Stoutism - again

I just heard a piece on radio 4 talking about proposals published in the BMJ for health warnings on clothes over a 40" waist for men and a size 16 for women. Obesity is such a problem apparently that it could "bankrupt the NHS". Well, how about siphoning off the savings on pensions from our early demise to pay for us disgusting fatties?

The whole thing is ridiculous, we may be fatter but we are living longer and longer. This is not about health but morality, a specious Puritanism that loathes the image of pleasure and subversion presented by fat people. Not that this image is true either. We just put on weight. So what?

Apologies

Apologies for the lack of posts. This is one of the busiest weeks of the year as I clear up work before Christmas. This is compounded by three days of interviews for new tutors. This process is as amazing as it is tiring with some astonishingly talented people applying. One of them made a comment that stuck in my mind, "there are no bad learners, just bad teachers". Instinctively, I want to agree though I doubt whether I can shoulder that degree of guilt. It is indicative of the idealism that still burns despite the best attempt of authority to smother it with a blanket of bureaucracy. There is still hope.

Inside every thin person …

The old cliché has always been that inside every fat person there is a thin one trying to get out. Now we apparently have Tofis. Yes, thin outside, fat inside. Is this a sign of successful undercover work by the Stout Liberation Front? Or are these thinnies are just jealous?

Ho, ho, ho

Really nice piece here by Oliver Burkeman on the myth of the abolition of Christmas, 'winterval' and all, by the PC lobby.

None of this exists. No one at all is abolishing Christmas, banning Christmas decorations and all the rest of the things that get the tabloids hot under the collar. It is all made up. The article is excellent on the combination of idleness and malice of the right wing press and the unholy (or should that be holy?) alliance of Muslim and Christian religious fundamentalists at war with secularism who are pushing this fabrication.

Actually, they all miss the root of secularism at Christmas; it's called Christmas. Overspend, overeat, overdrink and quarrel with your family. What could be more secular than that?

Spam, spam, spam ...

This site is being spammed to death so I will probably be turning off comments. I was tolerant of it until one of the many waved a red rag to this somewhat rotund bull:

Adipex is considered one of the most effective weight loss drugs of our times.

I am not putting up with this exploitation of body-fascist induced neuroses so the comments box will be off unless I get some real comments.

Apologies to anyone who reads this blog who actually wants a fake Rolex, selection of porn or Viagra. A tip, download your email, there will be plenty more links there.

UPDATE

I have just been told of word verification. It is now on for the site. Let's see if it works.

Funding Hedges

There is a snide piece in the Guardian diary by Jon Henley about Oliver Kamm. He writes,

But what with the excellent Iraq Study Group finally publishing its long-awaited encomium to Mr Tony's action-packed Iraqi adventure and all, we would imagine this column's favourite hedge-fund-trading leftist and staunch advocate of the war, Mr Oliver Kamm, will be mighty relieved he's already pledged not to update his important and influential blog for the whole of December. A shame, really; we were rather looking forward to Ollie's condemnation of the report's misguided authors as a pernicious bunch of Chomsky-reading Muslim-huggers.

Notice how he neatly avoids dealing with any of Kamm's carefully made arguments, with which I do not fully agree, instead Henley uses sarcasm and a sideswipe at Kamm's profession as a way of de-legitimising his comments.

Of course the whole point about Kamm's critique of the left is that it has abandoned its long tradition of internationalism, of the kind that sent volunteers to fight fascism in Spain, to become identical with conservative, isolationist appeasers, the very people who make up the Iraq Study Group. I think his case is proved. One-nil to Ollie.

Bluff!

I always thought that Melvyn Bragg bluffs his way through "In our Time" and isn't quite the polymath he tries to seem to be. This week there was a programme on something I know about and my suspicions were confirmed. It was still a good programme on Anarchism with nice contributions from Peter Marshall and Ruth Kinna. There was nothing about the Individualists though, a sad omission from Anarchist history that I am trying to correct at the moment.

Good advice, which we will all ignore

Apologies for the lack of posts, work pressure is intense at this time of year. Never mind, escape is near.

The latest Normblog profile is of Geoff Robinson and he has a tip for us bloggers:

What would be your main blogging advice to a novice blogger? >
Refer to facts rather than expressing opinions; don't just quote silly statements by people you dislike.

Geoff, that is the whole fun of it!

A lonely impulse of delight

Last night I had one those moments of delight that would be familiar to anyone who loves reading. I had tortured myself by watching the second half of Manchester City's dire 0-0 draw with Watford and then scanned my shelves for something to read. There was Bohumil Hrabal's novella, 'Too Loud a Solitude', bought some time ago but unread. For the next two hours I disappeared into Hrabal's world, lost in prose, unable to surface until the last page. Fighting the temptation to read it all again, I went to bed.

A little while ago, I made my daily journey to Normblog and there was one of his writer's choice features. Chris Simms had chosen to write on M.R. James' classic ghost story 'Oh, whistle and I'll come to you, my lad'. I love James' stories and they too are reminiscent of my childhood. Simms reckons that, "At its heart, the tale addresses the dangers of surrounding yourself with books and leading a solitary life that retreats ever further from the outside world".

That is the theme of 'Too Loud a Solitude', but rather than being about an archetypical bookish professor its main protagonist is a worker, a man who pulps books yet loves them. You can begin to glimpse the complexities. The basis is profound social comment, but this is a book whose humour, pathos and beauty stand above meaning. It is perfect art.

Here is just one passage from the beginning and I defy any reader to fail to recognise this experience.

"… when I read, I don't really read; I like to pop a beautiful sentence into my mouth and suck it like a fruit drop, or I sip it like a liqueur until the thought dissolves in me like alcohol, infusing brain and heart and coursing on through the veins to the root of each blood vessel."

The novella has now infused me. I won't forget it.

Phobiophobia

Oh dear, I seem to have 'not-another-phobia-phobia'.

How many phobias can you have these days? Russophobia seems to be the new one. The seemingly litigious Neil Clark makes his customary relativist argument that we should overlook the sins of Putin (the flat-rate tax; the "partial marketisation of Russia's education and health systems"; his "bloody campaign of repression in Chechnya"; the "chasmic" gap between rich and poor) because "an independent Russia stands in the way of their (neo-conservatives) plans for global hegemony". This theme of my enemy's enemy is my friend is a well worn one that I reject in favour of a consistent left liberalism. I suppose I am tyrannophobic.

This isn't my main point though. There is now a tendency to add the suffix phobia to any critical political stance in order to discredit it. It is a casual, unthinking habit, much in the same way that "gate" was appended to any scandal. However, phobia normally means an irrational fear. What happens if your fear is rational? Are you still phobic? What if you don't fear but hate? Perhaps The Plain English Campaign should stop targeting Germaine Greer's use of Kantian terminology and pick up on this. Let's face it, fear of Muslims is ridiculous, hatred of Muslims is dangerously prejudiced, fear of terrorism is rational, hatred of tyranny is human. The use of the phobic suffix throws a derogatory blanket over a number of completely distinct positions and, in doing so, reduces debate to sloganising. Let's get rid of it and return to critical thought and the use of English.

Democracy or dumbing down

Two views on blogging:

First, Jasper Gerrard:

"Vodcasts and blogs are to the noughties what graffiti was to the Seventies: mindless scrawls reading: 'I woz ere.' It says: 'I'm a moron, but worship me anyway.' …
Bloggers are the codgers who used to write letters in green ink banging on about speed humps or Judao-Freemason conspiracies".

In contrast, Robert Tait in Tehran:

"With some 7.5 million surfers, Iran is believed to have the highest rate of web use in the Middle East after Israel. The net's popularity has prompted an estimated 100,000 bloggers, many opposed to the Islamic regime. Some blogs are substitutes for Iran's once-flourishing, but now largely suppressed, reformist press".

Instinctively, and obviously, I approve of the latter and I don't like the snobbish rubbishing of any open method of communications that does not require the moderation of an editorial board.

Jasper Gerrard does qualify his remark by, rather patronisingly saying, "They probably include gifted amateurs whose vodding and blogging will earn them a proper job. As for the rest, well, everyone has a right to write; but a right to be heard still has to be earned". Presumably, this means that amateurs like Norman Geras might get a proper job, just like those erudite masters of the English language who sometimes lurk on the Guardian's opinion page, and then we might be able to read him with respect.

Blogging is for me a simple form of self-indulgence, but I have also learnt much from a number of distinguished bloggers, all anyone has to do is to exercise their judgement. I am certain that I am as capable of making my own mind up about the quality of the blogs I read, just as I am of abandoning another ghastly Guardian article about the travails of being middle-class in London after the first few lines.

Democratiya

The new edition of Democratiya is out. As always it looks excellent, even more so this time as there is an article by me!

I am really proud to be included in what is one of the best political journals around. There is a lot of good reading in there.

Non-violence

Oliver Kamm has a couple of posts about Mark Kurlansky's new book, Non-violence: The History of a Dangerous Idea. It is full of Kamm's trademark forensic dissection of faulty source material. There is a lot in these posts that I agree with, some defences of non-violence verge on the embarrassing. Pride of place goes to Michael Moore's dire book, Stupid White Men, associating Nelson Mandela with non-violence, when it was Mandela who broke with Luthuli's Gandhian pacifism to organise armed resistance to the Apartheid regime. I haven't read Kurlansky's book, and don't think that I will, but I am currently ploughing my way through Jonathan Schell's The Unconquerable World. It has the same faults, huge unverifiable sweeping statements that would make any historian cringe and exaggerated claims for the potency of non-violence. I am finding it deeply disappointing, even as a polemic.

All of which is a shame, as non-violence is much more interesting, both in its practicality, and in the ideological counter it provides to the eschatological and murderous concept of the utility of violence, which is the underpinning of terrorism. This is where books that make hyperbolic claims for non-violence do a real disservice. By doing so, they are replicating simplistic discourses, only swapping the myth of violence with that of non-violence. They also engage in cringe-making exercises in wishful thinking, "if non-violence had been used instead …" "Well it wasn't, so we don't know", is the only real answer to such pointless speculation.

The standard criticism of non-violence is Orwell's that it would fail if used against a ruthless dictator. This is true. However, as, for example, the rebellions against Saddam showed, violent uprisings also fail in most of those situations, but with a higher cost. Any rebellion has to choose its moment as well as its opponents. Success is down to timing as much as tactics and the nature of the regime.

Where non-violent action is most useful is when it is small-scale and ameliorative; it can be effective in conflict resolution and community building and it is often better at testing the loyalty of the military to a regime (who are less likely to be sympathetic to those who are trying to kill them!). It can undermine the consent on which any regime rests, implicitly recognising the State's monopoly of violence but exposing its lack of legitimacy, and, above all, it can make a nuisance of itself in a way that is not as easy to suppress as an armed rebellion. Perhaps its greatest function is that it is a viable way of keeping hope alive. Charter 77 did not bring down Communism, but it always offered the prospect of its defeat, as did samizdat publications and a myriad of other small acts of dissent. The Burmese junta certainly do not share the moral values of their opponents, nor do they seem to be the on the point of collapse, but they have at least felt unable to murder Aung San Suu Kyi, and she remains as a symbol of the possibility of change. None of this suggests in any way that it is a potent tool in international affairs or a replacement for concerted international action, especially against totalitarianism, nor that it could have defeated Nazi Germany if it had been but tried. The flaw in Schell's and, presumably, Kurlansky's argument is that they have a heroic vision of non-violence as a universal panacea and twist their evidence accordingly.

Oliver Kamm's marvellous demolition of Kurlansky's pretensions to scholarship still leaves me with a sense of unease about him being overly negative about a tactic and philosophy that should be a part of the toolbox of the left. A more eclectic and less romanticised picture of the use of non-violence emerges from a new publication, People Power and Protest Since 1945: A Bibliography of Nonviolent Action. It too has some dubious entries, for instance the Ulster Worker's Strike was notorious for its use of violence and intimidation. However, it does give a wider picture of the use of non-violence in a number of conflict situations and contains hundreds of references. Many of these protests failed, as Islamism will undoubtedly do, however, none of them left the shattered remains of human beings on city streets. For that reason alone, we should be grateful that there are those who are willing to resist using the methods of non-violence and view it more generously.

Peace and reconciliation again

Norm is still posting from Australia, showing the truly addictive nature of blogging. This one reflects an earlier post of mine

He links to an article reporting on the use of empirical history as a vital tool in building a peace process of mutual understanding and reconciliation in the Middle East. I fully endorse this suggestion but with the caveat of wondering about how we are to overcome the mutual loathing of historians for each other.

Adult Education - again

I have posted about Dennis before . His presentation is now on You Tube here. One of the things I like is when students feel comfortable taking the mickey. He certainly stole the show.

Walter Langley

Today was one of the unexpected delights of my job. I have to carry out tutor observations of our part-time staff and this morning I observed the art historian, Tim Stimson. The class was on the Newlyn colony of Victorian artists and focussed on the social realist, Walter Langley. The second half of the class was gripping as Tim explored the extraordinary mastery of Langley's watercolour technique, its astonishing detail and perfectly balanced composition. The class opened my eyes to Victorian Art and focussed on just one painting, "But Men Must Work and Women Must Weep". The title is drawn from Charles Kingsley's poem, "The Three Fishers". Tim is a champion of Langley's work and I think that he is right.

I was gripped by the painting. It was the face of the old woman that was haunting. Cloth links the flowing lines of the figures in a near perfect composition, a circular image that clearly gives us the idea of a life cycle, hence the three generations (did you spot the babe in arms at first?). Could it mean that each generation is condemned to repeat the same fate? I think not. The first clue is that the hand on the shoulder is too light to be more than consoling. It is not the embrace of a passionate shared grief, it is a gesture of solidarity. It said, "It is our fate, it is woman's lot".

Everything draws you to the old woman's face – and what a face! It bears an expression of profound sorrow, deeply etched, but it is also complex. Most importantly, it breaks the circle. It looks out, not back. It looks to the light. In its sorrow, it gazes to the sea and the past, but I saw more in it, determination, anger. And the poem is an angry poem.

Charles Kingsley was active in the Chartists and was a founder of the Christian Socialist movement. His early novels, notably Alton Locke (1850), written in the aftermath of the defeat of Chartism, are explicit explorations of social injustice. The Three Fishers is an obvious expression of this political sentiment.

The Three Fishers
Charles Kingsley (1819–75)

THREE fishers went sailing out into the West,
Out into the West as the sun went down;
Each thought on the woman who lov’d him the best;
And the children stood watching them out of the town;
For men must work, and women must weep,
And there’s little to earn, and many to keep,
Though the harbour bar be moaning.

Three wives sat up in the light-house tower,
And they trimm’d the lamps as the sun went down;
They look’d at the squall, and they look’d at the shower,
And the night rack came rolling up ragged and brown!
But men must work, and women must weep,
Though storms be sudden, and waters deep,
And the harbour bar be moaning.

Three corpses lay out on the shining sands
In the morning gleam as the tide went down,
And the women are weeping and wringing their hands
For those who will never come back to the town;
For men must work, and women must weep,
And the sooner it’s over, the sooner to sleep—
And good-by to the bar and its moaning.

It is because the circle of the composition is broken that I do not see three generations intrinsically locked into the same tragedy. We can see a circle as being past pain, current pain and future pain, accepted with bitter resignation. In this case, the figures would represent that resignation, the shattering of illusion and innocence to be betrayed, a complete circle. However, I see the figures differently as past, present and future. The past is experience, the present is despair and the future is hope. The old woman is certainly looking to the past and has clearly experienced the same hurt; she is feeling her pain rather than the grief of the young woman. However, she is staring into light from darkness, a common form of socialist iconography. Is she looking to the future as well as the past, seeing a new future where this will not happen again? Is she seeing a sign that a new dawn will break the cycle? Is she a visionary? This would fit into the climate of Victorian thought, which was ultimately optimistic and progressive. There was a common belief that the world could and would change for the better and this is expressed in all the arts. I cannot see Walter Langley, especially given his working class background, escaping this and this is the way Kingsley would have seen it. That Langley consciously referred to the poem in the title surely means that he meant to reflect Kingsley's anger and his politics.

The Victorian "cult of death" was, to me, part of the daily experience of a new mass society, of squalor and cholera in the cities, of dangerous and arduous work, and above all of the terrible heartbreak of high infant mortality and the death of women in childbirth. The cult of death produced kitsch, mawkish sentiment. This painting is not kitsch, not even masterly kitsch. Its style is social realism and I was struck by its lack of sentimentality, once again because of the old woman. The painting offers something more, and that is what I saw in it, a sense that the world will change and the circle will be broken. This is the message that the painting gave to me.

On a broad front

Apologies for the recent lack of posts but I have been having great fun setting up my new computer - I like new toys.

Well, we fatties are in the papers again.

First the bad news, Blair announces a new social contract. Of course it is nothing of the sort. Rather, it is like the kind of list you get with your insurance renewal documents headed, 'amendments to your policy schedule'. There, in impenetrable prose and near invisible print, are the clauses that mean that your property is no longer insured for simple everyday events such as fire, flood or theft. So worried are they by the future prospect of rising sea levels that they will now only pay up for a flood if it is caused by a prehistoric sea monster coming up the Humber. What this social contract really is is a new set of conditionalities for citizens to be able to get the services they have paid for and, up until now, have had a reasonable expectation of receiving.

So what sins should prevent the automatic receipt of health care? Dead right, being fat is prominent amongst them…

"Examples include an expectation that a local health authority will only offer a hip replacement if the patient undertakes to keep their weight down".

So what will they do if you renege on the pledge? Kidnap you, whip out the new hip and put your old one back? Of course, what it really will be used for is to refuse people the treatment they need. Someone like me who has struggled with his weight all his life will approach a whippet-like doctor who eats like a horse and can't put on an ounce who will then use this chance fact as evidence of his moral superiority to condemn those who have committed the sin of gluttony to a life of pain as suitable punishment.

I have a different idea. How about basing it on contributions paid. All teetotallers will have to pay a surcharge due to the amount of tax they avoided by drinking carrot juice all their sad lives. Non-smokers have paid even less … hold on … I don't smoke … better start again.

On a more serious note, as a left libertarian, I believe that collective action is necessary to ensure security. It is only when we have that security that we can be really free to make different choices, to take risks. Security can only be achieved if it is unconditional. The welfare state was always meant to be the source of our security but the more it is hedged by conditions, the less it can act in that way. Worse, as conditions are shaped by middle-class conventional wisdom or even downright prejudice, the more likely it will be that the welfare state will be an agent of social control rather than liberation.

Well, that has given the new keyboard a bashing. Now for the good news.

Top of the NME's cool list is a substantial singer, Beth Ditto. I had never heard of her, or incidentally of the cool list, until the other morning. There she was on stage; ample, dimpled flesh bulging from a swimsuit. The headline? "Fat, out and proud". Good on you Beth. A hero for our time. Just don't get a bad hip.

Great Libertarians - Josephine Butler

If there is anyone who deserves the epithet "great", it is Josephine Butler (1828-1906). However, she is not often described in the same breath as "libertarian". As we are in the year of the centenary of her death there has been a renewed interest in her. Durham University has now opened a new college bearing her name. There was also a feature article in the Guardian by Julie Bindel, "A heroine for our age" published on September 21st of this year. It isn't a bad piece at all but something is missing, Butler's libertarianism. Even Jane Jordan's fine biography, criminally out of print even though it was only published in 2001, does not quite get to grips with it, presumably due to the author's lack of familiarity with Victorian Individualism, undeniably an obscure movement today but widely known at the time and partly emerging from Butler's campaigns.

Bindel's position is different; if I read her correctly she tends to see Butler as a proto-radical feminist and as a forerunner of current anti-prostitution campaigns. There is more than enough material to justify this. Butler is remembered as the leader of the campaigns against the Contagious Diseases Acts and against the sexual exploitation of children. Not only that, but Butler was an ardent and outspoken feminist whose demand for female equality was as much economic as legal and social. In addition, her approach to sexuality was conservative and rooted in her Christian evangelical beliefs. She was as appalled by the moral degradation of prostitution as much as by the physical exploitation. However, this doesn't tell the whole story; Butler was a complex figure.

Julie Bindel quotes the radical feminist and anti-pornography campaigner Sheila Jeffreys on Butler.

Jeffreys considers Butler one of the bravest and most imaginative feminists in history. "She told men they must change, rather than having the male-dominated state set up systems of prostitution that would protect the male customers and give official approval to their behaviour," she says. "This is hard to imagine now when governments around the world are once again calling for legalisation of the industry."

This is where something jars. Surely Butler would have supported the legalisation of prostitution? After all, its illegality renders large numbers of women criminals. She certainly would have bitterly opposed a process of legalisation that involved regulation, which she felt caused prostitution and abuse, but the removal of laws altogether would probably have met with her approval. She wanted to abolish laws not replace them with others. Secondly, when Jeffries said that Butler "told men they must change", she is not wholly right. Butler certainly believed in moral reform but she explicitly distanced her own campaigns from it.

Jane Jordan makes it clear that Butler opposed purity crusades - arguably intellectual forerunners of a strand of contemporary radical feminist thought, especially when given a feminist slant by Christabel Pankhurst - saying that it was "fatuous" to force people into moral behaviour. She defended those implicated in notorious sexual scandals, such as Parnell, Dilke and Oscar Wilde. Jordan writes that "Josephine considered the idea of converting Wilde to Christianity (goodness only knows what Wilde would have made of such overtures)". It seems that both Butler and Jordan were unaware of Wilde's devout Christian socialism, another neglected aspect of the thought of famous Victorians.

In fact, Butler opposed all forms of government regulation, even legal reductions in working hours. As she put it, "the ostensible purpose … is to reduce the hours of women's labour from ten to nine a day; but it, in fact, merely provides for reducing the paid labour of women by that one hour daily, and as one of the chief reasons given for this reduction is, that 'the comfort of the home is greatly affected by the prolonged absence of the mother from the family', it is fair to infer that the one hour spared from paid labour at the factory, is spared in order that the mother may employ it in unpaid labour at home". Butler constantly argued for female economic independence and it is this that is the key to understanding how she proposed to end prostitution.

Butler did not want to end prostitution by morally reforming men. She wasn't concerned with men; she was a feminist after all. She wanted to end the economic destitution of women. Women would not be trapped into prostitution and children would not be sold by their parents to pimps if they were not forced to do so by poverty, degradation, chronic illness, alcoholism, etc. Male desires were irrelevant compared to the economic and social condition of women that made them exploitable. Hers was a crusade against injustice and what she called "tyranny".

This tyranny was the tyranny of State regulation; a State which was certainly patriarchal, based on the legal exclusion of women, but also, just as importantly, one that only represented the rich. Yes Butler saw State power as patriarchy, but she also saw it as class rule. The Contagious Diseases Acts not only institutionalised the abuse of women, but of poor women. Her analysis was based on both class and gender. Government inevitably meant simply the imposition of the desires, interests and values of wealthy men on the poor and on women. It was in her pamphlet, "Government by Police", that she came closest to making a complete political statement.

"The more absolute a government is, the more will the police be developed; whilst the freer the country is, the more it will follow the principle that everything which can be possibly be left to care of itself should so be left."

A radical republican, she argued that power can only be exercised by the excluded through a process of drastic decentralisation, allowing a direct local democracy to flourish. Moral reform will come from people having the liberty to choose to be moral and through the absence of coercion. Universal individual economic security and independence will end the abuse of women, regardless of male morality, simply because they do not need the money. Decentralisation will end the tyranny of wealthy men.

What Butler achieved in a lifetime punctuated by debilitating illness and family tragedy is breathtaking. As well as political campaigns in Britain, Europe and India, she was a practical activist running refuges for those escaping prostitution and a voluminous writer. She also had a long and happy marriage to an astoundingly supportive husband, to whom she paid tribute by writing his biography after his death.

Julie Bindel's article did mention some of the personal price to be paid by such a public life, especially in the loss of friendships from her challenges to Victorian respectability. However, the greatest alienation from colleagues was due to her uncompromising libertarianism. This led her to adopt unfashionable positions. The most notable example was her stance on the Boer War. Unlike the liberal left of her day, she supported the British. This might sound eerily familiar. Whilst colleagues were vehemently opposed to British Imperialism and supported the Boers, Butler was acutely aware of the consequences of a British defeat for the black South African population. She held no illusions about the British, but detected a quantitatively crueller racism in the Boers. She saw Apartheid coming. Thus, in some way, she can be seen as a forerunner of the current-day anti-totalitarian left.

Josephine Butler was an exemplar of the values of Victorian Evangelical Christianity, values I do not share. However, my admiration for her lies in the fact that, in distinction from many of her contemporaries, she acted on her beliefs. She behaved as a real Christian, perhaps to reaffirm her faith against periodic surges of doubt, but more likely because her compassion and righteous anger was as much a part of her personality as her intellectual convictions. It led her to an un-patronising identification with, and respect for, the underdog. This consistency of belief made Butler a feminist and a libertarian. She deserves to be remembered as much for the latter as for the former.

Peace will come

Normblog has a post on an amazing new suggestion, a global orgasm for peace. Check out the organisers' web site. Apparently, "The mission of the Global Orgasm is to effect change in the energy field of the Earth through input of the largest possible surge of human energy."

On December the 22nd this year we are all supposed to have an orgasm whilst thinking about peace. Norm delicately points out that this isn't the best thing to have on one's mind at the time to ensure success. However, I now realise the real meaning of what I took as an anti-peace activist banner held up by Iraqis in the background as Saddam's statue was toppled. It simply said, "Human Shields - Wankers."

Grunt, howl; grunt, howl

Some items of joy in today's Guardian.

First, Madeleine Bunting starts an article with, "It seems churlish to complain". Dead right Maddy, it does and it is.

Secondly, Yana Buhrer Tavanier provides a witty defence of the free movement of people in the wake of Bulgaria's accession to the EU. " … there should not be any worries regarding Bulgarian plumbers. Why? Because they don't exist. I recently bought myself an apartment and the people calling themselves plumbers were anything but".

Third, and most importantly, is Sunny Hundal's launch of the New Generation Network, an attempt at democratising and liberalising the politics of communalism. "We reject the increasingly common sight of extremist groups such as Hizb ut-Tahrir being feted by anti-racism organisations and politicians on common causes". Read the manifesto here.

Finally, there is a review of the return of the Bonzo Dog Doo-Dah Band. Forget the Stones and the Who, who cannot swoon to their amazing rendition of The Sound of Music, thrill to My Pink Half of the Drainpipe, meditate on the profundity of Can Blue Men Sing the Whites? Jollity Farm is the only music I want at my funeral and to all my friends lucky enough to outlive me - you will have to sing along.