Blogs in June 2011.

I thought I should see what others are doing:

Flesh is Grass has an important post on how the EDL managed to march, unescorted, from Redbridge to Dagenham.

Yaacov Lozowick has given up blogging. Pity, I didn’t agree with him, much, but he has a thoughtful way and articulates many intelligent ideas.

Johnny Guitar thinks about the Troubles, the Good Friday Agreement and the need for a South Africa-style truth commission, just not at the moment.

Weggis on the case against biofuels. Completely agree, it seems so questionable to use food stuff or related material as fuel for the internal combustion engine.

Harry Barnes on Sorting Out The Labour Party, which I think is very optimistic. In the short term they could ditch Ed Miliband, try to be a bit radical, really, seriously distance themselves from the skeleton of New Labour. Chance would be a fine thing.

In related news, I am not surprised that Ed Miliband is less popular than Iain Duncan Smith or William Hague, when they were in a similar position. Frankly, Miliband’s inarticulate, has the charisma of a saucer and he’s politically useless.

Jams looks at an evil cat, great photos.

Mark Gardner at the CST has a reflective post on the situation at UCU and its wider implications, From UCU to MEMO and “Israel’s British hirelings”.

Ten minutes hate on the ‘miracle villages’.

Chris Dillow considers Miliband’s power blindness.

Nick Lowles provides a photo and details of the EDL thugs racial attack in Dagenham.

Sorrel Moseley-Williams ponders Journalists’ Day in Argentina.

Not a blog, but worthwhile all the same. Searchlight on the BNP’s use of Facebook and Twitter.

Rosie looks at Fact and Fiction.

James Bloodworth has a couple of cracking posts, Will the Defence Secretary’s links with Sri Lanka compromise British calls for an enquiry? and Isn’t it time for an apology, Mr Chomsky?

Rebecca provides an update on the Gaza flotilla. Personally, I think the Israeli Government should allow them into Gaza with minimum fuss or hassle. I think Gazans should get as much as they can, after all living under Hamas must be terrible.

Jack of Kent looks at the arrest of blogger Jacqui Thompson and the many unanswered questions.

Greens Engage on Cynthia and Jello.

At Greater Surbiton, a guest post by David Pettigrew, Justice in Bosnia after Mladic.

Eric Reeves has a piece in the Washington Post, In Sudan, genocide anew?

Engage has an abundance of posts which should be read, just a small selection: Open antisemitism doesn’t harm your reputation, Sally Hunt pretends not to understand the term “institutional racism” and Richard Kuper on the Working Definition of Anti-Semitism (by Eve Garrard)

Enjoy!

The Guardian’s Oxbridge Elite, Press TV And The Kirk.

Firstly, thanks to Engage for pointing me towards Ben Gidley’s piece at Dissent, The Politics of Defining Racism: The Case of Anti-Semitism in the University and College Union. Clearly, Dr. Gidley is very knowledgeable on this topic and a pleasure to read, here’s a snippet:

“Racism is mercurial. It mutates over time. Pseudoscientific racial theories are now spouted only by marginal cranks. Notions that different races are different species have come and gone; eugenics has come and gone; words like “Aryan” and “Semitic” are starting to sound quaint. The period since the 1980s has seen the rise of cultural racism, or racism that focuses on cultural differences rather than biological ones.”

In class related matters, the Guardian asked its staff, who’d been educated at Oxbridge and had it helped them in their career. Hmm, not a hard question to answer. Next, they’ll be saying old Etonians dominate the British establishment.

The New York Times on Ratko Mladić, chocolates and genocide. I expect that Ed Herman and Diana Johnstone will be up in arms shortly. Balkan Witness has a good page on Herman and other’s denial. NPR is worth a read.

Time has an informative piece on the psychology of dictators, and I suspect that its findings apply more broadly than many would care to admit.

Political Betting looks at political leadership and finds that Ed Miliband has a lower rating than William Hague (when he was Tory leader, briefly), good graph.

Modems and Scraps.

Just a few scraps that occurred to me, the Beeb has a good post on how older technology is helping Egyptians organise after the State clampdown:

“Fax machines, ham radio and dial-up modems are helping to avoid the net block imposed on Egypt.

On 27 January, Egypt fell off the internet as virtually all international connections were cut following an order from the government.

But older technologies proved their worth as net activists and protesters used them to get round the block.

Protesters are also circulating information about how to avoid communication controls inside Egypt.

Call charge

Dial-up modems are one of the most popular routes for Egyptians to get back online. Long lists of international numbers that connect to dial-up modems are circulating in Egypt thanks to net activists We Re-Build, Telecomix and others.

Dial-up numbers featured heavily in Twitter messages tagged with hashes related to the protests such as #egypt and #jan25.

ISPs in France, the US, Sweden, Spain and many other nations have set up pools of modems that will accept international calls to get information to and from protesters. Many have waived fees to make it easier for people to connect.

Few domestic lines in Egypt can call internationally to get at the modems, however. The Manalaa blog gave advice about how to use dial-up using a mobile, bluetooth and a laptop. It noted that the cost of international calls could be “pricey” but said it was good enough for “urgent communication”. The advice was posted to many blogs, copied and sent out by many others.

We Re-Build, which campaigns for unmonitored internet access around Europe, said it was also listening on some ham radio frequencies and would relay any messages it received either by voice or morse code. ”

Elsewhere, the ever useless Labour leader, Ed Miliband, is profiled:

“Labour leader Ed Miliband has revealed he was a “bit square” as a youth, eschewing drugs and under-age drinking.

In a GQ magazine interview with Piers Morgan, he said his greatest talent was being “good at the Rubik’s Cube”.

Asked if he had ever been in a fight, he said: “Well, I may have been hit a few times. I went to a tough school.”

Mr Miliband, 41, added that he would not bow to pressure to marry his partner, Justine Thornton, with whom he has two children.

He also refused to “boast about my sexual prowess” when questioned about his romantic history.”

Are you still using Internet Explorer? A very bad idea as the Beeb explains:

“Microsoft has issued a “critical” warning over a newly-discovered flaw in Windows.

In a security advisory, the company warned of a loophole that could be used by malicious hackers to steal private information or hijack computers.

The bug potentially affects every user of the Internet Explorer web browser – around 900 million people worldwide.

Microsoft has issued a software patch to defend against attacks, and said it was working to develop a long-term fix.

The security advisory, which was published on Friday, details how the vulnerability can be used to manipulate users and take over their machines.

Although the flaw is actually inside Windows itself, it only appears to affect the way that Internet Explorer handles some web pages and documents.”

Please, oh please, try Chrome or Firefox instead, better still go for Linux.

Update 1: Here’s the Egypt Resource Page at We Rebuild which is full of interesting stuff.

Useless New Labour, the Tories And Workfare.

Despite impressions to the contrary New Labour is still very much alive and kicking in Ed Miliband’s Labour Party.

This is evidenced by their inability to tackle the Tories head-on over their workfare scheme.

Any other party would have highlighted the inadequacies of Iain Duncan-Smith’s proposals and been able to show the callous pennypinching authoritarian nature of the Tories, but not Ed Miliband’s frontbench mediocrities.

Instead Gang Miliband concede the Tories’ arguments from the outset, Douglas Alexander admitted as much on Sky News arguing Labour had similar policies (the difference being apparently “real” jobs) that were “backup by real sanctions”.

So Alexander and the Labour Party don’t mind penalising the poor, as the Tories are doing, they’re just arguing over a few details, he says as much in a Guardian interview.

Britain faces one of the most ideologically twisted governments since Thatcher’s time, and in many ways they are pushing through measures that only Margaret Thatcher could salivate over, yet their political opponents, in the form of the Labour Party, can’t muster cogent arguments or real opposition to them.

In fact, the political cretins running the Labour Party have been outflanked on the Left by the Archbishop of Canterbury.

Who would have thought it, and I say this through gritted teeth, Rowan Willams makes some penetrating points:

“People who are struggling to find work and struggling to find a secure future are – I think – driven further into a downward spiral of uncertainty, even despair, when the pressure is on in that way.

“People often are in this starting place, not because they’re wicked, stupid or lazy, but because their circumstances are against them, they’ve failed to break through into something and to drive that spiral deeper – as I say – does feel a great problem.”

One final thought, I remember Thatcherism first time around.

I wasn’t in Britain all of the time, but when I was I noticed a change, a perceptible shift, there were many more people living on the streets, sleeping rough, more beggars, more destitution, an increased climate of fear and the introduction of security guards where you never saw them before.

I suspect that Britain under Cameron’s Tories will make Thatcher’s time seem like halcyon days.

That’s how bad it will get, and Ed Miliband’s pathetic Labour Party need to accept their part in allowing it to happen.

Update 1: What we mustn’t forget is that the Tories are only really implementing a New Labour policy, albeit in their own inequitable way.

Who can forget the contemptible James Purnell ?

“James Purnell was accused of introducing a version of the American “workfare” today after he published plans to ensure that most benefit claimants are preparing for employment.

The work and pensions secretary said that under the proposals in his white paper on welfare reform “virtually everyone” claiming benefits would have to do something in return for their money.

Unveiling the plans in the Commons, Purnell said that most people on incapacity benefit would be required to attend job interviews and the unemployed would be expected to do four weeks’ full-time activity after a year out of work. Pilot schemes would require them to work full time for their benefits after two years.”

Update 2: Diary of a Benefit Scrounger has a heart felt post:

“And “Puff!” there go another 2.6 million voters Mr Alexander. Maybe a few more activists like me. Because if there is anyone in society you should be protecting, anyone Labour should instinctively know they should protect, anyone that needs you and our party desperately today, it is these sick and disabled and frightened people.

Admit you got it wrong on ESA. Take the hit. Come up with solutions and most of all, do what you claim you will do and LISTEN. Now, before it is too late – or give up the name Labour and all it stands for.

In the end, you see, there will be no-one left. No-one who believes you are any different to the Conservatives. No-one who doesn’t expect you to let them down on every promise, just as the LibDems have. I heard it every day of the campaign. “they’re all the same, they’re all the same THEY’RE ALL THE SAME.” The words should ring in your ears, you should not need suggestions for government when people up and down the country are suffering and frightened.

By all means support the “Squeezed Middle” but if, in the process, you decide the rest are all “Feckless Poor” then admit you are, in fact, Tories. Make the same dazzling conversion on the Road to Damascus that has overcome Mr Clegg and leave Labour to her true supporters.

And to Ed Miliband I say – You are not Labour. I am Labour and so are the millions of people who came out to vote for and canvass on behalf of our party on May 6th. You represent us, you do not decide to mould us in your image. You decide on policy with us in mind, not with one eye on the Daily Mail, and one eye on the opinion polls. Do what is right and the votes will follow. Most of all, reshape my party, our party so that I don’t hear that endless refrain on the doorsteps next time “They’re all the same.”

I, and other bloggers, politicians, journalists and charities will make this an issue. We will campaign with every ounce of strength until this terrible, terrible removal of ALL benefits from the most vulnerable people in society is reversed and ESA is overhauled. It would be a dreadful state of affairs if Labour are not there, campaigning with us, side by side, if they choose this issue to prove once and for all, that they really are “all the same.”

Update 3: Sue Marsh’s post is cross posted on the Labourlist, it will be interesting to see if the penny drops within the Labour Party, on how they are viewed from the outside, as basically useless and not much better than the Tories. I am not optimistic.

Update 4: Left Foot Forward is uncritically pushing Douglas Alexander’s guff.

Update 5: Flesh is Glass’s musings on the Big Society are worth a ponder.

Update 6: Chris Dillow displays his usual thought manner:

“If we take this as a measure of those who really don’t want to work, then “workshy scroungers” represent a mere 6.8% of the claimant count, 4.1% of the LFS measure of unemployment, and 2.1% of the wider unemployed (which adds the economically inactive who‘d like a job to the LFS measure of unemployment.)

The vast majority of unemployment – over 9-10ths on this reckoning – has nothing to do with people not wanting to work, and everything to do with a lack of demand for labour.

And this is where that rightist trick (or error) enters. They mistake small truths for large ones, and use the small truth to obfuscate the big one. So, the truth – that a few of the unemployed don’t want to work – is exaggerated and used to hide the bigger truth, that the vast majority of unemployment has other causes. “