Posted via Pixelpipe.

sketched by dweller at 12:43 am

0 comments

Share |

Thursday, January 22, 2009

President Obama News (video)

Labels: obama bush clinton cheney hillary barack pudding dessert chocolate

0 comments

Wednesday, January 14, 2009

white phosphorus - gaza

Gaza – Ma’an – Everything was on fire; houses, sheds, trees.
Ma'an News Agency Jan 13, 2009

Bombs, too, were everywhere, and with them came the white clouds. White phosphorous, the doctors are now saying, but that's disputed in Israel.

But for sure it was a night of terror. We were terrified. We thought we were going to burn to death.

Bombs were everywhere. That's what 27-year-old Fadia Al-Najjar kept saying. She's from Khaza'a; she was telling us what kind of horrific night she and her family had just gone through.

While explaining what had happened, Fadia stood next to her paramedic husband Ghanem, now surrounded by other medics, desperately struggling to save his life after he was caught in an airstrike unlike he had ever seen before.

Ghanem was incapacitated while on duty trying to bring injured Palestinians to the hospital. There had been calls reporting mysterious white smoke in the latest airstrike, and Ghanem was dispatched to attend to the wounded. He was on duty when he inhaled some of the smoke.

"The shelling with phosphorous bombs started in Khaza'a. Two of the bombs hit the area around our house,” Fadia explained. She recalled how the fire spread quickly throughout the home, and white smoke billowed out the windows.

"Neighbors were screaming, asking for help; the fire was changing," she remembers. "I woke up my kids, got them to my parents’ house, hoping to find a safer place."

"But the real catastrophe was two hours after we had moved to my parents’ house; bombs hit their home too and the fire spread everywhere. The top floor was burnt completely.”

It's not just her husband Fadia keeps watch over. In fact, the young mother has to split her time among the hospital's many wards. Her children have also been hospitalized.

"They wanted to burn us alive inside the house. There were 40 of us in there. Men, women, children,” she recalls of the second bombing. "We could hear their bodies burning."


"We didn't know where to go. Our house, my parents' house, my in-laws' house? All were burnt, damaged, destroyed. But where can we go in this weather? It's very cold."

Zakaya

Another relative, 51-year-old Zakaya, said she struggled to make sense of the chaos and confusion of trying to find her injured family members at Nasser Hospital in the northwest of Gaza City.

Zakaya told Ma'an that she barely remembers what happened, "but at about 10:00pm we heard explosions in several areas of Khaza'a, coming closer and closer."

"We live so close to the border wall [targeted by Israel], so we were just so afraid; our fear reached a maximum level."

"The children were asleep, so I tried to wake some of them because I felt our home was no longer safe," she says. "And all of the sudden bombs fell all over our two-story house."

"White smoke filled the house, and suddenly fires were spreading inside," Zakaya explained while checking on her children at the hospital's intensive care unit.

"We started screaming; we were so scared. I started to get the kids outside but the bombing went on and six more bombs fell on our house."

After the sixth bomb hit the home Zakaya and those her family was able to get out of the home were forced to abandon those left in the building. The fire was too hot and the smoke too intense and no one could get back inside.

"The smoke was spreading so fast; we couldn't see through it. We couldn't see, but we could hear.” From the windows of the burning home the cries of her children and cousins filled the streets. “The cries were not just from my home, but from the neighbors' house too."

Paramedics arrived and evacuated some of the last who were rescued from the building. They braved the smoke and were able to rescue a few others before the entire building was engulfed in flames.

Adel

According to 48-year-old Adel Kdeih, the night was calm before the bombs hit. Now that he knows what it was, that it was phosphorous, "it just makes the situation that more horrible."

Kdeih came hurrying to the hospital to check up on his children injured by the phosphorous, but he also remembers how tired he was. He was in great shock, numb, when he told Ma'an how the "dozens of incendiary bombs fell on civilian houses."

"We could hear women and children screaming in fear," he says.

Many of the bombs fell on the courtyard of his house. "I hurried inside the house to wake up my twelve children. I was able to evacuate the house with the help of paramedics and others from the [Hamas-run] civil-defense team."

"When I was evacuating the house I saw a lot of houses and fields being burnt, too,” he recalls.

The doctor

Dr Yousef Abu Ar-Reesh, the medical director at Nasser Medical Center, said more than 90 patients were brought in for burn treatments Sunday night.

"Most of them were skin burns, lacerations and deep wounds. A lot of them came in choking, unable to breathe," he explains.

He explained that as far as he can tell the Israeli army is using two kinds of bombs,"The first causes severe skin burns and leads to death, as with 41-year-old Hanan Al-Najjar here, and others."

"The second kind leads to suffocation, congestion, the inability to breathe.”

Dr Ar-Reesh said that he cannot confirm that the bombs are white phosphorus, since there are no specialized laboratories in Gaza. The eyewitness reports and the type of injuries he has seen in the hospital, however, worry him.

"What is certain” he said, “is that the Israeli government is using a new kind of bomb and explosives that Palestinian medics have never even heard of."

"Not even the Arab medical teams who just arrived can give us any support," he says.

The doctor pointed out that the wounds and burns are "terrible and horrific."

"And they can lead to death, as with Hanan Al-Najjar, who burned to death when a shell directly hit her body.”

When asked if Israel is deliberately using weapons that are illegal under international law for use against civilians, Dr Ar-Reesh chooses his words carefully: "I can't rule that out."
0 comments

Monday, January 12, 2009

Temporary School Of Thought

Temporary School Of Thought

a space where people come together to share knowledge, non-descript skills, tactical imagination, creationism, passive action. a week long event of mutual learning, leftwing bias, free lectures, inert radicalism, workshops, discussion and film screenings.
1 comments

Sunday, January 11, 2009

LEARNING TO MAKE AN ‘OUD IN NAZARETH by Ruth Padel

LEARNING TO MAKE AN ‘OUD IN NAZARETH

Published in The New Yorker, 27th October 2008

The first day he cut rosewood for the back,
bent sycamore into ribs and made a belly
of mahogany. Let us go early to the vineyards
and see if the vines have budded.
The sky was blue over the Jezreel valley
and the gilt dove shone
above the Church of the Annunciation.
The second day, he carved a camelbone base
for the fingerboard.
I sat down under his shadow with delight.

The third day, he made a nut of sandalwood,
and a pickguard of black cherry.
He damascened a rose of horn
with arabesques
as lustrous as under-leaves of olive beside the sea.
I have found him whom my soul loves.
He inlaid the soundhole with ivory swans,
each pair a Valentine of entangled necks,
and fitted tuning pegs of apricot
to give a good smell when rubbed.

The fourth was a day for cutting
high strings of camel-gut. His left hand
shall be under my head.
For the lower course, he twisted copper strings
pale as tarmac under frost.
He shall lie all night between my breasts.
The fifth day he laid down varnish.
Our couch is green and the beams of our house
are cedar and pine. Behind the neck
he put a sign to keep off the Evil Eye.

My beloved is a cluster of camphire
in the vineyards of Engedi
and I watched him whittle an eagle-feather, a plectrum
to celebrate the angel of improvisation
who dwells in clefts on the Nazareth ridge
where love waits. And grows, if you give it time.
Set me as a seal upon your heart.
On the sixth day the soldiers came
for his genetic code.
We have no record of what happened.

I was queueing at the checkpoint to Galilee.
I sought him and found him not.
He’d have been in his open-air workshop -
I called but he gave me no answer -
the selfsame spot
where Jesus stood when He came from Capernaum
to teach in synagogue, and townsfolk tried
to throw Him from the rocks. Until the day break
and shadows flee away
I will get me to the mountain of myrrh.

The seventh day we set his wounded hands
around the splinters. Come with me from Lebanon
my spouse, look from the top
of Shenir and Hermon, from the lions' dens.
On the eighth there were no more days.
I took a class in carpentry and put away the bridal rug.
We started over
with a child’s ‘oud bought on eBay.
He was a virtuoso of the ‘oud
and his banner over me was love.
0 comments

Saturday, January 10, 2009

Stag's Head - Still sorely missed

The best Athlone pub outside of Athlone! Full of Athlonians and acolytes on weekends in the good old days of the late 80s/early 90s when I used to go there regularly.

YOu can see the exterior and interior of the Stags as it was 20 years ago on "Completely Pogued", a bonus documentary on the DVD of the Pogues live at the Town and Country Club in '88 (it was broadcast on Channel 4 a couple of times in the 90s.)
Report this for removal
MadMick - 3 Jul 2008 15:05

The best Athlone pub outside of Athlone in the 80s and early 90s. The saddest pub closure of my lifetime - not having been to Camden for several years I was totally shocked on revisiting a couple of years ago to discover that the Stag's had joined the late great pubs in the sky. RIP.
Report this for removal
MadMick - 1 Jul 2008 15:05

Yes, a sadly missed pub. To rub it in, the block of flats conversion is now called "The Stags Head Apartments". Shameful.

There's a pub nearby on Royal College St that's had exactly the same treatment, ie, closing down and being called The Black Horse Apartments. I reckon there's someone contemptible out there who's doing this for a living. Let's get a mob together and lynch the fucker.
Report this for removal
travis - 22 Feb 2008 20:03

I loved this place, my second home for 4 years when I lived in london. Bert was a one off, a real gent and his staff/family were the salt of the earth.
We will see less and less of this sort of pub and that is a tragedy.
Report this for removal
scaldy - 11 Feb 2008 03:42

this was my favourite in the world ever.
maybe it was Bert and family (Landlord)
maybe it was the hearth fire
maybe it was the great music
maybe it was all the regulars
maybe it was the lock-ins
maybe it was the pool table.(I know there was no place but that part of the craic)
maybe it was the back yard
maybe it was the quiet weekdays.
maybe it was the saturday afternoons which drifted into evenings and late nights.
maybe it was all the wonderful diverse people who were likely to meet. or maybe it was Noreen. but whatever it was it is sadly missed. It's likes will never be seen in London A part of me died the day they closed the old place down.
Report this for removal
shancoduff - 8 Sep 2006 16:41

Sadly missed. Was a great place with top Guinness and great live Irish music particulalrly on Sundays. Good place to warm up after a day at Camden/Stables market. Spent many a good night there and met my missus there. Certainly irreplacable.
Report this for removal
pdavis500 - 9 Apr 2006 13:56

"The greatest little boozer"

The Stag's closed more than a year ago now and I'm still in mourning. It's not even a gastro-pub but just converted into flats.

Its like will never be seen again. Irreplacable.

Thanks for a some unforgettable times Bert Griffen.
Report this for removal
ThierryHenry - 2 Nov 2005 11:20

Great, just what Camden needs yet ANOTHER gastro pub. The Stags was a fantastic place, especially the music. Unfortunatley, it's happening all over the borough. Sad days indeed.
Report this for removal
Mat Delort - 6 Sep 2004 11:30

Very sad to hear this is closing down. Unfortunately 'anonymous' has been rather naive. Apparently its closing down for four months and will re-open as a gastro-pub. Great!
Report this for removal
Owen - 15 Jun 2004 17:18

sorry to hear that the stags is closing down...the best irish pub in london..great traditional music
unique atmosphere. diverse clientele and the best bar staff in the world
Report this for removal
brian tinley - 21 May 2004 20:47

end of era!!! Bert sad to see you and your family leave the best pub in camden! lets hope the new owner leaves the stags as it was under Bert
Report this for removal
anonymous - 5 May 2004 12:13

This pub is one I dont like to tell many about, on the other hand it deserves the recognition for been a real taste of what Irish bars should be in london (less commercial, tacky waxy o conors/o'neills) It is like steeping into a pub at home! I love it great food and the guv is a great guy! Great Music too and all welcome to play! Long may the inn in Camden be!! P.S happy St. Patricks Day guys!!
Do chara
K
Report this for removal
Karen - 17 Mar 2004 14:58

Lovely place. Warm, cosy and great atmosphere. More pubs like these please!
Report this for removal
Steve - 15 Mar 2004 13:44

A personal favourite of mine. A dying breed for sure, so long may it remain unchanged – I shudder when I recall what has happened to practically all other Camden pubs.

It’s hard to find, which is a good thing, though well worth the effort if you’re a right thinking sort with excellent taste in pubs.

Report this for removal
Steve Harper - 13 Feb 2004 14:13
One of the last proper Camden pubs, friendly, great atmosphere - but keep it a secret.......
Report this for removal
Derm - 14 Jan 2004 10:29
Does this place still do the Thai food? Nice pub in an unpromising location. Bonus points for real fire, loses half a mark though for the pool table - waste of space as there's not enough cue room when it's busy.
Report this for removal
Matt - 12 Jan 2004 12:53
best barstaff in the world
Report this for removal
o"sullivan - 7 Jan 2004 20:38
The best pub in London.
Report this for removal
Odran Jennings - 24 Nov 2003 12:59
great pub this , just a welcoming atmosphere and a real fire if i remember, excellent, place to go on a saturday afternoon in winter,
Report this for removal
pat - 22 Oct 2003 15:18
my mate small hands and dangrous first dave first started drinking here when they were young,i dont mind a traditional old boozer with good old live irish music being played over the weekend,but the toilets are freezing in the winter.
Report this for removal
baz tav - 17 Oct 2003 12:47
My local. Friendly bar staff, nice quiet pub during the week and really busy on Friday/Saturday nights.

And Bert the gaffer is a top bloke
Report this for removal
Jonesy - 1 Oct 2003 13:33
top place! first place i started drinking and still go back!!! landlord and family are great and good friends! place to go for a good lrish experience.
Report this for removal
S.H. - 19 Sep 2003 12:54
use to drink there all the time when I LIVED IN LONDON..GOOD CRAIC AND Bert the gov is sound
Report this for removal
Gerry - 31 Jul 2003 15:47
Good little pub this. Not particularly pretty, but does what it says on the tin. We often used to stagger over there after band practice in a nearby studio. Those were the days!
Report this for removal
G - 16 Jun 2003 16:27
Visited here last year; Thai food, real ale and a lovely atmosphere in a 'proper' Irish bar.

Could it be possible that the Bucks Head (suggested by someone else with a blurry photo) could actually be this?
Report this for removal
mike - 10 May 2003 14:08
0 comments

sad eyed lady of the lowlands

sad eyed lady of the lowlands
lowlands
lowlands away
my love
so the be when was in the brent cross acid party space at
joel’s parents place where badness was goodness
allowed up to a point and then brent cross was the beyond the
point new station where we would all arrive
and further unexpected points were crossed
such as the 30 year old guy with our 15 year old girl friend
but the main point was an irritating pseudo grown up daringness and
dabbling with adult mind bending drug-sex danger.
irritating cause I was rarely dabbling with the drugs and definitely not
getting any of the sex.
Oh no, I was living in good old boozy Glasgow,
being trained in the ways of booze and heavy metal.
Roman marching camps and cup and ring marks in Argyllshire
I went to gigs at the Barrowlands with girls who wanted me to get it up,
when I would only “oh sit down” to James.
So I got a dose of panic attacks,
some kind of acid mushroom come down from the previous years
mixed with major sessions drinking pints and pints of tartan special...
I learned how to drink,
I learned how to sing drinking songs
Back down south I realised how quiet and mellow everyone was in
comparison to up in Scotland.
I discovered that my crude jokes and songs and fast drinking methods were
an appreciated novelty after the years of faux-north London squat trendy heroin addict
vacant middle class cliquey wankdom that my friends were unwittingly exposed to.
0 comments

Thursday, January 08, 2009

Avi Shlaim: How Israel brought Gaza to the brink of humanitarian catastrophe |

Avi Shlaim: How Israel brought Gaza to the brink of humanitarian catastrophe |
World news |
The Guardian

This is the best article I have read about the current situation in Gaza.

Oxford professor of international relations Avi Shlaim served in the Israeli army and has never questioned the state's legitimacy. But its merciless assault on Gaza has led him to devastating conclusions

The only way to make sense of Israel's senseless war in Gaza is through understanding the historical context. Establishing the state of Israel in May 1948 involved a monumental injustice to the Palestinians. British officials bitterly resented American partisanship on behalf of the infant state. On 2 June 1948, Sir John Troutbeck wrote to the foreign secretary, Ernest Bevin, that the Americans were responsible for the creation of a gangster state headed by "an utterly unscrupulous set of leaders". I used to think that this judgment was too harsh but Israel's vicious assault on the people of Gaza, and the Bush administration's complicity in this assault, have reopened the question.

I write as someone who served loyally in the Israeli army in the mid-1960s and who has never questioned the legitimacy of the state of Israel within its pre-1967 borders. What I utterly reject is the Zionist colonial project beyond the Green Line. The Israeli occupation of the West Bank and the Gaza Strip in the aftermath of the June 1967 war had very little to do with security and everything to do with territorial expansionism. The aim was to establish Greater Israel through permanent political, economic and military control over the Palestinian territories. And the result has been one of the most prolonged and brutal military occupations of modern times.

..........
0 comments

Sunday, January 04, 2009

"inhuman" assault on Gaza

John Ging, the head of the UN relief agency in Gaza, described the situation there as "inhuman".

"We have a catastrophe unfolding in Gaza for the civilian population," he said. "The people of Gaza City and the north now have no water. That comes on top of having no electricity. They're trapped, they're traumatised, they're terrorised by this situation.

"They're in their homes. They're not safe. They're being killed and injured in large numbers, and they have no end in sight. The inhumanity of this situation, the lack of action to bring this to an end, is bewildering to them."

The UN has been particularly angered at the contention of the Israeli foreign minister, Tzipi Livni, that there is no humanitarian crisis in Gaza.

Ging also accused Israel of a campaign of destroying public buildings vital to the administration and governance of Gaza.

"The whole infrastructure of the future state of Palestine is being destroyed," he said. "Blowing up the parliament building. That's the parliament of Palestine. That's not a Hamas building. The president's compound is for the president of Palestine. Schools, mosques."
0 comments

windows 7

Windows 7 IS what Vista should have been.
It actually runs nice and fast - much better for exploring
files and folders and viewing photos in the full screen slideshow.
I haven't yet tested the speed at which files can be copied from drive to
drive (a major unforgiveable fault that vista had).

This should be made available for free for us mugs that had
the inadequate Vista foisted upon us when we bought new comps in 2008...
0 comments

Tuesday, December 30, 2008

'I didn't see any of my girls, just a pile of bricks'

Israeli air strike kills five daughters from one family as Gaza death toll passes 300 |
World news |
The Guardian

The family house was small: three rooms, a tiny kitchen and bathroom, built of poor-quality concrete bricks with a corrugated asbestos roof, in block four of Jabalia refugee camp in northern Gaza. There are hundreds of similar homes crammed into the overcrowded streets, filled with some of the poorest and most vulnerable families in the Gaza Strip.

But it was this house, where Anwar and Samira Balousha lived with their nine children, that had the misfortune to be built next to what became late on Sunday night another target in Israel's devastating bombing campaign of Gaza.

An Israeli bomb struck the refugee camp's Imad Aqil mosque around midnight, destroying the building and collapsing several shops and a pharmacy nearby. The force of the blast was so massive it also brought down the Balousha family's house, which yesterday lay in ruins. The seven eldest girls were asleep together on mattresses in one bedroom and they bore the brunt of the explosion. Five were killed where they lay: Tahrir, 17, Ikram 15, Samer, 13, Dina, eight and Jawahar, four.

They were the latest in a growing number of civilian casualties in Israel's bombing campaign. At least 335 Palestinians have been killed and as many as 1,400 injured. On the Israeli side, four people have been killed by Palestinian rockets. Israel's military offensive continues and may yet intensify.

Imam, 16, lay in the room with her sisters but by chance survived with only injuries to her legs. She was eventually pulled free and rushed to hospital. "I was asleep. I didn't hear anything of the explosion," she said yesterday as she sat comforting her mother. "I just woke when the bricks fell on me. I saw all my sisters around me and I couldn't move. No one could see me from above. The neighbours and ambulance men couldn't see us. They were walking on the bricks above us. I started to scream and told my sisters we would die. We all screamed: 'Baba, Mama. Come to help us.'"

Her parents had been sleeping in the room next door with their two youngest children, Muhammad, one, and Bara'a, 12 days.

Their room was damaged and all were hurt, but they survived and were taken straight to hospital even before any of the older girls were found.

Imam eventually recognised her uncle's voice among the rescuers and she shouted again for help. "He found me and started to remove the bricks and the rubble from me," she said. "They started to pull me by my hands, the bricks were still lying on my legs."

Her mother, Samira, 36, had seen the pile of bricks in the girls' bedroom and was stricken with grief, convinced they were all dead. Like all the family, she was asleep when the bomb struck. "I opened my eyes and saw bricks all over my body," she said. "My face was covered with the concrete blocks."

She checked on her two youngest children and then looked in the room next door. "I didn't see any of my daughters, just a pile of bricks and parts of the roof. Everyone told me my daughters were alive, but I knew they were gone."

She sat on a sofa surrounded by other women at a neighbour's house further along the street and struggled to speak, pausing for long moments and still overcome with shock.

"I hope the Palestinian military wings retaliate and take revenge with operations inside Israel. I ask God to take revenge on them," she said.

Her husband, Anwar, 40, sat in another house where a mourning tent had been set up. He was pale and still suffering from serious injuries to his head, his shoulder and his hands. But like many other patients in Gaza he had been made to leave an overcrowded hospital to make way for the dying. Yesterday his house was a pile of rubble: collapsed walls and the occasional piece of furniture exposed to the sky. He spoke bitterly of his daughters' deaths. "We are civilians. I don't belong to any faction, I don't support Fatah or Hamas, I'm just a Palestinian. They are punishing us all, civilians and militants. What is the guilt of the civilian?" Like many men in Gaza, Anwar has no job, and like all in the camp he relies on food handouts from the UN and other charity support to survive.

"If the dead here were Israelis, you would see the whole world condemning and responding. But why is no one condemning this action? Aren't we human beings?" he said. "We are living in our land, we didn't take it from the Israelis. We are fighting for our rights. One day we will get them back."
0 comments

Friday, December 26, 2008

alt facebook status update #1

Matthew glugs a tax collector's fill of shame and belches a stinking burp of redemption.
0 comments

Sunday, December 14, 2008

Bush gets shoes thrown at him in Iraq

0 comments

Wednesday, December 10, 2008

sketches of winkle

well she danced like a floozy in a hot tub of guava
eddy ran the sceen you know he's hip to her mantra
he was a meditative fucker all strung out on sinatra
sketching van winkle like there ain't no tomorrow
i saw van winkle show up on the scene
i bled from my elbows when i saw that he was doing all those
sketches of winkle, crying to the heavens in a fit of rage
skethces of winkle, keeping little cupids locked up in a cage
sketches of winkle, i think i love her but she don't love me
skethces of winkle, i thought she loved me dude
well she drained all the fluid from the sink in the kitchen
eddy wanted veggies all he's doing is bitchen
steve and sandy went out and bought a new pair of mittens
mean ween cut me and he said he was kidding
rip van winkle
rip rip rip van winkle
0 comments

Tuesday, December 02, 2008

thod speaks

"""There was a time when almost everyone worked the land. Now we produce more food than ever with only a tiny fraction of the people. So we have 1 man producing as much as 100 used to, what are the the other 99 to do now. Well we still have the food, so they have gained 100% leisure time. Of course the one that still has to drive the tractor resents them. But you don't see him offering to cut his work hours and share the labor around. He wants to earn more than everyone else. This is the basic problem, too many people are working too hard. The factories are the same, the robots can do what 10 men used to do, we still get the same amount of product. We are just going to have to stop working so hard and spread the work around more. Make it illegal to work more than 20 hours a week. Those that want to prove they are better than everyone else because they work harder are going to have to find other ways to play their oneupmanship game.

We could start classifying the workaholics as anti social in that they deprive other men of their jobs. Or we could classify it as a mental illness. Still most people are happy to let them be the mugs and put in all the work hours. Just so long as they get their share. All you hear about is complaints from those mugs that they get taxed, thats because they are so dumb they cant see the big picture. They cant see anything but defining themselves in terms of work and money. So we encourage their psychosis. We don't need their labor it can all be made by a few hours a week from each person.

In the future it will all be done by robots. There will still be guys going out trying to play a game that isn't there anymore. """
0 comments

Sunday, November 23, 2008

oh I'm so effing scared of this dude

this is one scary dude,
and he;'s doubly scary coz he's english
like yoo and mee
but now he's deddd blown up by a cosy comfy us missile, I'm so
happy and now i feel so sayf innit?
1 comments

Sunday, November 16, 2008

the fetching scarf

the fetching scarf she wore at weekends was lying across her back and dangling over her breasts, beating time as she hurriedly walked down lake passage.
Glasgow kisses and milkman wronged wives slashed the net curtains – a bitter reflex.
lips curled and the fan humming in the hairdressers.
steeples so tall and the flailing jacobite windows ajar – windy gust
trod treading footfalls again and still making no ground on the Great Western Road
back from the Maryhill dole
back from the gray wet bleak hole
0 comments

The End of Wall Street's Boom - National Business News - Portfolio.com

The End of Wall Street's Boom - National Business News - Portfolio.com

To this day, the willingness of a Wall Street investment bank to pay me hundreds of thousands of dollars to dispense investment advice to grownups remains a mystery to me. I was 24 years old, with no experience of, or particular interest in, guessing which stocks and bonds would rise and which would fall. The essential function of Wall Street is to allocate capital—to decide who should get it and who should not. Believe me when I tell you that I hadn’t the first clue.

I’d never taken an accounting course, never run a business, never even had savings of my own to manage. I stumbled into a job at Salomon Brothers in 1985 and stumbled out much richer three years later, and even though I wrote a book about the experience, the whole thing still strikes me as preposterous—which is one of the reasons the money was so easy to walk away from. I figured the situation was unsustainable. Sooner rather than later, someone was going to identify me, along with a lot of people more or less like me, as a fraud. Sooner rather than later, there would come a Great Reckoning when Wall Street would wake up and hundreds if not thousands of young people like me, who had no business making huge bets with other people’s money, would be expelled from finance.
0 comments

Wednesday, November 12, 2008

Peter Schiff was right!!

You may never have heard of this guy,
but I saw a video of him about a year ago and he
described economic collapse coming while the other
experts around him laughed in his face.
He stood calm and stood his ground.
Now he has been vindicated.
Everything he said was right.

I urge you to watch this video and see how time and again,
he gave this warning.

0 comments

Tuesday, November 11, 2008

need a piss

need one, but won't leave the
stale sheet bed

need to sleep, but won't switch off the
google chrome black killer box that gives me a skin rash

needs must when the french devil's kick wigan's backside

need a falafel but they shut it down,
no Turkish bar b que for me

need health but the scum between my teeth will keep
the throat infection topped up for the winter

need to de-pornolize,
in fact this is working I'm suck-seeding ha ha

need to stop economy obsessing,
I now have a layman's degree in "the world is going down the tubes"

need to learn some new songs on the guitar,
but I always forget which ones I had earlier elected for this role

needeepinnoneffectivemedicines

nee d een dddd nnn eee eee

glen hoddle's escape hatch

I dreamt I had a new type of camera
you put both eyes in the viewfinder like
a diving mask and everything looked so
vivid and clear and bright,
with this unique machine at once I became an artist
bringing visionary beauty from the mundane light from objects and scenes
we all normally see in shades of tainted dreary modern human vision

I dreamt of a woman swimming in these strange waters,
neither sea nor river and this documentary I was filming/watching
it was the story of a man. she became the narrator,
after being the sex object of his.

I needed those dreams and today's sun and last week's intense
caring stare of my fantastic GP who explained the lot and gave
me what I had forgotten I deserved.
0 comments

Ian Dury show comes to London: Looks good

0 comments

Friday, November 07, 2008

Does one want fries with ones big mac?

0 comments

Thursday, November 06, 2008

Alex Jones take on the Obama victory

It is always healthy to think beyond the hysteria
that such events as Diana's death and now Obama's victory create
in the mass public.

I don't really go for conspiracy shock jock Alex Jones,
but he is on form in this show.

http://rss.nfowars.net/20081105_Wed_Alex.mp3
0 comments

Monday, November 03, 2008

John Cusak - No currency left to buy the big lies

I knew it!!!
At the anti-Iraq war march in London 2003 I was sure I saw John Cusak the cool American film actor marching along near Gower street.
Turns out he's a bit of a lefty.
Check his latest blog. Its long and a bit complex but pretty dang good stuff
he is an angry not so young man...

As I contemplated the real possibility of an Obama victory and listened to right wing pundits revise history still unfolding, I thought of titles for this blog:

"Neocon Logic: This Statement is Untrue"
"The Modern Free Market System is False But a New Revelation Shall Come"
" They Would Feast on Themselves: All the Money's Gone, Nowhere to Go"
I decided on:
"No Currency Left to Buy the Big Lies"

NO CURRENCY LEFT TO BUY THE BIG LIES

In the pre-capitalist reality, James Madison said when he put power in the hands of the business elite, he would be entrusting "enlightened statesmen and benevolent philosophers who would devote themselves to the welfare of all."

Clearly, he believed this statement in the way I guess some modern Republicans do. The only problem was that he eventually realized this didn't work and in 1792, disillusioned and worried about the democratic experiment, condemned what he called "the daring depravity of the times." He went on to denounce the business elites who, given ultimate power, "become tools and tyrants of government...they overwhelm government with their powers and combinations and are bribed by its largesse." That's how he perceived the system he had helped design. In 2008, this is an apt description of the Republican relationship to government and power.

read on...
0 comments

Sunday, November 02, 2008

Barcelona #1 - Cigarette Girls

Cigarette Girls
On two of the occasions that I entered a tobacconists I was confronted by a young woman dressed in what seemed like a beauty contest outfit with a sash across her chest and not many clothes on.
I was asked whether or not I smoked. It was then that I realized that a special offer was on the cards. They were offering cheap John Player Special cigarettes; The smokes that went out of fashion in the UK in about 1982 and are lower on the pecking order than Dunhills. I don’t usually smoke anything, but when on holiday I do get the urge and seeing that there was no cigarette ban in Spain I couldn’t resist the chance to sit in a bar or restaurant and spark one up. But for me it was Gauloise Blondes or nothing.
No, neither green, red, blue or yellow JPS let alone the traditional black would sway me. I didn’t want to disappoint the girls on parade, but together we knew they were just doing a job so it was all smiles.
0 comments

Saturday, November 01, 2008

awesome crystal caves

0 comments

Friday, October 31, 2008

paranoid commies : James Bond has secret anti-Russia messages from UK and USA

Bond girls often come to a sticky end but Olga Kurylenko will be hoping that the Communists never get hold of her.

Kurylenko, the Ukrainian actress who plays Bond's sidekick in Quantum of Solace, has been condemned by the Communist Party of St Petersburg for aiding "the killer of hundreds of Soviet people and their allies". Apparently oblivious to Bond's fictional nature, it accused her of assisting "a man who worked for decades under the orders of Thatcher and Reagan to destroy the USSR".

In an appeal to the actress on its website, the party said: "The Soviet Union educated you, cared for you and brought you up for free but no one suspected that you would commit this act of intellectual and moral betrayal."

It is not the first time the Communists of St Petersburg - or Leningrad, as they would rather it be called - have taken aim at perfidious Western films. Earlier this year they claimed that the film Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull, set in the Cold War in 1957, was a vehicle for crude anti-Soviet propaganda and lambasted the antics of Harrison Ford and his ruthless Russian nemesis Cate Blanchett, calling them capitalist puppets.


The party declared that Ford had "no future in Russia any more" - a message that apparently failed to reach the country's cinemagoers, who flocked to see the film at a record 808 screens.

The Communists are, however, willing to rehabilitate Kurylenko - if she delivers her co-star, Daniel Craig, into the clutches of Russia's secret services for interrogation. "Let him tell what other plans are being written in the Pentagon and Hollywood to discredit Russia and drive a wedge between the Russian and Ukrainian peoples," it said.

Sergei Malinkovich, the leader of the city party, told The Times: "Everyone knows that the CIA and MI6 finance James Bond films as a special operation of psychological warfare against us. This Ukrainian girl sleeps with Bond and that means that Ukraine is sleeping with the West."
0 comments

giant lego man on Brighton beach

Mystery surrounds the appearance of a giant Lego man on a beach in Brighton.

The 6ft-tall (1.8m) red, green and yellow figure has the slogan "No Real Than You Are" painted on the front and some words written in Dutch.

Brighton resident Peter McNiven said he had spotted the figure in the water while walking to work this week.

It is not known if the figure washed ashore or was carried to the seafront. A Lego man with the same slogan appeared on a Dutch beach last year.

Mr McNiven, 32, who works for a digital marketing company, said: "I just happened to stumble across him on Wednesday morning.

"I took a couple of pictures because it's not something you see every day.

"There's a lot of talk about him coming over from Holland to here, but there's no tide marks on him."

A spokesman for Brighton and Hove City Council said it did not know how or why the Lego man had appeared on the beach.


The Dutch Lego man was pulled out of the sea last year
He added the figure had now been taken away.

In August 2007 a giant Lego toy, bearing a close resemblance to the Brighton figure, mysteriously appeared on Zandvoort beach in Holland.

And Like the Brighton Lego man, there was no official explanation about where the giant plastic toy had appeared from.

The blue and yellow figure was pulled out of the sea and bore the same slogan "No Real Than You Are".
0 comments

Tuesday, October 28, 2008

granddaughter shagging

now cameron and brown are wading in on the side of righteousness
in the Ross Brand insult andrew sachs debacle.

I think they must reckon that those people who are most upset
by the shenanigans are the demographic that are swinging between voting Labour and Tory.
No other reason for these two to start commenting.
Its absurd.

Anyway for all we know Brand did shag Sach's granddaughter.
She looks pretty shaggable...

0 comments

0 comments

Sunday, October 26, 2008

mortgage madness 2003

this amazing documentary explains why the
crazy housing boom that is now crashing happened
in the first place
0 comments

Saturday, October 25, 2008

why we are callous brutes

Psychologically, we can't help but selectively construct our own mental world:

Try to imagine how many events of emotional significance occur in the world in the course of 24 hours:

Countless causes for joy - at 3:05PM a healthy baby was born in Alaska
Countless causes for optimism - at 11:45AM a divorcing couple amicably finalised custody arrangements in Bulgaria
Countless causes for anxiety - at 8:32AM a coughing poultry worker boarded a plane for the UK
Countless causes for anger - at 2:22PM a factory worker in China was unfairly dismissed

Now think of the other 6 billion people in the world. Something joyful, or reassurring, or ominous, or unjust... (etc) has probably happened to each one of us today.

How could a single organism react with genuine emotion to all of these events?

Right or wrong, it is unavoidable that we have to choose which events we invest emotional significance in.
0 comments

Friday, October 24, 2008

Young Creatives

'young creative' is clearly a term used by people who work in advertising, PR and marketing to try and kid themselves their doing something valid, vital, exciting, original, daring and 'outside the box'.

When what they are actually doing is spending their days slapping lube on the scabby cock of capitalism so as to make it easier for the man to fuck us all up the arse.

kaka tim

0 comments

Thursday, October 23, 2008

The Stark Choice Now Facing America - The Market Ticker

The essence of this article could also apply to the
United Kingdom

The Stark Choice Now Facing America - The Market Ticker
The truth is that our nation, and indeed the world, has too much debt for its ability to earn income and has had since 1968. As this became apparent to the people at The Federal Reserve and Treasury, in the 1980s starting with Alan Greenspan, interest rates were artificially kept low for a long period of time to encourage you and others to go into that debt - debt you and these firms cannot possibly repay.

This is why we had the crash in 1987, why LTCM blew up in the 1990s, why we had an Internet Bubble and now why we had a Housing Bubble.

All of these bubbles were intentionally created by The Fed, Treasury and Wall Street Banks to keep the charade alive that you could take on more and more debt and they could make more and more money.

We are now out of bubbles and ability to support bubbles, and America (and the world, in fact) is out of the ability to support more debt.
0 comments

Tuesday, October 14, 2008

I think it could get really nasty -- 'mob' nasty.

This is a post from the House Price Crash forum.
I've been reading this website quite regularly for the past six months.
Its a very interesting place to read about the current financial shenanigans.
There are also outlandish posts like this which are food for thought...


Post by Dissident Junk 13/10/08

Something is not right, there's a presence somewhere, something waiting to be born.

I know I sound utterly nuts (I don't often speak about these things because I know I sound nuts), but I tend to be able to read how things will pan out politically and culturally, what is inevitable and what isn't. I have wondered whether it is a "Blink" thing -- you know that book by Gladwell? -- because I have spent the last ten years of my life utterly submerged in political, cultural and social analysis in both my work and social spheres, so maybe my feelings are a form of subconscious process of analysis that then make me feel something 'instinctually'.

But, nevertheless, I told people in 2000 we would see race riots in the North -- they laughed at me -- and we did. I said we would see a terrorist attack on British soil -- they laughed again -- and we did. I became convinced that the implications of house price rises meant something rotten at the heart of our systems, and that they had to crash and it would be horrific -- everyone laughed at that -- so I found HPC and realised I wasn't alone, and now we see it all panning out.

And at the moment, I just feel this 'presence of an absence', something really strange, bizarre and -- you use this word yourself -- surreal that is about to come to pass. I can't explain what it is or what it will look like. This feels like the calm before a very weird and insane form of storm.

I guess, putting my rational hat on, that there has been too much social, cultural and financial change in the UK in too short a time. There has been a loss of a sense that anything is stable, or works to understood parameters and theories. When things seem so subject to change like this, then people do not know how to 'predict' their best course for the future, they find it hard to make informed decisions, everything becomes uncertain, and with uncertainty comes unease, a sense of vulnerability, a sense of anxiety and then panic. And with panic comes the loss of morality, the loss of civilised behaviour.

I would say that the size of the ultimate reaction relies on two factors: one) to what extent people have repressed their reactive impulse over how long, and two) how much pressure has been placed upon them.

And it is this that bothers me. The last eight years have seen a political environment where dissent or challenges to the existing ideological position have been stifled, quashed or just ignored; modes of reaction to events from both the government and media has felt very muted in proportion to the significance of those events (you can see this in the official responses from situations as disparate as the raft of teenage stabbings, for example, or the response to the Bridgend suicides to the terrorist attack on 7/7 and the blatantly preposterous nature of the housing and credit boom. Even the response to the J-18 or the May day riots, which, when you think about it, were astonishing really as public displays of youth disaffection, seem now to have been dangerously non-existent).

These official responses have served to mute public reaction, but they do not dissolve it. Instead, it is stifled but continues to grow in its smothered state as new events add to the keg of discontent. And more and more things just keep adding to the keg: high migratory patterns (both immigration and emigration: the impact of emigration upon those left behind is never discussed but also has quite significant social and psychological consequences), taxation, financial instability, even things are small as a lap-dancing club opening in a small market town can really unsettle people.

And we seem to have seen a lot of this type of change, and reactions to it have been stifled.

It bothers me. And I know that the way things are going simply cannot continue. Too much change, and too much pressure. I think the keg is going to blow soon. I suspect the outcome will be some form of ideological paradigm shift, but I think it could get really nasty -- 'mob' nasty.
0 comments

Tuesday, October 07, 2008

Smoke Mirrors And How A Handful Of Missed Mortgage Payments Started The Global Financial Crisis (from Sunday Herald)

LAST WEEK, something happened which I never expected to see in my lifetime. There was a general run on the entire British banking system, something that hasn't happened before, even in wartime. Ordinary people started moving their money around from bank to bank in fear that they might lose their cash. Millions of pounds were flowing across the Irish sea for the safe haven of the Irish government's recently-announced 100% depositor guarantee. The UK's banks were on the verge of losing public trust, and public trust is the one thing that banks need to survive.

We are witnessing what the commentator Martin Wolf of the Financial Times calls "the disintegration of the financial system". But how did we get here? How did a few dodgy sub-prime mortgages in American inner cities lead to what is beginning to look like the collapse of capitalism?

read on
0 comments

Sunday, October 05, 2008

2012 SHIT logo

I just got round to watching the British part of the Olympic ending ceremony
in China.
What a load of codswallop.
Jimmy Page you old nutter, what were you thinking?
- the whole thing was an embarrassment

0 comments

Sunday, September 07, 2008

Do zebras go neigh?

We are ancient
We like to see ourselves as new

But all that is new are
our things

No no we are so
wonderfully old

Just look at insects
They seem to have just stepped from the
primeval soup

All angles
All geometry

And yes it's a valid perception
We know insects are earlier than us

Yet we do not perceive
our own antiquity

Look at the wrinkles on our hand
like elephant hide

The nails
all horny

Oh walking man
dancing gymnast
tumbling free
how you so perfectly express
your antiquity

I am not asking for a
return to stoneage ways

But to know that grass
with its fruit on top
Makes a bedlike meadow
more precious than any
manicured lawn

teaches us something
don't you think?
0 comments

breezy breeze

breezy breeze
I hide behind

the smiley smile
you won't know

the easy ease
with which I
fill my eye
with the sleazy sleaze
0 comments

I like pretzels

the shiny surface
the dry crunch
the salty tongue
0 comments

Thursday, September 04, 2008

Hypocrites in the US news media defending Sarah Palin exposed by The Daily Show

0 comments

Monday, September 01, 2008

memory of the alps

0 comments

Tuesday, August 12, 2008

rainy day library

Islington Central Library, Holloway Road from my window with weeds growing in the foreground.
0 comments

Monday, August 04, 2008

St Pancras Station Wi Fi censors political websites London UK

Major International Transport Hub Censors Political Websites


Paul Joseph Watson
Prison Planet
Monday, August 4, 2008

While establishment media outlets in the UK spent most of last week reporting on China’s censorship of political websites in anticipation of the Olympic games, they ignored the fact that London’s St. Pancras International, one of the biggest transport hubs in the west, has already implemented stringent filters that block users of their wi-fi service from accessing even mildly political websites.

Traveling through St. Pancras in order to board the Eurostar on my way to Switzerland, I had an extra couple of hours that I thought I would fill by checking in on some of my favorite alternative news websites.

Upon clicking on my favorites menu and selecting prison planet.com, I was quickly met with a white screen and bold black text informing me that the website in question was blocked and could not be accessed.

Was this some kind of a technical error? No, as I was soon to discover that all websites affiliated with Alex Jones are blocked in St. Pancras.

Not only that, but even far milder left-leaning commentary websites like thinkprogress.org were on the same blacklist. In fact, every non-mainstream news website was inaccessible.

By the way, when I visited Communist China last summer, which filters every website through a government blacklist, prison planet.com was not blocked and neither were any other English language alternative news websites.

Internet censorship of alternative news websites is worse in London than it is in Communist China. The hypocrisy was painfully evident as I sat reading newspaper headlines about how evil China is for censoring anti-government material while London’s biggest transport network, which recently underwent a £300 million regeneration, did exactly the same thing with not so much of a peep out of London’s broadsheets or tabloids.

St. Pancras connects to Kings Cross station and the London Underground. Perhaps it was our exposé of the fraud of the official story behind the 2005 London bombings that irked the censors, yet there is little explanation for also blocking a website like thinkprogress.org, which doesn’t even cover UK-related issues.

This is another precursor to Internet 2, where only government-approved websites that have obtained permission by means of an accepted registration application are allowed to be seen by web users.

It’s also a stark reminder about how our media has diverted all attention concerning Internet censorship towards what is happening in China when the exact same control measures are being put in place right here at home.
0 comments

Sunday, August 03, 2008

anthrax suspicions

If you think the suicide of the man accused of the anthrax plot smells fishy
then read this article

Dr. Bruce Ivins, Ms. Jean Duley, and the FBI’s “Court Document”

and this one

NYT Changes Anthrax Story…As I Was Reading It!

this is rotten mackerel and prawns left in a binliner in the sun kind of fishy...
0 comments

Tuesday, July 22, 2008

inevitable climate change

"from guardian comment is free"

Ask yourself what politicians represent in human society. The answer is unmitigated growth in the economy as this feeds their innate lust for power. The EU is a small example of politicians coming together to create an entity which is economically bigger that other states to hence increase their relative power to other states in the world.

To do anything meaningful about climate change would mean cutting back on fossil fuel use. Your economy would suffer due to extra costs and not be competitive with others that don't cut back. Even if 90% of the public want politicians to control climate change nothing will be done. The real clients of politicians are companies not the public and companies will never OK anything that restricts their competitiveness or profits compared with foreign companies. As example the EU will not be passing any regulations any time soon which place EU car manufacturers in a poor position in the world.

The reality is there is no body with any power in society that can offer more that a token of control of climate change. The lack of a mechanism means we will burn all the fossil fuel we can lay our hands on as quickly as we can get it out of the ground, price permitting. Even if this means that long term humans have no future nothing will be done. There is no monetary value that can be placed on balance sheets throughout the planet for the death of the human race. i.e. it's irrelevant whether the human race survives or not.
1 comments

Thursday, July 17, 2008

Fascist Pigs!!

The bloody battle of Genoa

When 200,000 anti-globalisation protesters converged on the Italian city hosting the G8 summit in 2001, all but a handful came to demonstrate peacefully. Instead, many were beaten to a pulp by seemingly out-of-control riot police. But was there something more sinister at play? And will the victims ever see proper justice? Nick Davies reports
0 comments

Thursday, June 19, 2008

Brown's new human rights initiative

0 comments

Friday, June 13, 2008

alien baby

0 comments

Friday, June 06, 2008

Lupo Pensuite - The Greatest Free Download Ever!!

This download has blown my mind.
It is a collection of standalone portable freeware apps,
lovingly crafted into a nicely arranged nested menu operated package that runs with one click.
Install this on your usb stick and run it on any xp or vista computer.
Great for work where installation is blocked.

Check out the homepage for more details and a download link.
0 comments