A commenter replied;-

My political heart is held together with Velcro these days. Break it, slap it back together, carry on. There is little or no chance of a good result as long as power is in the hands of people who would seek it. The electoral system has been hopelessly compromised and, AFAIK, no measures have been taken to make it more secure. Democracy is a game we are given to play while the men at the top decide which of their number will rule and which will oppose, and then they make it seem to have been our doing.

I have a small ivory box with a gold padlock on it, and inside is my last crumb of hope. I don't expect to be needing the key any time soon.

Stencils and Other Street Art
Historical Photos
Photos as Usual

Oh, a bumper packed edition! Get snapping!

Ad astra per aspera

Or rather - did get the freelance photo gig, but was offered £30/page, including all photos and words, so walked away laughing at the stupidity of publishers.

I wouldn't mind so much if it weren't a start-up mag aimed at a rich audience.

I'm getting so, very, very exasperated with business types who want the moon on a stick but aren't prepared to pay a fair rate for it.

My wife's uncle is getting older, and is setting much of her family's history on the web, which is really a fascinating (and quite sad, too, her uncle Emile murdered in the death camps.) Her great aunt Helene, who was quite the character, just passed away a little over a year ago at the ripe old age of 105, and she has two other aunts at or nearing 100, so I guess I know who is going to oulive whom.

The Oncle Marcel and Tatie Rose in the stories are my wife's grandparents, her grandmother Rose and I being quite close; in her later years she was afflicted by alzheimer and often mixed me up with my father-in-law. She probably told me enough stories about the war, going South, life in Nice and then in Sclos de Conte in the hills, to fill a book which, between my wife and I and some of the other things her ucle Robert recently sent to us, we may actually do. Rose passed away about ten years ago.

My family pictures and all that are not out on the web yet though a few "famous" family members sort of are; they're all over the place, close family in France, Belgium, Ireland, Canada and the US. Happily, nothing in my family history comes close to comparing to my wife's family history, and her close relatives are even more widespread, due to circumstances, than my own, in France of course, but also Peru, Uruguay, Argentina, Canada, the US, Israel, Poland (she has an uncle who was an actual Lublin Pole who was a judge in post-war Poland, I never met him but know his kids quite well; he has since passed away as well), Denmark, Italy, Colombia and Switzerland, all of whom she and her family regularly see and/or correspond.

If we think we live in crazier times, we have but to look at what preceded us by a mere few decades.
 

Let's Go Red Wings!

this is an interestin essay on alternet about a new book that's been published, Lords of the Land: The War for Israel's Settlements in the Occupied Territories, 1967-2007, that seems ot have moved the debate on by looking at how occupation has distorted Israeli domestic politics.

Edith Zertal and Akiva Eldar end their exhaustive study of Israeli settlement policy with a poignant question: Is it possible, they wonder, that Israel's 2005 withdrawal from the Gaza Strip will become a "first step in Israel's journey of liberating itself from the enslavement to the territories that it occupied in 1967, and which have occupied [it] since then and have brought it to the verge of destruction"? Negotiations that have been set in motion by the Annapolis peace conference in November will likely provide a partial answer. Zertal, a leading Israeli historian, and Eldar, a chief political columnist and a former Washington correspondent for the Israeli daily Ha'aretz, have recently published Lords of the Land: The War for Israel's Settlements in the Occupied Territories, 1967-2007. It is a detailed history of Israel's nearly forty-year occupation of Gaza and the West Bank with a painful contention at its core. The occupation, say Zertal and Eldar, has wounded Israel's very psyche, damaging both its sense of self and its moral standing in the world. "The prolonged military occupation and the Jewish settlements that are perpetuating it have toppled Israeli governments," write the authors, "and have brought Israel's democracy and its political culture to the brink of an abyss."

The Hebrew version of this book was a best-seller in Israel, and sparked a debate there on the devastating realities and consequences of Israeli settlement policy

Those people inside the station daren't leave for fear of losing their chance to travel. But trains aren't going. So people are literally living there and have been for days. Whole families have camped out there setting out newspapers on the floor and settling down. The huge expanse of the station concourse is a sea of bodies.

There are only a dozen toilets, so people relieve themselves on the station concourse. I saw human faeces. The amount of mess is indescribable.

I doubt this is worth reading in full unless you're more interested in literary figures than I am. However Amis has a curious profile in the media: Both left-wing darling of a sort and a cheerleader for the neocon right of late.

To supporters, he's one of the few public figures brave enough to speak the truth about Islam and the failures of multiculturalism. To opponents, he's just a mouthpiece for racism. So who is the real Martin Amis?

Johann Hari comes to a similar conclusion;-

Amis's cognitive dissonance seems to squat in the room, like a physical presence. With the right lobe of his brain, Amis tells me he loves our multiracial society, and he says it with vigour and rigour. I don't for a second think he's lying. But then, with the left lobe he passionately praises a writer who seems to me to be an outright racist, one who damns virtually all Muslims as secret Sharia-carriers and brags that the "white" birth-rate is still higher in the US. It is as though Amis has been fractured by the kerosene blast of September 11 into two people - and they aren't talking.

They continue to gabble over each other. Just a few minutes after wondering if feminism has drained women's will to reproduce and "lost us Europe", he tells me that his forthcoming novel - The Pregnant Widow - is a celebration of the sexual revolution and feminism. "I am a gynocrat," he says. "I think the world would be better if women ruled it." Feminism today is only in "its second trimester", he adds, and when it reaches delivery it will make the world an even better place.

And beneath the sound of ideologies clashing inside him, I can still trace remnants of Amis's left-wing late youth. He continues to advocate nuclear disarmament, saying that the existing nuclear powers should immediately begin working towards "the zero option". He is proud to have opposed the Iraq War, where he says "we have created a fresh kind of Hell".

As I stumble out into the Primrose Hill drizzle, I feel like I have been watching a boxing match in Amis's brain. He waves goodbye and shuts the door. I stand at the gate, wondering if the Steyn-hugging round-'em-up impulses will deliver a knock-out blow to the other Martin: the nuclear-disarming multiracialist who remembers his Muslim girlfriends with a sweet smile. I hope not. If the fantasies prevail, one of our best novelists will disappear, raving, into the long Eurabian night.

Happiness is being young or old, but middle age is misery

People are most likely to become depressed in middle age, according to a worldwide study of happiness. The team of economists leading the work found that we are happiest towards the beginning and end of our lives, leaving us most miserable in middle years between 40 and 50.

bugger eh ? British and middle aged. I'm stuffed.

keep to the Fen Causeway

If anyone has a lead on finance positions in France, please forward me the leads...(currently a financial director in a small PE firm in the US, 15 years experience, dual US/France national, blah blah blah...)

Let's Go Red Wings!

he International Monetary Fund (IMF) has lowered its forecast for global economic growth this year.

But the revised predictions are still well short of being a global recession. The IMF's chief economist calls it a significant global slowdown.

For the major developed economies, the IMF predicts continued, but much weaker, growth this year.

The new forecast for global economic growth this year is 4.1%, after nearly 5% last year.

Short Applebaum: capitalism makes people prettier and allows the pretty to rise to their deserved fortune.

And there she could very well be talking about things that matter, like, say, love.

(yes, this is indeed a veiled request for pics of communist era babes)

Some how this also impinges on the first amendment, but I'm not sure what the connection is.

I wear my new title with pride...
 

Policies not Politics
---- Daily Landscape

Crashing the Subprime PartyHow the feds stopped the states from averting the lending mess.By Nicholas Bagley
Posted Thursday, Jan. 24, 2008, at 11:19 PM ET

As the federal government scurries to prevent the subprime mortgage crisis from sending the economy into a deep recession, many of us are asking why it waited so long to intervene. As it turns out, the government wasn't exactly sitting on its hands. Instead, for reasons that now appear hopelessly shortsighted, an obscure federal agency torpedoed legislation from a handful of states that would have made institutional investors far charier of buying mortgage loans that were likely to go belly-up. If the legislation had been permitted to go into effect, the crisis we now face would probably look a lot less grim. The right question, then, is not why the feds did so little. It's why they did so much.