… Peter Hitchens, surely the time-honoured ‘cunt’ is a perfectly adequate nom de fucking plume, though, on second thoughts, as he now views the Tory scum as a ‘liberal party’ (see Question Time Thursday and any number of his mental shit columns) maybe ‘fucking mentalist fucking cuntard’ might be more appropriate.
Worra fucking Cunt he is.
Mr C Hitchens– please kill it. Do that fratricide shit. Do it now.
I know Canadians me I do..
One of them said this to me via email:
I got two of these in the mail. I drew a cock jizzing on to Stephen Harper’s face on one of them and sent it back to them. I would drive a pair of garden shears up to the handle into the Prime Minister’s skull.
I said:
I will follow your actions over here when i get any toss in the mail from cuntbagballs tory filth also. I may send them their shit back to them smeared in human excrement on their leaflets also — just for added spice.
These kind of shears were recommended for the driving into skulls and that.
I seem to remember the dumb cunTs at Saucer Shite having a ‘guest post’ by that thick tory cunT a few weeks ago. Correction, it was an approving one about an article of Blond’s that misread where he was coming from:
[http://www.hurryupharry.org/
The Graun article Osler links to is unbelievably shitjournoscumshit and Osler is completely correct on all matters concerning the cunT Blond. Blondie shit is a bastardised and semi-literate attempt to reconstitute Thatcherite ‘popular capitalism’, more reminiscent of Alfred Sherman than anything else. Pissflap wank, in other words.
Of course it is all a fucking formula. Find two opposites, stick the shit together and then claim that it is a new and interesting idea. Red Tory; Blue Trotskyite; Green open cast mining; Pink homophobe - see, it is dead easy and publishers fall for it, especially if dressed up in closely compacted, crammed language like wot sewage is when put under extreme pressure and conventional (read shit) wisdom.
…basically just water in one hand — and a huge invoice in the other.
The book of Genesis: “Boreded Ceiling Cat makinkgz Urf n stuffs: 1 Oh hai. In teh beginnin Ceiling Cat maded teh skiez An da Urfs, but he did not eated dem. 2 Da Urfs no had shapez An haded dark face, An Ceiling Cat rode invisible bike over teh waterz. 3 At start, no has lyte. An Ceiling Cat sayz, i can haz lite? An lite wuz.”
Tzvetan Todorov examines the relationship of the avant-garde to dictatorships (excerpt in German) and also describes how Mayakovsky and Marinetti were brought together by their fundamentalism and determination to create from nothing. “The pair would meet again on June 20, 1925 and eat together. Their translator was unnerved: what could a Bolshevik and a Fascist possibly have in common? The meeting however took place in an atmosphere of “utmost congeniality.”
…
…art historian Ester Coen had explained that Futurism’s second wave (1919-44) is generally regarded as the less artistically significant of the two, as most of the movement’s major artists had died in World War I. But after spending several hours examining the enormous Milan exhibit, I come to think otherwise. To my aching eyes, the reinvention of everyday life doesn’t start with canvases but with the stuff of quotidian experience—graphic design, fashion, the decorative arts, even food—all of which the Futurists experimented with prodigiously during this later period. At least one-third of the unbelievably exhaustive exhibit showcases Futurist-designed posters, tableware, costumes, lighting fixtures—every inch of it a marvel of ingenuity and novelty.
Viewed from this angle, the Futurists actually did predict the future: Is not Target-esque “design for all” an outgrowth of the Futurist call for the immersion of art in everyday life? Can’t the dizzying success of “fast fashion” a la H&M be traced to the argument for “illusionistic, sarcastic, sonorous, loud, deadly, and explosive attire” made from inexpensive materials issued by the “Futurist Manifesto of Women’s Fashion”? (”The reign of silk in the history of female fashion must come to an end.“)
So why is this phase overlooked?
Because these were also the years that the Futurists became Fascists. When Italy entered World War I in 1915 and Marinetti’s infatuation with violence erupted into reality, his avant-garde started to deteriorate. Futurist paintings became more fragmented and abstracted; the movement’s ranks thinned when members enlisted; and in 1916, Umberto Boccioni, its brightest star, died during a cavalry training exercise, age 34. Meanwhile, Marinetti had started to align himself with Benito Mussolini. Playing to their shared faith in brutality, machines, and a vision of an all-new Italy, Marinetti made a risky gamble: If he supported Fascism, he figured, his movement could become the official art of the state. In 1919, he founded the Futurist Political Party—formally separate from the art avant-garde—which was soon absorbed into the Fascist Party, which went national in 1921. So it’s true: Marinetti wasn’t only a Fascist—he was one of the very first. It was a shaky and vexed alliance. Mussolini couldn’t have cared less about art, so Futurism never did attain “official” status. But more important, the very institutions Marinetti longed to destroy were those that Mussolini relied on to maintain his tyranny: tradition, family, religion.
…
Ever since Italy’s unification in the 1860s, food had played a crucial role in the country’s politics. During the 1920s and ’30s, in order to build a stable national identity, the Fascist regime actively discouraged exports and imports of non-Italian foods, severely limiting both the quantity and quality of foodstuffs available to the public. It was into this environment of impoverished patriotism that Marinetti issued one of his most radical texts, a lustily anarchic tome initiating a dead-serious slapstick revolt against Italian cuisine: The Futurist Cookbook. With it, he denounced pasta as “an absurd Italian gastronomic religion” that made people sluggish and lethargic and argued for “absolute originality” in food, as well as “a battery of scientific instruments in the kitchen.” Goodbye, beloved carbonara and checkered tablecloths; hello, chicken stuffed with ball bearings and carnation scent spritzed from spray bottles.
…
A handful of recipes—or “formulas”—featured [in the book]:
Drum Roll of Colonial Fish: Poached mullet marinated in milk, liqueur, capers, and red pepper and stuffed with date jam, banana, and pineapple. “It will then be eaten to a continuous rolling of drums.”
Words in Liberty Sea Platter: A watermelon half at sail across a sea of endive, with a tiny captain sculpted from Dutch cheese commanding a crew of calves’ brains cooked in milk. “The sea and the ship are sprinkled with cinnamon or red pepper.”
The Excited Pig: “A whole salami, skinned, is served upright on a dish containing some very hot black coffee mixed with a good deal of eau de Cologne.”
Tasty Preface: “A cylinder of butter with a green olive on top. At the base of the cylinder: salami, raisins, pine nuts and tiny sugared sweets.” (Yet more phallocentrism!)
White and Black: “A one-man show on the internal walls of the Stomach consisting of free-form arabesques of whipped cream sprinkled with lime-tree charcoal. Contra the blackest indigestion. Pro the whitest teeth.”
This man (pictured) is a modern-day fascist…
Declassified accounts of FBI interviews with Saddam Hussein … on the questions of WMD and links to al-Qaeda. FBI summaries of 20 formal interrogations and five ‘casual conversations” it held with Hussain in 2004, before he was handed over to Iraqi custody and hanged in 2006.
According to the transcripts, Hussain told FBI interviewer George L. Piro that he allowed the world to believe he possessed WMD because he did not want to appear weak to Iran, believing that Iran was planning to annex south Iraq. He also said that he had no dealings with al-Quaeda and called Osama Wheelie Binladen a ‘zealot’.
Hussein noted that Iran’s weapons capabilities had increased dramatically while Iraq’s weapons “had been eliminated by the UN sanctions,” and that eventually Iraq would have to reconstitute its weapons to deal with that threat if it could not reach a security agreement with the United States.
Piro raised bin Laden in his last conversation with Hussein, on June 28, 2004, but the information he yielded conflicted with the Bush administration’s many efforts to link Iraq with the terrorist group. Hussein replied that throughout history there had been conflicts between believers of Islam and political leaders. He said that “he was a believer in God but was not a zealot . . . that religion and government should not mix.” Hussein said that he had never met bin Laden and that the two of them “did not have the same belief or vision.”
When Piro noted that there were reasons why Hussein and al-Qaeda should have cooperated — they had the same enemies in the United States and Saudi Arabia — Hussein replied that the United States was not Iraq’s enemy, and that he simply opposed its policies.
PS. The Washington Post’s web site is fucking shit — worra design über fail.
Today, 96 percent of Gaza’s population of 1.4 million is dependent on humanitarian aid for basic needs. According to the World Food Programme, the Gaza Strip requires a minimum of 400 trucks of food every day just to meet the basic nutritional needs of the population. Yet, despite a 22 March decision by the Israeli cabinet to lift all restrictions on foodstuffs entering Gaza, only 653 trucks of food and other supplies were allowed entry during the week of May 10, at best meeting 23 percent of required need.Israel now allows only 30 to 40 commercial items to enter Gaza compared to 4,000 approved products prior to June 2006. According to the Israeli journalist, Amira Hass, Gazans still are denied many commodities (a policy in effect long before the December assault): Building materials (including wood for windows and doors), electrical appliances (such as refrigerators and washing machines), spare parts for cars and machines, fabrics, threads, needles, candles, matches, mattresses, sheets, blankets, cutlery, crockery, cups, glasses, musical instruments, books, tea, coffee, sausages, semolina, chocolate, sesame seeds, nuts, milk products in large packages, most baking products, light bulbs, crayons, clothing, and shoes.
http://www.thecrimson.com/article.aspx?ref=528434
NB: The Israeli Supreme Court has previously ruled that reducing the average caloric intake of Gaza is not technically collective punishment by starvation, unless the average slips below the medical definition of starvation (a minimum amount of calories per day). Israel also defines pasta as “luxury” goods and won’t let it enter.
The Israeli Defense Ministry was put in charge of administering the drip-feed sanctions on the population of Gaza following the Israeli Government’s decision on 19 September 2007 to label Gaza an “enemy entity” or “hostile territory”. In response to vigorous petitions, appeals, and protests by Israeli and Palestinian human rights organizations, the Israeli military promised the Israeli Supreme Court it would not allow a “humanitarian crisis” to develop in the Gaza Strip.
Based on that assurance the Israeli Supreme Court decided on 27 January 2008 to allow the military-administered blockade and sanctions against Gaza to proceed.
CunTs all.
“The Final Solution, as the Nazis called it, was originally only one of the exterminatory projects to be implemented after a victorious war against the Soviet Union. Had things gone the way that Hitler, Himmler, and Göring expected, German forces would have implemented a Hunger Plan in the Soviet Union in the winter of 1941–1942. As Ukrainian and south Russian agricultural products were diverted to Germany, some 30 million people in Belarus, northern Russia, and Soviet cities were to be starved to death. The Hunger Plan was only a prelude to Generalplan Ost, the colonization plan for the western Soviet Union, which foresaw the elimination of some 50 million people.”…“At a time when German resistance to Hitler receives attention in the mass media, it is worth recalling that some participants in the July 1944 plot to kill Hitler were right at the center of mass killing policies: Arthur Nebe, for example, who commanded Einsatzgruppe B in the killing fields of Belarus during the first wave of the Holocaust in 1941; or Eduard Wagner, the quartermaster general of the Wehrmacht, who wrote a cheery letter to his wife about the need to deny food to the starving millions of Leningrad.”
In The New York Review of Books: Holocaust: The Ignored Reality … Also contains often neglected facts about the Great Terror in the Soviet Union, the geographics of World War II’s mass killings, and about the Expulsion of Germans (”Vertreibung”) after the war:
“Although the expulsions were a case of collective responsibility, and involved hideous treatment, mortality rates among German civilians—some 600,000 out of 12 million—were relatively low when compared to the other events discussed here. Caught up in the end of a horrible war fought in their name, and then by an Allied consensus in favor of border changes and deportation, these Germans were not victims of a calculated Stalinist killing policy comparable to the Terror or the famine.”
Hat tip me hat tipping him hat tipping me.
I wonder sometimes whether the Nixon tapes really will just continue to be the gift that never stops giving. I was in college when Richard Milhous Nixon was first elected president, and I can still remember the profound sense of loathing and disgust that I experienced at the mere sight, let alone the sound, of him and of his most especially repellent sidekick Henry Kissinger. Wiser and older people tell you that the passions of your youth will dry up and that a more sere and autumnal condition will overtake you as maturity advances, but the thought of the Nixon gang in the White House still infuses me with a pure and undiluted hatred and makes me consider throwing up things that I don’t even remember having eaten.Just take a look at the most recent harvest from the tapes that the Nixon Presidential Library has released from the early months of 1973. The impressive thing is that even in the smallest details, the obsessive nastiness and criminality of the bigger picture is further delineated. The foulness of Nixon’s mind was not “compartmentalized” between one issue and another. For example, like most “family values” Republicans, he was distressed by the Supreme Court’s finding in Roe v. Wade. But, like almost anybody, he could imagine an exception where abortion might be excusable or even desirable. “There are times when an abortion is necessary. I know that. When you have a black and a white. Or a rape.” The association of ideas between the first mental picture and the second one is so clear as to be—if it were not so hideous—pathetically laughable in an individual, and really quite alarming in a president of the United States.
As so often, his remarks about black Americans are crude and often sexual, while his innuendoes about his Jewish fellow citizens are more sinister. And, as ever, the worst interludes of anti-Semitism occur when Nixon is chatting to his friend Billy Graham. This time—February 1973—the two cronies are discussing Jewish opposition to the evangelical Campus Crusade movement. What the Jews don’t seem to get, observes Nixon, is that they bring dislike on themselves. Why, just look at the record—disliked in Spain, disliked even in Germany. It could be America next. “What I really think is deep down in this country, there is a lot of anti-Semitism, and all this is going to do is stir it up.” To this aperçu (incidentally suggesting that anti-Semitism “in this country” is not located all that “deep down,” since it’s being vented in the Oval Office), he adds, “It may be they have a death wish. You know that’s been the problem with our Jewish friends for centuries.”
…
Bad—and revealing—as all this petty filth and bigotry undoubtedly is, it has a tendency to pale when set against the sheer brutal cynicism of the conversations about Vietnam. Nixon liked to talk tough in two distinct but related ways about this subject. To Charles Colson—another pious Christian among his consiglieri—he is heard on the tapes boasting that his massive bombing of North Vietnamese civilians would be vindicated and that those who opposed it would be held “treasonable.” (His famous confidential secretary, Rose Mary Woods, is on the tapes expressing the same hope for an arraignment of disloyal senators and congressmen.) But when talking to his most depraved of all associates, Henry Kissinger, he is full of cruelty and bluster when expressing his intention of applying pain to the South Vietnamese. If the South Vietnamese client president, Nguyen Van Thieu, would not agree to sign Nixon’s version of what was later to be called “peace with honor,” Nixon yelled on tape in 1973 that he would “cut off his head if necessary.” Thus, a huge number of American lives and an incalculable number of Vietnamese ones were thrown away to end the war on more shameful terms than had been on offer in the fall of 1968 (when Nixon had been in league with Kissinger and Nguyen to sabotage and oppose those very terms; for more on this, see my book The Trial of Henry Kissinger).
Bonus — Hitchens doing some ’stand-up’ from a few years back:
In Iran the dead will not be forgotten - the Ayatollahs will not fall this week, nor, I suspect, even this year, but the memory of this month will remain, and may even be remembered in Persian verse. It might read something like this:
XCI
‘Rise like Lions after slumber
In unvanquishable number -
Shake your chains to earth like dew
Which in sleep had fallen on you -
Ye are many - they are few.’
[have now taken down the embedded video as the stupid shit keeps playing some advert shite with fucking audio annoyance piss and shit — go look for it yersell if you really want it like]
http://www.vanityfair.com/online/politics/2009/06/tony-blair.html
More here…That Graydon Carter’s hair is something to fucking behold like.
Fucking bleedin nora.
Hat tipped and worn with panache at an askew and cheeky angle to Nicky C. You certainly are wearing that cap at a jaunty angle, would you care to dance?
Michael Jackson/1993/Ian Penman/The Modern Review/Michael Jackson: Imitation Of Life
… a figure as sick as any America has ever produced or procured as an icon. Jackson is more Howard Hughes than Mickey Mouse, more late-Elvis than ET, and more symbolic of everything despoiled and uncertain about childhood in our century, than the harmless Spielbergian dummy he has for so long (been) painted. In a world that can no longer shock us (Madonna, Damage, Basic Instinct: why should adult stuff shock us?) squeaky-clean Michael has come to represent the creepy, shadow’s-spawn side of US celebrity.
… Michael’s young audience (whose street gestures, styles and music he ceaselessly recycles – sometimes literally rips off) is happy to accept cartoon imitations of human form and aspiration: he doesn’t dress well, his dancing is longer exceptional, his sexual projection is embarrassing – you’re embarrassed FOR him. In one video last year, you see him being sideline-coached on how to act like a turned-on adult, and any boy (even – or especially – a Gay one) who doesn’t know how to react to Naomi Campbell is way off orbit. Michael has no real glamour or allure: words like Dangerous and Bad roll on/off him without any real pleasure-zing of recognition.
What’s falling apart isn’t just Michael’s face but the face of what it represents: his corporate-Pop dream of eternally renewable identity as the ultimate commodity. (In the ’80s, it also appealed to all the new teeny bopper post moderns. Lofty-thinking chaps praised Jackson as the ultimate pop paradigm – he was, with Madonna, the ultimate thesis-fix.)
….America used to dominate us like a Lee Marvin sadist: it had no need of running interference from the emotions. Now it’s gotten this “Don’t you see I have to, because it was done to me” rap, and wants our wounded puppy tears. It wants pity, not awe. It used to be that you kept it zipped: now we have a “feminised” space of confession. It used to be that America’s crucified heroes stalked Death Valleys and New Frontiers. Now they work in electronic space, blip time, sealed inside the soundbite, the video and the Vanity Fair cover.
Apparently Nick Griffin wept when he addressed the fascist faithful following their capture of two seats in the European Parliament. Ah, the sentimentality that always accompanies brutality. I expect thoughts of his mother or the idea of harm coming to defenceless fluffy animals evokes a similar response in this vicious fuck. It’s always with same with these gangster types, don’t you find?
Another rather incongruous response is that from sections of the ‘liberal-left’ when confronted with this repulsive man and his fascist gang. Take the egg-pelting business. Just from the top of my head I can recall Michael Heseltine being sprayed with red paint; John Major being hit with an egg with such force it drew blood; Prescott having a bucket of water chucked over him by some one-hit wonders at the Brit Awards and then being hit with an egg on a later occasion; and most recently there was Mandelson having some green goo chucked over him.
Unremarkable, one would have thought, in a country that has a long tradition of dairy products and other sundry items being lobbed at the proud and the powerful - but when this happens to Griffin, all of a sudden it’s an outrage, it’s illegal, it’s playing into the hands of the fascists, behaving like the fascists? This is ignorant, masochistic - and strangely fastidious, coming as it sometimes does from those who spend much of the rest of their time striking a Jacobinesque pose.
We see the same sort of thing in relation to the issue of BNP teachers. The NASWUT have called for the teaching profession to follow both the prison service and the police in banning members of the BNP from serving. Ed Balls is giving it serious consideration, apparently. Some fear this may cause the ceiling of our liberty to collapse. Brett, for example, asks, “Are civil liberties only for nice people?“ [http://www.hurryupharry.org/2009/06/23/are-civil-liberties-only-for-nice-people/]Um, no - but joining a particular profession isn’t the same thing as being a member of civil society. Anyway, BNP members are delinquent members of civil society and certainly are not suited to the teaching profession. Neil Robertson’s post on LC is more intelligent but the thread below displays the same strange phenomenon - this solicitude for the civil liberties of fascists.
The proposal to ban the BNP is probably just a piece of political posturing and almost certainly a waste of time - a large hammer to crack an almost imperceptible nut. Apparently only around 13 teachers were found on the leaked BNP membership list - and I bet most of them were PE teachers.* But it would have been nice if the masochistic liberals could have spared a thought for the children. Would you be relaxed about a BNP member teaching your child history, perhaps covering the unpleasantness between 1939-45? If so, I would hazard a guess that your child is an imaginary one. As for myself, in the unlikely event that I discovered my corporeal child was being taught by a BNP member, I’d be up at the school gate with a basket of eggs.
*When I was at school, PE teachers were all fascists who enjoyed humiliating fat people. When I joined the profession, they’d transmogrified into caring, sharing ‘pastoral care’ teachers. Who do they think they’re kidding? Nazis in highly-flammable clothing is what they are.
“As a helicopter circles overhead, the construction workers building the subway next to the city motorway are standing on multi-storey mobile homes, making the victory sign of the reformers, as are people in cars stuck in the traffic. When a group of young people on the motorway manage to send a unit of Basijis packing, the drivers sound their horns, some climb out of their cars and start dancing. People standing on the roofs of the nearby houses and the pedestrian bridge I am standing on, shouting ‘death to the dictatorship’. Then the military arrive. The demonstrators jump over the side rail, some escape in cars. I hear someone shout ‘everyone honk!’ Immediately a concert of horns breaks out. Militias are positioned on every street corner, in the North they’ve resorted to old men with white beards and lanky boys, no older than 15. The calls of ‘God is greater’ are louder this evening, and they continue longer into the night.”
“I will burn them if there are any there”
Egypt has decided to translate books by Israeli authors into Arabic. 27 authors have been selected for the privilege, among them David Grossman and Amos Oz. This might have something to do with the nomination of the Egyptian Minister of Culture, Faruk Hosni, for the UN post of director general of the United Nations cultural agency (UNESCO). Hosni recently assured the Egyptian parliament that there were no Israeli books in Egyptian libraries and if he heard evidence to the contrary, he would see to it personally that they were burned. Following much protesting against his nomination, eventually, Hosni apologised. To aid in the lubrication of this u-turn, the books will not be translated directly from Hebrew but from European languages (English and French).
Unesco is responsible for promoting international collaboration through education, science, and culture.
* To put a ‘charitable’ spin on the attributed comment on book burning by Hosni … the comment of “I will burn them if there are any there” is an idiomatic way to convey a strong denial in Egyptian dialect. In this case, he was conveying a strong denial of normalization to an opposition MP from the Muslim Brotherhood. Hosni also had something to do with this invite for Israeli conductor Daniel Barenboim to perform in Egypt.
