Smart people know not all Jews are Zionists. Smart people who do their homework know too that not all Zionists are Jews. Keep this in mind if, like me, you’ve been dazedly picking yourself off the floor courtesy Piers Morgan’s … Read More »
A drawing room in the west wing at Steel City House Concluding my review last year of a movie based on a Martin Amis novel about the Auschwitz commandant Rudolf Höss and his wife Hedwig, who live with their family … Read More »
A return to America’s proxy war on Russia in Ukraine, in which it seeks to “freeze” the conflict at Europe’s expense – i.e. have the latter’s deeply unpopular comprador leaders cut welfare even further to ramp up “defence” spending in … Read More »
A near constant of this site is that a once progressive capitalism – the predominant system for organising social relations to produce and daily reproduce the material conditions of human existence – now threatens us and most other life forms … Read More »
The last day of March continued Britain’s unseasonal heatwave. I wandered the Kennet & Avon Canal towpath, a stone’s throw from the Georgian splendour of Bath city centre … … to encounter nature red in tooth and claw. (I’m pretty … Read More »
Cracking rumours emerge from the US-Russia bilateral negotiations in Riyadh. The US is reportedly offering to withdraw its military presence from former Soviet republics, dismantle missile sites in Poland and Romania, cancel all sanctions and even tease the eventual withdrawal … Read More »
Yesterday my daughter Annie, below and to the left of her little sister Fran, circa 1986 … … gave birth to this bonnie lad, Mateus. Making her the tired but happy mum … …and me the delighted granddad. How time … Read More »
Female Mandarin I’d no chance with this next shot. A shutter speed of 1/500 seconds is way too slow for so tiny a bird flying so fast over so short a distance. As for my reflexes, they’re glacial. Still, I … Read More »
Yesterday morning, in writing my intro to Paul Knaggs’s skewering of one instantiation of the heartless idiocies of Team Starmer, I picked up on Mr Knaggs having quoted Naomi Klein’s splendid work: I can’t recommend Shock Doctrine too highly. It rides the … Read More »
The government can’t say who’s committing fraud or how much it really costs – if they could, they’d be catching the actual fraudsters instead of building a surveillance system to monitor everyone’s bank accounts. They’re using a mathematical model based … Read More »