Strategic betrayals are always rewarded By Phil Hall In the Middle Ages in 1381 the mayor of London, William Walworth, killed Wat Tyler at a parlay with a knife by stabbing him in the stomach and then cutting off his head. The mayor’s coat of arms then became the Saint…
The Butcher of Poland
by Garry O’Connor Condemned to death and hanged in 1947, Hans Frank’s public repentance was unique among the leading Nazi criminals tried at Nuremberg. One psychiatrist pointed out Frank’s ‘beatific tranquillity merely hid his own tensions’. But what of such carefully acted out piety? Didn’t this hastily cultivated yet forceful…
Open letter to Nick Bostrom
Never mind existential risk, what are your politics? An open letter to Nick Bostrom, Director of The Future of Humanity Institute at Oxford University By Phil Hall Dear Nick, I think you should be using H. G. Wells’s version of futurology, the one he explores in his book Anticipations and…
Poet of Honour: Christopher Reid
In Christopher Reid’s many poems the words invoke a real airy, sensual presence of images. In your transference to the ambience, you are presented with smell, taste and the sensation of touch.
Do you feel lucky, punk?
Tales of Macau, the biggest poker game in the world By Thomas Levene This article is, in part, my personal poker journey and, partly, an insight into the mysterious and secretive world of nose-bleed cash games that just get bigger and bigger. The elegant Wynn, in Macau Cilade de Sintra,…
On The Rocks
A poem by Yogesh Patel
with a warning: Drink responsibly
Courage is an eternal, euphoric spirit./ And only the spirit makes me/
speak aloud. And the trying/ freedom always needs it.
If I ran Monsanto
By Thomas W. Gilbert and Deborah Glaefke Gilbert In this realm of destruction, This hellhole called Earth, There’s a Darth Vader business That’s so full of its worth. It’s consistent; it’s fascist, And it’s blessed with a vision. It has great friends in Congress Who vote each decision Over those…
Photo-essay: The Million Man March
The marchers came from all over North America in a shared experience; strangers hugged and held hands as if they were old friends By Andy Hall In 1995, The Nation Of Islam leader, Louis Farrakhan had called for a march on Washington similar to the one 32 years before organised…
Green Bottle Bloomers: On Mike Mills & The National
by Ciarán O’Rourke Mills’s movies are shaped by his peculiar obsessions, and this, in large measure, is their saving grace. In Beginners and 20th Century Women, he returns compulsively, not just to specific scenes from (his) youth, but to the process of remembering the past – which for him, as…
Socialist arguments against religion
Joe Hill Will there be pie in the sky for us when we die? By Phil Hall Socialist arguments against the use of religion are not always arguments against the idea of an ordering presence in the universe, or against an Earth and a cosmos full of meaning, or against…
Out and About in the Fourth Estate With Steven Gilfillan
Under The Greenwood Tree It was one of these evocative autumn mornings, so I was doubly shocked to hear that Borak Yesenin’s mother had died. It came as a surprise too when on behalf of him and the rest of the family I was asked to the funeral, and in…
Mark this day: social media colludes in the first global act of censorship.
The Internet has been captured by billionaires. Progressive Governments must take note! OUR Internet should be in the commons. By Phil Hall Facebook, Whats App and Instagram went down today – presumably in a damage limitation exercise after the release of the Pandora Papers. It’s frightening and, at the same…
Can you drive an HGV or pick fruit?
… and global warming: Blah, blah, blah! Zombie Apocalypse, 3rd October 2021 By Gordon Liddle ‘I asked him what food was grown for. He answered, ‘Well, to eat of course!’ ‘No,’ I said, ‘it’s grown for profit.” Well, the Labour conference went well. The Starmeroids have gone home to prepare…
I create the stars as I go…
Making keepsakes with pyrography By Gill Rippingale I’ve been making Keepsakes for a number of years now, and have posted pictures of various pieces on my blog, on Instagram, Etsy, Pinterest, and on my Facebook page, Hug-the-Tree Pyrography, together with descriptions, but of course the information can get buried quickly!…
Poet of Honour: Mona Arshi
As defined by the Forward Prize winner poet Mona Arshi, a ‘rupture of empathy’ is amplified around us. As a human rights lawyer, she often observes it at a touching distance; yet keeps nurturing life, but in the end, the lilies have to be sadly left to be ‘beauty-drained’.
The philosophy of Iris Murdoch
by Jon Elsby During her lifetime, Iris Murdoch was probably better known – and more highly esteemed – as a novelist than as a philosopher. Privately, Isaiah Berlin once called her ‘a lady not noted for the clarity of her ideas’.’ Yet she taught philosophy at St Anne’s College, Oxford…
A letter from a revolutionary eco-socialist in pain.
It’s been a very bad month for blue tits, for the poor and for me! By Gordon Liddle Zombie Apocalypse, 18th Sept 2021 Blue Tits tend to have only one brood per year. They feed their young on caterpillars and have to gauge when these are freely available to choose…
Opposition to Avi Loeb’s unbiased, empirical inquiry
Critical and logical thinking is not genuine Smart Thinking, it is merely a form of computation By Bryan Greetham In the film Free Guy a bank teller discovers he is actually just a character in a video game. This forms the basis of a question that many have asked….
Madeleine McCann: Trolling the Victims
A deep dive into a dark world By Carrie Camel A CONCERTED social media campaign has been launched by trolls to destroy a new book on the Madeleine McCann mystery. The aggressive trolling, spearheaded out of Spain by a retired British police detective, comes from a group that has long…
Afghanistan: debunking the clash of civilisations
“Behind you is the sea, before you, the enemy” By Khaled Diab The Taliban takeover of Afghanistan and the collapse of the American-backed Afghan government has revived fears that we are in the midst of a monumental clash of civilisations between the West and Islam. In this extract from his…
The Blairs, Catholicism, and New Labour
by Garry O’Connor The word ‘religion’ comes from the Latin religare, meaning ‘to bind back’, and in the present climate, in a society awash with an ‘all-pervasive claim to victimhood’, and the escalating fear and often reality of violence, a ‘binding back’ in multiple ways, not least culturally, is needed….
Restoration
Harry Greenberg Reflects on a First Creative Project From His Early Teens I have restored the family heirloom. It was handed down and went with the family wherever they went. Some of them said, ‘For God’s sake, leave it behind, lose it in transit; who wants it? Who needs it?’…
Poet of Honour: Keki Daruwalla
The recipient of the Sahitya Akademi Award (1984) and the Commonwealth Poetry Prize (1987) for Asia, Daruwalla is at his best with his poems engaging with nature.
How to celebrate the Day of the Dead
… and a calavera for the selfish By Phil Hall So you have lived deep and extracted all the sweetness out of life, and you have had your last meal. But, what food and drink would you like people to remember you by? What wafting smell would have the power to…
Personal Tragedies in Rodrigo Hasbún’s Los afectos
by Kathryn A. Kopple In 2015, the Bolivian writer Rodrigo Hasbún published Los afectos (Affections), a slim volume loosely based on the Ertl family, a clan foisted on the reader with precious little introduction. “The day papa returned from Nanga Parbat (with some heart-rending images, of a beauty that wasn’t…
Of The Earth
By Thomas Gilbert Life’s fortunes take us down a trailThrough fog and wind and rain and hailBut sometimes sun and warmth and peacecome by to help us find release. Jamie, do you want to go sledding at the toboggan run this afternoon? Her dad asks her. Oh, yes. I’d love…
Alexei Navalny and the Revival of the Cold War
Reproduced by kind permission of the author, from Global Research The case of the poisoned underpants I think we are all curious about the political trajectory of Alexey Navalny. Clearly there is a big power play being made around him. He is a pawn in a great game most of…
Extracts from Alexandria Adieu
Published in London by Gilgamesh Books in Autumn 2021 In his powerfully evocative new book, Alexandria Adieu, the veteran Fleet Street foreign correspondent, historian and author, Adel Darwish, has written the memoir of his birthplace: Alexandria. Alexandria is not simply an Arabic, or a Greek city, an Egyptian city, it is…
A Retrospect on The Three Tenors
by Jon Elsby Just about everyone old enough to remember the football World Cups of the 1990s and early 2000s will remember the Three Tenors. The open air concerts they gave, cleverly timed to coincide with those World Cups, converted Luciano Pavarotti, Plácido Domingo, and José Carreras from operatic superstars…
Capitalism is what happens when the psychopaths and gangsters are running the neighbourhood. Our only chance is to wrestle the wheel from them.
… and create a National Forest the length and breadth of the UK. Zombie Apocalypse, 16th Aug 2021 by Gordon Liddle Time to pause. Stop. Time to take stock. We are drifting toward war and ecological collapse like drunks seeking the next open bar. Staggering along, bouncing off lampposts and…
May Uprising, Paris, 1968
by Garry O’Connor ‘The past is bourgeois propaganda,’ booms a deep voice in French from the stage of Paris’s Odéon Theatre. I am participating after a fashion in the May uprising of 1968. I have lived for some months in a tiny maid’s room, eight flights up on the Île…
The USA broke Afghanistan, now it must own the mess.
The USA Bugs Out By Phil Hall and Tony Hall The decisive battle that the USA has lost is the battle to rebuild Afghanistan and win hearts and minds. Let’s start by injecting a little historical memory into these farcically simplistic and convenient narratives of invasion, counter invasion and withdrawal….
The Labour Party – sifting through the wreckage
Will activism become a cottage industry? By Paul Halas The news that the selection process for prospective Labour candidates is to be changed to allow yet more Tories to represent the party will surprise no one. It is only the latest increment in Keir Starmer’s drive to make the party…
In the end, are religion and science compatible?
Does the answer lie in the ideas of Teilhard de Chardin? By Matthew Taylor In 2014, Pope Francis confirmed that the idea of the expanding universe (the Big Bang) and Evolution are both true and compatible with Christian belief. At a meeting at the Vatican’s Pontifical Academy for the Sciences,…
What will it take for the British to reach a tipping point and realise they are being shafted by this bunch of Eton inbreds?
…and ban plastic grass! Zombie Apocalypse, 05th Aug 2021 By Gordon Liddle As miserable weather continues with more miserable weather, the crop from the garden is poor this year. Polytunnel is miles behind last year and even the potatoes outside have been poor. If we had to survive on what…
An audience with Samuel Beckett
by Garry O’Connor Ian Herbert, another friend from King’s, was working for Pitman’s. He commissioned a book on French theatre. I decided I would try to interview Samuel Beckett, intending a whole chapter just on him. I wrote to ask if I could see him and gave him some dates…
A Conscientious Objector’s view of the War against Vietnam
By Thomas Gilbert First things first: I was never in Vietnam. I was a conscientious objector (CO). When I turned 18 years old, just graduated from high school, I received a letter from the draft board indicating that I had been given a draft status of 1-A. There were only…
Why the Asian Century for China, may never arrive
By Tobias Devene When China Rules the World, China: The Emerging Superpower, How Economic Reform is creating a New Superpower, and China, the Remaking of the World Order. These are all titles of books about China and how it will rise, inevitably to be the next global superpower. The idea…
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