American way of life. In this way, neoliberalism imposes the destruction of nations and groups of nations in order to reconstruct them according to a single model. This is a planetary war, of the worst and cruelest kind, waged against humanity.”

 

HAPPY NEW YEAR!

 

——–

 You might perhaps care to view some of our earlier posts.  For instance:

1. Why? or How? That is the question (3 Jan 2012)

2. Partitocracy v. Democracy (20 July 2012)

3. The shoddiest possible goods at the highest possible prices (2 Feb 2012)

4. Capitalism in practice  (4 July 2012) 

5.Ladder  (21 June 2012)

 6. A tale of two cities (1)  (6 June 2012)

 7. A tale of two cities (2)  (7 June 2012)

 8. Where’s the beef? Ontology and tinned meat (31 Jan 2012)

Every so often we shall change this sample of previously published posts.

——-

Posted in Africa, Canada, Economics, Globalisation, Mexico, Military, Politics, UN | Tagged , , , , , , , , , | Leave a comment

Read my lips

Posted on December 13, 2013 by Antigone1984.com

Editorial note: If you have not yet read our mission statement above, please do so in order that you can put our blogs in context. 

13 December 2013

“There will be no downgrading of human rights under this Government…”

William Hague, Conservative Foreign Secretary, 2011

“…the next Conservative manifesto will promise to scrap the Human Rights Act.”

Theresa May, Conservative Interior Minister, 2013

Antigone1984:

We remind readers of a passage from our post Partitocracy v. Democracy originally published on 20 July 2012:

“Politicians, understandably, regularly come out as the least popular category when people are polled to give their views as to which occupations they most admire.  Antigone1984 has had a long and in-depth acquaintance with politicians of all stripes, both nationally and internationally. Its conclusion is that in general, with a very few honourable exceptions, politicians are the scum of the earth. Just as the scum rises to the top, so politicians have risen to the summit of the political cesspool. They represent not the people but themselves and only themselves. The sole aim of their political activity is to secure personal preferment. It is often claimed that politicians are liars, that they do not tell the truth.  Antigone1984 does not believe this.  It does not believe that they are liars. To be a liar you have to know what the truth is. The politician has no idea what the truth is. He or she does not know what the word means. To a politician, “the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth” is defined as whatever words happen to be coming out of his mouth at any given moment in time. It need bear no relations to the facts nor to whatever that same politician has said in the past. Nor need it bear any relation to what he or she says two minutes later. As we have just suggested, to a politician the truth varies according to whatever suits his or her personal interests at the moment they are speaking. UK journalist Simon Hoggart summed up the typical politician when he quoted this remark by an anonymous political activist: “Most Members of Parliament are as slippery as a bucket of worms. Put your hand in and it comes out all slimy.” Public service is a euphemism for the opportunist pursuit of personal ambition.”

——–

 You might perhaps care to view some of our earlier posts.  For instance:

1. Why? or How? That is the question (3 Jan 2012)

2. Partitocracy v. Democracy (20 July 2012)

3. The shoddiest possible goods at the highest possible prices (2 Feb 2012)

4. Capitalism in practice  (4 July 2012) 

5.Ladder  (21 June 2012)

 6. A tale of two cities (1)  (6 June 2012)

 7. A tale of two cities (2)  (7 June 2012)

 8. Where’s the beef? Ontology and tinned meat (31 Jan 2012)

Every so often we shall change this sample of previously published posts.

——-

Posted in Europe, Justice, Politics, UK, UN | Tagged , , , , , , , | Leave a comment

Women “too ethical” for business

Posted on December 12, 2013 by Antigone1984.com

Editorial note: If you have not yet read our mission statement above, please do so in order that you can put our blogs in context. 

12 December 2013

 

Men are nearly five times more likely than women to reach a senior executive position in the UK, according to research published by the 30% Club, a group of companies including Diageo, RBS and John Lewis, which has pledged to get more talented women into their boardrooms.

According to a report on the research published in the London Guardian on 11 December 2013, a survey of more than 500 men and women in 13 blue-chip companies showed that male executives were more likely to be seen as decisive and rational, while women were rated as well-organised and ethical – to the detriment of their promotion chances.

Antigone1984:

Surprise, surprise!

So the message to women in business is presumably quite simple: don’t be well-organised or ethical, then you’ll get on!

We can see no reason whatever why one cannot both be well-organised and ethical and, at the same time, decisive and rational.

What we appear to be seeing here is evidence of rank corporate prejudice against women – not that there is anything new in that.

There is also the suggestion that when a man or woman takes up a business career they must leave ethics behind them – or else!

Business is about the bottom line – and that’s it.

Fret about the morality of what you are doing and you do so at your peril.

Good to know.

——–

 You might perhaps care to view some of our earlier posts.  For instance:

1. Why? or How? That is the question (3 Jan 2012)

2. Partitocracy v. Democracy (20 July 2012)

3. The shoddiest possible goods at the highest possible prices (2 Feb 2012)

4. Capitalism in practice  (4 July 2012) 

5.Ladder  (21 June 2012)

 6. A tale of two cities (1)  (6 June 2012)

 7. A tale of two cities (2)  (7 June 2012)

 8. Where’s the beef? Ontology and tinned meat (31 Jan 2012)

Every so often we shall change this sample of previously published posts.

——-

 

 

 

 

 

 

Posted in Economics, UK | Tagged , , , , , , | Leave a comment

Authors attack Big Brother

Posted on December 11, 2013 by Antigone1984.com

Editorial note: If you have not yet read our mission statement above, please do so in order that you can put our blogs in context. 

11 December 2013

A STAND FOR DEMOCRACY IN THE DIGITAL AGE

Hundreds of Writers sign Appeal condemning Mass Surveillance

Yesterday 10 December 2013 – International Human Rights Day – no fewer than 562 authors, including five winners of the Nobel prize for literature, from over 80 countries joined together to launch an appeal in defence of civil liberties and against secret mass surveillance by corporations and governments.

The authors were condemning the horrific scale of clandestine Big Brother surveillance revealed last year by former US espionage operative Edward Snowden, who is currently a political refugee in Russia.

The five Nobel laureates are Orhan Pamuk, J.M. Coetzee, Elfriede Jelinek, Günter Grass and Tomas Tranströmer.

Other signatories include Umberto Eco, Margaret Atwood, Don DeLillo, Daniel Kehlmann, Nawal El Saadawi, Arundhati Roy, Henning Mankell, Richard Ford, Javier Marías, Björk, David Grossman, Arnon Grünberg, Ángeles Mastretta, Juan Goytisolo, Nuruddin Farah and João Ribeiro.

Victor Erofeyev, Liao Yiwu, David Malouf, Yann Martel, Ariel Dorfman, Amit Chaudhuri, Roddy Doyle, Amos Oz, Mikhail Shishkin, Thomas Keneally and Anna Funder are also among the signatories.

British authors who signed up include Julian Barnes, Martin Amis, Ian McEwan, Irvine Welsh, Hari Kunzru, Jeanette Winterson, Hanif Kureishi and Kazuo Ishiguro.

The appeal, which was published in 30 newspapers around the world, reads as follows:

 “In recent months, the extent of mass surveillance has become common knowledge. With a few clicks of the mouse the state can access your mobile device, your e-mail, your social networking and Internet searches. 

It can follow your political leanings and activities and, in partnership with Internet corporations, it collects and stores your data, and thus can predict your consumption and behaviour. 

The basic pillar of democracy is the inviolable integrity of the individual. Human integrity extends beyond the physical body. In their thoughts and in their personal environments and communications, all humans have the right to remain unobserved and unmolested. 

This fundamental human right has been rendered null and void through abuse of technological developments by states and corporations for mass surveillance purposes.

A person under surveillance is no longer free; a society under surveillance is no longer a democracy.

To maintain any validity, our democratic rights must apply in virtual as in real space.

* Surveillance violates the private sphere and compromises freedom of thought and opinion. 

* Mass surveillance treats every citizen as a potential suspect. It overturns one of our historical  triumphs, the presumption of innocence. 

* Surveillance makes the individual transparent, while the state and the corporation operate in secret. As we have seen, this power is being systemically abused.

* Surveillance is theft. This data is not public property: it belongs to us. When it is used to predict our behaviour, we are robbed of something else: the principle of free will crucial to democratic liberty.

WE DEMAND THE RIGHT for all people to determine, as democratic citizens, to what extent their personal data may be legally collected, stored and processed, and by whom; to obtain information on where their data is stored and how it is being used; to obtain the deletion of their data if it has been illegally collected and stored.

WE CALL ON ALL STATES AND CORPORATIONS to respect these rights.

WE CALL ON ALL CITIZENS to stand up and defend these rights.

WE CALL ON THE UNITED NATIONS to acknowledge the central importance of protecting civil rights in the digital age, and to create an International Bill of Digital Rights. 

WE CALL ON GOVERNMENTS to sign and adhere to such a convention.”

——–

 You might perhaps care to view some of our earlier posts.  For instance:

1. Why? or How? That is the question (3 Jan 2012)

2. Partitocracy v. Democracy (20 July 2012)

3. The shoddiest possible goods at the highest possible prices (2 Feb 2012)

4. Capitalism in practice  (4 July 2012) 

5.Ladder  (21 June 2012)

 6. A tale of two cities (1)  (6 June 2012)

 7. A tale of two cities (2)  (7 June 2012)

 8. Where’s the beef? Ontology and tinned meat (31 Jan 2012)

Every so often we shall change this sample of previously published posts.

——-

 

 

 

Posted in Literature, Police, Politics, UK, UN, USA | Tagged , , , , , , , , , | Leave a comment

Fun and games

Posted on December 11, 2013 by Antigone1984.com

Editorial note: If you have not yet read our mission statement above, please do so in order that you can put our blogs in context. 

10 December 2013

You couldn’t make it up.

The slime of state snooping into people’s private lives has seeped into corners of cyberspace previously imagined unbesmirched by the spooks.

Now we know otherwise.

On-line gamesters, your number is up! Big Brother is watching you.

Yes, the snoops have opened up a whole new minefield of internet penetration – the on-line games industry.

According to media reports published today, the US National Security Agency (NSA) and its British satellite, Government Communications Headquarters (GCHQ), have mounted a concerted drive to infiltrate global nerd communities whose tens of millions of members waste their lives playing on-line games.

This revelation comes in a further exposure – of the dirty tricks employed by secret police in so-called western democracies – by Edward Snowden, a former spook who worked for the NSA and is now a political refugee in Russia after he blew the gaff last year on the massive – and ongoing-  surveillance by state agencies of the private communications of countless millions of innocent citizens.

According to today’s London Guardian, an NSA document entitled “Exploiting Terrorist Use of Games and Virtual Environments” stressed the risk of leaving online games communities under-monitored, describing them as a “target-rich communications network” where intelligence targets could “hide in plain sight”.

If properly exploited, games could provide vast amounts of intelligence, according to the NSA document. They could be used as a window for hacking attacks, to build pictures of people’s social networks through “buddy lists and interaction”, to make approaches by undercover agents, to obtain target identifiers such as profile photos and geo-location, and to allow collection of communications.

The spooks are also said to have tried to recruit potential informants from among the tech-savvy game-playing geeks.

According to the Guardian, however  – surprise, surprise – the documents contain no indication that this surveillance ever foiled any terrorist plot, nor is there any clear evidence that terror groups were using virtual communities of cyberspace gamesters to communicate in the way the intelligence agencies thought they might.

Now here comes the funny part.

The surveillance and infitration of online games communities has become so intensive and all-pervasive, involving all sorts of different semi-autonomous espionage  networks,  that the spooks are, inadvertently, spying on themselves!

No problem.

The NSA has set up a “deconfliction group” to spy on its own spies in a bid to stop them spying on each other.

As we said, you couldn’t make it up.

Antigone1984:

No one wants to meet a sticky end at the hands of terrorists.

We all want to feel secure.

But the fact is that the proliferation of secret state surveillance is making us feel exactly the opposite.

Novelist Ian McEwan says the following in today’s Guardian:

“Where Leviathan can, it will. The state, by its nature, always prefers security to liberty. Lately, technology has offered it means it can’t resist, means of mass surveillance that Orwell would have been amazed by. The process is inexorable – unless it’s resisted. Obviously, we need protection from terrorism, but not at any cost.”

——–

 You might perhaps care to view some of our earlier posts.  For instance:

1. Why? or How? That is the question (3 Jan 2012)

2. Partitocracy v. Democracy (20 July 2012)

3. The shoddiest possible goods at the highest possible prices (2 Feb 2012)

4. Capitalism in practice  (4 July 2012) 

5.Ladder  (21 June 2012)

 6. A tale of two cities (1)  (6 June 2012)

 7. A tale of two cities (2)  (7 June 2012)

 8. Where’s the beef? Ontology and tinned meat (31 Jan 2012)

Every so often we shall change this sample of previously published posts.

——-

 

 

 

 

Posted in Police, UK, USA | Tagged , , , , , , , | Leave a comment

Abolish school exams!

Posted on December 9, 2013 by Antigone1984.com

Editorial note: If you have not yet read our mission statement above, please do so in order that you can put our blogs in context. 

9 December 2013

At a time of mega-testing of children’s intellectual abilities, when there is ferocious competition between states to rank highly in the annual hit parades of those with the top-performing pupils, it is perhaps worth reflecting whether the downside of the educational rat race involved – the elimination of play and the stunting of young people’s natural and emotional development – outweighs any putative advantages. Besides which, of course, the international comparisons are often flawed through being based on skewed statistics which, inter alia, fail to take account of cultural and societal differences. The warning “rubbish in, rubbish out” applies as much here as in any computerised statistical model.

Which is why it was refreshing to read the following letter from reader Roy Boffy in the London Guardian newspaper  on 4 December 2013:

“Why have these tests at all? Most teachers can tell us, very cheaply, how well children are performing, who is doing well, who needs more support, without the complicated, expensive and often invalid rigmarole of formal testing. Nowhere in the workplace are people subject to such regimes. Workers are not set down in serried ranks and given unseen papers to test how well they do their jobs! Such a procedure would be preposterous – and it is no less preposterous when applied to students.”

 

——-

 You might perhaps care to view some of our earlier posts.  For instance:

1. Why? or How? That is the question (3 Jan 2012)

2. Partitocracy v. Democracy (20 July 2012)

3. The shoddiest possible goods at the highest possible prices (2 Feb 2012)

4. Capitalism in practice  (4 July 2012) 

5.Ladder  (21 June 2012)

 6. A tale of two cities (1)  (6 June 2012)

 7. A tale of two cities (2)  (7 June 2012)

 8. Where’s the beef? Ontology and tinned meat (31 Jan 2012)

Every so often we shall change this sample of previously published posts.

——-

 

Posted in Education, UK, UN | Tagged , , , , | Leave a comment

It’s a dog’s life for some

Posted on December 8, 2013 by Antigone1984.com

Editorial note: If you have not yet read our mission statement above, please do so in order that you can put our blogs in context. 

8 December 2013

The term “a dog’s life” is defined by the Oxford English Dictionary as “an unhappy existence, full of problems or unfair treatment” and “a dog’s dinner” is described derogatively as “a mess”.

Well, this isn’t always the case.

We are grateful to the diarist in the London Guardian for the following vignette observed by a shopper in the upscale Waitrose supermarket and published in the paper on 3 December 2013:

“I was behind a well-paid young couple in Berkhamsted Waitrose at the butchery counter who were ordering fillet steak – not for their own dinner, but to feed their dog. The complacent man boasted that he wouldn’t normally be at Waitrose because he regularly got the fillet steak for the dog at Harrods food hall.”

“Poor Fido,” commented the diarist, “no one escapes austerity.”

It sure brings tears to one’s eyes to think what that poor pooch must have gone through as he munched his way through downmarket steak from an upmarket supermarket.

After such a harrowing tale of canine suffering, one has hardly any compassion left for the plight of human victims of the most vicious attack on living standards in living memory that is now being mounted on Britain’s sick and poor by a smug governing clique of fatcat politicians wallowing in wealth and privilege.

Who, for instance, can have much time for the following whinge-ridden story by correspondent Amelia Gentleman which appeared in another part of the London Guardian on the very same day that Fido’s misfortune was retailed?

“It is…cold inside the Morley [a district in Yorkshire] home of Auxilia Mapuranga, a former NHS [National Health Service] healthcare assistant, who is sitting wrapped in a blanket, her feet tucked into a special electric foot-warmer bag, which she thinks is a cheaper way of staying warm than turning on the gas heating in her two-room flat, which she has mostly stopped doing because the bills were getting so high. It is dusk, but she waits till it gets a bit darker before she turns on the light. Her judgment on whether the economy is beginning to turn around is entirely framed by what she sees as ever-tightening restrictions on access to state support. Because she is unwell, immobilised by arthritis and back problems and the after-effects of chemotherapy, she has been subject to the new, more stringent fitness-for-work assessments, which she has failed twice in the past two years. For most of this year, she has been trying to get by on reduced benefit payments of £35 [€42 or $57] a week, but has run into debt, and has been unable to pay the £10  [€12 or $16] bedroom tax…She lives alone…She has not ventured out for Christmas shopping in Morley’s Queen Street because she finds it hard to get about and in any case she has noticed that the cost of her regular weekly shopping is already creeping up to unaffordable levels. Instead, she is retreating further into her home. ‘When I can’t switch on my heating, I’d rather stay in bed to stay warm…,’ she says.”

Don’t some mothers ‘ave ‘em! Moaning minnies, all of ‘em. Why don’t these people get up in the morning and go out and do a decent day’s work? Forget about the lie being peddled by Commies that there are not enough jobs. It’s all down to personal determination in the end. Pull your socks up and get on with it. Skivers, slackers, ne’er-do-wells, the lot of ‘em, they just won’t make the effort. Everybody knows that if you are poor or ill, it’s your own fault. Horatio Alger and Samuel Smiles proved that years ago. Grit and hard work lead automatically to affluence. The rich deserve every penny they’ve got (even when they’ve got it without having had to work for it).

Our thoughts are with poor Fido.

——–

 You might perhaps care to view some of our earlier posts.  For instance:

1. Why? or How? That is the question (3 Jan 2012)

2. Partitocracy v. Democracy (20 July 2012)

3. The shoddiest possible goods at the highest possible prices (2 Feb 2012)

4. Capitalism in practice  (4 July 2012) 

5.Ladder  (21 June 2012)

 6. A tale of two cities (1)  (6 June 2012)

 7. A tale of two cities (2)  (7 June 2012)

 8. Where’s the beef? Ontology and tinned meat (31 Jan 2012)

Every so often we shall change this sample of previously published posts.

——-

 

 

 

 

 

Posted in Politics, UK | Tagged , , , , , , , | Leave a comment