Author Archives: steel city scribe
The returning soldier effect
A friend told me a joke the other day. A squaddie awaiting his train home after Armistice 1918 was interviewed on the platform by a radio reporter. And what’s the first thing you’ll do when you get home? Take the … Read More »
Love at Theresienstadt
All you need is love. The Beatles I see friends shaking hands, saying how do you do? – they’re really saying, I love you. Louis Armstrong A recent post saw me invoking Maslow as if his ‘hierarchy of human need’ … Read More »
Turkey attacks Kurdish forces in Syria
Here’s a thing. Following Turkey’s sudden but unsurprising move yesterday to attack Kurdish YPG forces in Syria, compare Guardian coverage with that of the centrist middle east outlet, al-Monitor. A little background. Before Daraa 2011, Erdogan used to call Assad … Read More »
Sir Tony Robinson on Momentum
Celebrities are on my mind. My previous steel city scribbling was on Gwynneth Paltrow’s keen advocacy of novel uses for coffee, mugwort tea and jade eggs. The post before that concerned celebrities less stratospheric – Jones, Mason and Monbiot – … Read More »
Thoughts on Ms Paltrow’s pitsy-patsy
“Bankers’ nieces seek perfection”, sneered Dylan in an otherwise rare ode to romantic love, “expecting all the gifts that wise men bring.” He’d clearly been mugging up on his Maslow. What’s more, once our needs at one level are met, … Read More »
Monbiot Cooked
Am I obsessed by Syria? I see egregious injustice done in our name to its people. I see risk of escalation in America’s refusal to leave a country it, unlike Russia, has not been invited into. I see corporate media … Read More »
Graun trashes White Helmet doubters
this post also features on offguardian In today’s Guardian a Spotlight piece by Olivia Solon – her profile calls her “a senior technology reporter for Guardian US in San Francisco” – carries the header, How Syria’s White Helmets became victims … Read More »
Brexit: three things we shouldn’t forget
Apropos yesterday’s dramatic and historically resonant intervention by Arlene Foster’s DUP – a coming together of two of the most potently charged issues in British politics – let’s remind ourselves of the immediate antecedents of this mess. First though, here’s … Read More »