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 »
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 »
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 »
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 »
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 »
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 »
This from the Pitchfork music site two weeks ago: In a recent press conference, Nick Cave explained his decision to play concerts in Tel Aviv … He said he “loves Israel”, noting that musicians performing there all “have to go through a public … Read More »
Initially put off by the manic tempo of this Russia Today presenter, that response was soon replaced by appreciation of his comic brilliance and, more importantly, the truth of what this American social commentator is saying. See for yourself in … Read More »
I’m worried about George. An admirer of many years standing of his excellent columns charting capitalism’s destruction of nature, I’m dismayed both by his stance on Syria and manner of defending it. His latest Guardian piece, yesterday – A lesson … Read More »