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New Year’s traditions can become onerous — Auld Lang Syne is frequently lacrimose rather than melancholy or hopeful — yet for Germany, Dinner for One, recorded in 1963 and repeated each year since 1972, will never die. A pleasingly darker humour than it appears, it is both customary and desirable for the viewer to match each glass as it comes.
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Patsy Cline – You Belong To Me
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May 7th, 2007 at 12:54 am
(Self Writ, The Building Blocks of Democracy, The King of Terrors)
The stoning of the Kurdish girl for loving a muslim ( and certainly yazidis are not muslim, but since, elsewhere, muslims do stone offenders, this is what it’s like… )
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The USAF has recently released ‘The Airman’s Creed’ to inspire itself.
I AM AN AMERICAN AIRMAN.
I AM A WARRIOR.
I HAVE ANSWERED MY NATION’S CALL.
I AM AN AMERICAN AIRMAN.
MY MISSION IS TO FLY, FIGHT, AND WIN.
I AM FAITHFUL TO A PROUD HERITAGE,
A TRADITION OF HONOR,
AND A LEGACY OF VALOR.
I AM AN AMERICAN AIRMAN,
GUARDIAN OF FREEDOM AND JUSTICE,
MY NATION’S SWORD AND SHIELD,
ITS SENTRY AND AVENGER.
I DEFEND MY COUNTRY WITH MY LIFE.
I AM AN AMERICAN AIRMAN:
WINGMAN, LEADER, WARRIOR.
I WILL NEVER LEAVE AN AIRMAN BEHIND,
I WILL NEVER FALTER,
AND I WILL NOT FAIL.
Oh dear.
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The Irish were the first Europeans to ban smoking in pubs, and now each day a pub perishes in the Republic. BBC
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May 6th, 2007 at 12:28 am
(Self Writ, Music)
A decidedly wonky recording, but the definitive standard in England… And despite the reference to TV, it was written in 1934 before the nazis invented the first state television broadcasting system the next year.
They invented a lot of things, but that was one of the worst.
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Jack Jackson Orchestra – Nobody Loves A Fairy When She’s Forty
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Yesterday, after strolling around the town I moved into the garden of a Quaker Meeting Hall, and after glancing incuriously at a group of seven on the grass including two men on a seat, sat on a low wall a distance away and lit a cigarette whilst waiting. One came up and asked for a fag himself. This happens. Then he returned and asked for another for his girlfriend; by now it was obvious that they were all homeless. For friendliness’ sake he then asked that I should come over and chat. Naturally enough I did so, and sat alongside, although temporising regarding the true amount of time I had left — which is a common enough white lie to avoid too much endurance to boredom. The girl tried to pay for the cigarettes; several of the men started on their lives past simultaneously — the least uninteresting of which was an incoherent ex-soldier who had bought his way out of the army ( £1700 ) after a breakdown brought on by having killed his man ( which he insisted was the most traumatic event possible; to which politeness refused any obvious disagreement, let alone ‘Worse things happen at sea…’ [ Although, not, perhaps, for the killee ] ) and had lost his family. They were all drinking from beer-cans, chatting wistfully of cannabis, and ranged from semi-cheerfulness to the volatile friendly-to-instantly-morose moodiness which is fairly typical…
However, though they expressed no hope for future improvement, other than that maybe someday they’d each get a council place instead of having to live with friends if they were fortunate; and they had no perceptable resentment either to the system nor the singularly dreary town they were in; and that their prospects of decent employment were slim — bearing in mind that real rates of unemployment in developed nations are likely to be around 15 – 20% once all those excluded from the figures, such as they for being homeless, are included — it was rather astounding that the tedium and lack of social grouping now present in society, leading so explicitly to alienation in all it’s senses, had so contrived that they were in no way fit cannon-fodder for any revolution. The poor old anti-welfarists will no doubt blame the insidious effects of molly-coddling socialism ( not that most Yanks since the Wobblies have any real definition of socialism other than as a bogey strawman ), whereas the lefties would blame capitalism… as a bogey strawman, of course.
Anyway, here is a good ( although not original ) idea from none other than the right-wing capitalist etc. sociologist Charles Murray, whereby the complicated welfarist policies would go, and everyone would merely get $10,000 a year from the state to act as basic income which could be augmented through work. National Review interview The main two objections that I can see would be that there would still have to be help with rent, otherwise the rentiers would grab it all; and that it would have to be sharply pegged to inflation…
And an Australian Leftie discussion of analogous proposings
Lavatus on unemployment
Quotes:
I got a job. Several jobs, in fact. I write – not only for blogs like this and loadedog -
but for a start up magazine here in the place where I live, I play music, I am a parent to a 16 year old boy, but for none of these activities do I get a wage. The music and the magazine writing are on the verge of producing a wage, but it has taken a long time to develop them to the point where they will be income producing. In the meantime, I have cheerfully and happily been a “dole bludger (hey, I paid lots of income tax over the 12 years I was a Uni lecturer) in the hope that one of these things will pay off. Meantime, I think that society and our culture is better off for me doing what I am doing than not…
Without the benefit of Glen’s knowledge of Nozick and Bourdieu, it seems to me that at some basic level, providing everyone with some minimum income keeps the wheels ticking over. As a bush economist (well, even that’s a stretch), it therefore seems to me that if the gap between the top and bottom continues to widen, there will eventually be some inevitable consequences.
Nozick’s delusional fear that the “State” is “forcibly” taking people’s property thru taxation is bizarre. It is the philosophy of someone whose feet never trod any surface other than bitumen and concrete, and whose sum experience of nature was the contents of an iron-grilled city zoo or the ghostly emanations of a plasma screen. Or in these days when such deprivation is the lived experience of most of us, it is the philosphy of someone whose imagination in so impoverished that they mistake our current predicament for the fabled Garden.
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The pseudo-Queen of Great Britain is visiting Jamestown VA for it’s quatercentenary. She has been urged by representatives of black and native American groups to apologise for Slavery and the Wiping Out of The Red Man. What she should do is to proclaim that they are privileged to be alive, and fucking lucky not to be slaves now: then shake a gun at them.
But don’t hold your breath.
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May 1st, 2007 at 12:22 am
(Other Writ, Poetry)
That which is marred at birth Time shall not mend,
Nor water out of bitter well make clean;
All evil thing returneth at the end,
Or elseway walketh in our blood unseen.
Whereby the more is sorrow in certaine —
Dayspring mishandled cometh not agen.
To-bruized be that slender, sterting spray
Out of the oake’s rind that should betide
A branch of girt and goodliness, straightway
Her spring is turned on herself, and wried
And knotted like some gall or veiney wen. —
Dayspring mishandled cometh not againe.
Noontide repayeth never morning-bliss —
Sith noon to morn is incomparable;
And, so it be our dawning goth amiss,
None other after-hour serveth well.
Ah ! Jesu-Moder, pitie my oe paine —
Dayspring mishandled cometh not againe !
Rudyard Kipling : Gertrude’s Prayer
