Das Capita

So the chairman from Capita resigns:

Capita's chief executive, Paul Pindar, said: "Rod has played a key role in establishing Capita as the leading service transformation partner to both public and private organisations across the UK."

At great cost!

Fantastic, I thought this aspect of the "loans controversy" was totally underplayed in the news. Who cares about the bloody lords and knights, all that rotting feudality, what matters is that many of these people bought access to the PM and shaped his decision-making. They expect us to believe that it was "just a loan, at commercial rates" with no afterthought...
All the crazy bloody-mindedness ("it is essential that this reform of the schools goes through (even though most of my party is against it)" suddenly makes sense: there was a debt to repay, in many ways, and only Blair knew it. This hidden guilt explains the stubborness.

What an ironic end to the Blair era: all these loans were to pay for an election campaign, desperatly trying to turn opinion and the labour hemorragy from the Iraq decision.

For the record...

"Oh, it was breathtaking. I mean I was almost starting to think that we had become inured to everything that we'd seen of this war over the past three weeks; all this sort of saturation. And finally, when we saw that it was such a just true, genuine expression. It was reminiscent, I think, of the fall of the Berlin Wall. And just sort of that pure emotional expression, not choreographed, not stage-managed, the way so many things these days seem to be. Really breathtaking."
(Washington Post reporter Ceci Connolly, appearing on Fox News Channel on 4/9/03, discussing the pulling down of a Saddam Hussein statue in Baghdad, an event later revealed to have been a U.S. military PSYOPS operation [stunt]--Los Angeles Times, 7/3/04)

Breathtaking? If only...
link.

These other one show what the war was really about... and how successful it was.

"If image is everything, how can the Democratic presidential hopefuls compete with a president fresh from a war victory?"
(CNN's Judy Woodruff, 5/5/03)

"It is amazing how thorough the victory in Iraq really was in the broadest context..... And the silence, I think, is that it's clear that nobody can do anything about it. There isn't anybody who can stop him. The Democrats can't oppose--cannot oppose him politically."
(Washington Post reporter Jeff Birnbaum-- Fox News Channel, 5/2/03)

Isaac Hayes...

a scientologist?
I can't dig that AT ALL, this is depressing...

The cranks' motto

They laughed at Galileo, they laughed at Darwin, they laughed at Edison … and they laughed at Punch and Judy.

From John Sladek’s 1974 book, The New Apocrypha (via).

The SAS...

hates america!
Interesting interview...

Great quote

From Sam in Lenin's comments. Says it all.

"Our position is that whatever grievances a nation may have, however objectionable it finds the status quo, aggressive warfare is an illegal means for settling those grievances or for altering those conditions."
-(Supreme Court Justice Robert Jackson, the American prosecutor at the Nuremberg trials, in his opening statement to the tribunal)

Incidentally many times when the word "fascist" is used (as in islamofascist), it's not a proper use (ie in any way connected to the Francos and Mussolinis of this world) but a way to reconnect morally and politically with the second world war, the only just war in memory, as conventional wisdom goes. But I've been thinking recently even this is exaggerated and as pointed above there is no just wars, only just defense (hence the common Orwellian euphemism). WWII was not just, it was a necessary horror.

God on his side

When I wrote that

If you are pushed to bomb people, out of reasons X or Y, it's a natural human instinct to hunt for rationalisations and to somehow make it fit into your moral universe. Of course, we kid ourselves into thinking it's the other way around, hence the confusion. A direct word from God is a pretty good justification...

concerning THE terrorists of course (yes the evil arabs!), we didn't have Blair's admission that he turned to prayer when trying to decide if it was good to cluser-bomb Iraq into democracy. It seems pretty relevant now...
Incidentally the column I linked to is stupid punditry. Of course Blair wasn't "told by god to do it", but it's never like that: you have doubts about a dubious moral decision, you turn to prayer i.e. a silent reflection about being one of God's chosen few, his people, Jesus's buddy... you can do no wrong. Dilemma closed.

Little circle-jerk

The closed intellectual circle and self-proclaimed rational little atoms have now invited Johann Hari, having ran out of idiots from the "cluster-bomb left" group. He's the saner of the lot and his interview has many interesting things to say, if a bit shrill. But their riff on the "cartoon" controversy is stupid. They say it's a free speech issue, of course it is, and who can hate free speech? Those haters are insane, case closed. But it's not, and the racism angle is totally absent, and this is similar to the just as idiotic discussions of the hijab ban in France, and it's more of the same.

First they are missing a lot of context, about hated, scapegoat minorities. Secondly, a bit of transposition can help you see the argument in a clearer way (discarding more or less conscious irrationalities): if a newspaper in china (say) had published a (non-agressive) cartoon of the prophet, would there be world-wide violence protesting this sacrilegous iconoclasm? When people were saying that the outcome of the 2002 election in France was wrong because of the obvious victory for the racist/fascist (not lightly used terms!) FN, were they against "free elections"? Is there any question of the state or anyone censoring the provocative magazine?

There is a lot of dismay at a series of provocative racist attacks in a charged atmosphere. This generates more hatred and violence which feeds back on the racism, just as they wanted. It's all part of the war on rationality, and you think little atoms would catch up on this but I fear they are blinded by they subconscious islamophobia.