Your Own Personal Jihad

"The G.O.P. Deserves to Lose"

2012-01-26T13:59:00.000Z

Ooh look at this, the Wall Street Journal (the in-house journal of the Republican elite) is not happy with the current crop of GOP Presidential candidates.

Some selected highlights:

Above all, it doesn't matter that Americans are generally eager to send Mr. Obama packing. All they need is to be reasonably sure that the alternative won't be another fiasco. But they can't be reasonably sure, so it's going to be four more years of the disappointment you already know.

Ouch!

As for the current GOP field, it's like confronting a terminal diagnosis. There may be an apparent range of treatments: conventional (Romney), experimental (Gingrich), homeopathic (Paul) or prayerful (Santorum). But none will avail you in the end. Just try to exit laughing.

Double Ouch!!

A primary ballot for Mr. Gingrich is a vote for an entertaining election, not a Republican in the White House.

Stop it, you're killing 'em!

On the evidence of his campaign, Mr. Romney is a lousy CEO.

This is just unfair!!!

What about Rick Santorum and Ron Paul? They are owed some respect, especially for the contrast between their willingness to take a stand for principle against the front-runners' willingness to say anything. But Messrs. Santorum and Paul are two tedious men, deep in conversation with some country that's not quite America, appealing to a devoted base but not beyond it. Sorry, gentlemen: You're not going anywhere.

"...in conversation with a country that's not quite America." I'll have to remember that one.

And the U.S. will surely survive four more years. Who knows? By then maybe Republicans will have figured out that if they don't want to lose, they shouldn't run with losers.

Man, this is what there own team thinks about them! What chance have they got?

Of Winston Riley, Slim Smith and Pat Kelley

2012-01-25T18:23:00.000Z

In the week of Winston Riley's untimely death (from injuries received in a brutal attack last November), I thought we should pause long enough to listen to a song from the group that he founded - The Techniques.

When Slim Smith left the group in 1967, Pat Kelley was recruited to take his place. This song 'You Don't Care' was the first single recorded with the new line-up. And what a recording it is, adapted from a Curtis Mayfield song, it has a lovely lilting style and was a huge Jamaican hit, spending six weeks at number 1.

For years I have been of the opinion that poor ill-feted Slim Smith was the greatest vocal talent that Jamaica ever produced, but listening to this song you would have to say, Kelley is at the very least Slim's equal.

David Cameron's ToDo List

2012-01-23T13:59:00.002Z

Don't Vote For Romney - He Speaks French!

2012-01-13T13:37:00.001Z

In his defense, he does speak French very badly.

Fox News Finds a New Way to Diss Mitt Romney

2011-12-14T19:33:00.001Z

Remember when Fox News would 'accidentally' list any Republican involved in a scandal as a Democrat?

Well, on a similar note, if anyone doubted that Romney is Fox's least loved Republican candidate, check out this graphic from last night's report.

It has been shown that there is a direct lineal correlation between minutes spent on Fox News and the poll standings of Republican presidential candidates. It could be argued therefor that FoxNews is Obama's biggest single strategic asset. To appease Fox and to get the face-time they need to win the Republican nomination, candidates have to dance to Fox's hard-right tune, a dance that will distance themselves from the great bulk of American voters.

So it is that with Obama's approval rating languishing in the lower 40%'s, he his well ahead of all his likely opponents, some argue that he may even be heading for a landslide victory. The two candidates that have a chance of beating Obama - the worthy (though dull) Mitt Romney and the intelligent and articulate John Huntsman have next to no Fox face time, and are thus falling away in the polls.

Our New House

2011-12-11T20:53:00.000Z

HA!

2011-11-29T10:41:00.002Z

Best Boy Band Evah!

2011-11-25T23:34:00.002Z

Don't Get Bitter, Get Organized

2011-11-24T14:18:00.000Z

Oh dear, turns out Marx may have been right

2011-09-11T23:39:00.003+01:00

I'll Call This Mourning

2011-05-28T19:33:00.000+01:00

R.I.P. one of my very earliest and longest lasting musical heroes - Gil Scott-Heron. Heartbreaking and almost unfathomable news at this point. He was right of course, the revolution will not be televised, but hopefully one day soon, songs as beautiful and poetic as 'Pieces of a Man' will be.

Krugman Talking Sense Again

2010-10-11T13:14:00.005+01:00

"But, right now, nobody wants to spend. Businesses don't want to spend, because consumers don't want to spend. And the economy is deeply depressed. And the only player out there who can get this economy moving is the government.

So, now is the time for the government to go ahead and borrow, spend, get this economy moving, and then be responsible, then pull back, but only after we have got this thing going."

Are you listening Mr.Obama?

How 'bout you, Mr. Cameron?

Big Government Wins Again

2010-09-30T14:37:00.001+01:00

Reading the ‘socialist economic bulletin’ this morning (as you do), I was intrigued by this table...

It’s taken from a discussion concerning a paper published by the the European Central Bank with the snappy title ‘Euro Area Fiscal Policies and the Crisis’. You can download it here.

Without doubt, tax revenues are increasing and deficits are falling where measures were put in place to grow the economies. As usual, Berlusconi’s Italy, which did not attempt a stimulus, is lagging behind. In Spain, that had by far the largest stimulus package, the public sector deficit has halved in the first seven months of 2010.

However there is not a direct linear correlation between the size of the stimulus and the growth in tax revenues. This is due to the differing components of the stimuli in different nations.

Over Euroland in its entirety 28% of the stimulus packages were in public investment, a further 50% was designed to stimulate household consumption and 17% businesses. The latest E.C.B. forcasts show that the household consumption will rise 2.3% this year, whereas capital investment will fall.

In other words, stimuli designed to boost domestic consumption have worked, and those aimed at business have failed. 50% of Spain’s stimulus package took the form of public works projects, Germany - which went down the route of tax cuts - has a much more modest result.

Anyone For Tea?

2010-09-30T12:11:00.003+01:00

There have been a number of opinion pieces published on both sides of the ocean that are attempting to re-cast the Tea Party activists in a new and more flattering light. Their story is of a Tea Party that is a mass-movement of those who demand small government and feel cut out of mainstream politics by a mysterious political and social elite. This elite allegedly all attended the same sort of universities where they were taught that Europe is great and creationism is nonsense. (I’m paraphrasing here.)

This represents a shallow attempt by the Right, to give the Tea-Party movement a coherence and strategic logic where there is none. It further attempts to paint the motivations of the movement as in some way normal and justifiable, rather than what it is – the mainstreaming of dangerous political, religious and social extremism.

The Tea Party protests began when Rick Santelli broadcast an attack from the floor of the Chicago Exchange on the government’s plans to help poor people whose mortgages had fallen into arrears. Cheered on by traders at the exchange, he suggested a tea party to dump derivative securities in Lake Michigan to protest Obama’s intention to “subsidize the losers”. (The video is still on YouTube and CNBC’s website, where CNBC continue to enthusiastically promote it.) So this movement that claims to defend the interests of the working man actually began with a call for a bankers’ revolt against the undeserving poor. This doesn’t sound like the birth of a grass roots movement to me.

Further if you look at the movement’s stated aims, ‘The Contract from America’ demands that America 1) adopts a single-rate tax system, 2) repeals Obamacare and 3) sustains George W Bush’s reductions in income tax, capital gains tax and inheritance tax. The only beneficiaries of these policies would be large corporations and Billionaires. So as George Monbiot pointed out, we have the bizarre sight of those who will be most hurt by these proposals marching on Town Halls and State capitals demanding they be adopted.

Tea Party events have been enthusiastically promoted by Fox News, owned by that well-known leftist working class hero Rupert Murdoch, and massively funded by large corporations and billionaires such as MetLife, Philip Morris and the Scaife family. (Using front organizations like ‘Freedom First’ and ‘Americans for Prosperity’ - an organization funded by the Koch Industry, a Kansas-based oil and gas conglomerate). So far from being the nemesis of some secret American ruling elite, the Tea Partiers are simply tools of the extremely rich and extremely powerful.

Moderate Republicans are being consistently taken out by tea-party favorites. Look at what has happened to Alaska's Sen. Lisa Murkowski - who is no RINO. Until a month ago she was overwhelming favorite to keep the Republican Alaskan Senate job. She’s now lost the Republican Primary to her tea-party-backed opponent Joe Miller, who will in almost certainly win the election, and is a complete nut job.

Also Crist failed in getting the Republican nomination in Florida. Sharron Angle, who if anything is even more spectacularly, willfully stoopid than Sarah Palin, has won the Nevada primary. Mike Lee massively defeated Bob Bennett (again, no RINO). Toomey is almost certain to beat Sestak, and all this is only in the Senate. We are used to seeing wackjob Republicans in the House, but there is usually only a couple of them in the Senate - Sessions and Inhofe. The USA’s politics seems to have taken a nasty downturn since their economy went down the toilet.

Ally this to the way that formally extremist beliefs are becoming mainstreamed by politicians and media figures, such the whole “Obama is a communist-Atheist-Muslim-who-should-be-sent-back-to-Kenya” thing and you have a recipe for the destruction of normal civilized values, and political discourse. For instance, the hard right in collusion with the rightwing media have been race baiting since at least Katrina and it seems to have started to gain some serious ground in the last year or so.

Racism is key to understanding the Tea Party Movement, it is the tea party’s raison d’etre. As I said in an earlier post the Tea Partiers are simply the Ku Klux Klan in Wal-Mart Tea-shirts. When they say, “we want our country back”, that is code for “we want a white millionaire in the White House as usual”.

(Though upon reflection The Taliban in Wal-Mart clothing would be a better analogy. The coincidence of the Tea Party worldview and that of the Taliban is startling – but that’s a whole different post.)

As Dave Neiwert has documented over the years, the American Right’s echo-chamber amplification has had a normalizing effect on extremist views that changes public attitudes. Views that were always present but generally considered lunatic and extreme have become increasingly mainstream precisely because they are presented uncritically, or even endorsed by, FoxNews and talk radio. As Joseph Goebbels said: ‘If you repeat a lie often enough it becomes perceived as the truth’. More people think Obama's a Muslim now than they did before he was elected (!) This situation is made worse by the more restrained media's willingness to pick up obviously crazy stories from Fox or the worst right wing blogs for fear of being perceived as “liberal”.

This normalization of extreme views seems to have accelerated since Obama's victory and especially in the last year, supported by the Right’s echo-chamber mechanism. They think if you're not burning crosses in people's yards, you must not be a racist. Whereas the use of implicitly derogatory racist generalizations is totally fine.

[As usual, Chris Rock put it best, the threshold for being racist now is; if you killed Medgar Evers, you are a racist.]

As Thomas Frank pointed out, the prevailing conservative discourse in America has saught to take economics out of the argument. It blames the troubles of middle and poor America not on economics (corporate power, class power, real world wage cuts, tax cuts for the rich, globalization and outsourcing) – but on cultural forces. This has been a common theme for right wing pundits for a few years now in attempting to explain why capitalism is actually making Americans less wealthy.

Secondly we have this theme of the elite American ruling class. The Republicans have recruited the poor and the middle class by using not economic issues, which they refer to as ‘Red Button’ social issues, such as abortion, gay rights, flag burning etc. And yet despite twenty years of Regan and Bush government, abortion is still legal, gay marriage is increasingly legal, there is no constitutional clause against burning flags, and average American wages continue to fall.

How to explain to explain this failure to their conservative core voters?

Simple. Invent a "liberal elite" straw man, representing everything that conservatives are not - people who are well educated, probably speak French and drink latte grande. They ignore any economic reasons for failure, and blame their own failure on the red-button social issues by blaming all on this alleged America-hating American elite.

This meme of an American ruling caste that hates middle-class Americans is increasingly common in conservative literature. It is merely a device to cover their own abject failure to better the lives of those they claim to represent.

England – An End of South Africa Tour Report

2010-01-21T19:07:00.016Z

Durham Teammates Collingwood and Onions, celebrate achieving an improbable draw in the first test.

In my heart of hearts I will always be a Windies supporter, but England is where I have lived off-and-on since last November, and will shortly be my permanent home. So it’s time I worked harder on my England cricket appreciation.

So, marks out of ten, in batting order.

Andrew Strauss 6/10

Strauss is a solid, workman-like, if less than totally inspiring captain. He is strategically smart, tactically less so. Has a good work ethic. Can’t read a pitch to save his life, it’s almost preferable when he loses the toss.

As a cricketer he did O.K.-ish. Only got to 50 once at Durban, though it was the innings that set up the victory. Made four starts but scored only one fifty. Was unable to cope with short-pitched bowling from around the wicket – got out that way three times out of seven. Strauss has undoubtably earned his place in the team given his performances since his hiatus, however, as a captain the jury is still out.

Alastair Cook 6/10

Cook as we all know has “issues” outside his off stump, issues that nearly cost him his international career. His solution to this problem has been simple but effective. “Look back to see if you’re bat is straight, then ignore any ball outside the off stump.” Play to your limits in other words. It’s not going to set the turnstiles rattling, but he’s doing a job.

Jonathan Trott 4/10

A real dissapointment, seemed out of sorts in the land of his birth. Hopefully he will learn and come back stronger, but you know how it is with England selectors – the clock is ticking. As a Bears fan I was a big advocate of calling Trott up to the squad, let’s hope he learns from the experience.

Kevin Pietersen 3/10

It’s a thin line between genius and madness, and Petersen appears to straddle that line with ever-increasing unease. His fine 81 at Centurion is a prime case in point, breathtakingly brilliant innings ended by a barking-at-the-moon-bonkers run out.

He seems to have started to believe his own propaganda, and now wants not just to score runs but to dominate and humiliate the opposition. He needs to get back to the basics of learning to build an innings. Duncan Fletcher has produced this typically exacting and precise analysis of Pietersen's batting problems for the Guardian. They should get together sometime.

K.P. - England's mad genius

Paul Collingwood 8/10

Not much to say really, Collingwood has got that flinty-eyed, “I’m a dead-hard, steely, northerner, me” schtik down pat. He has become the heart and soul of this England team, never scores centuries anymore, but his steady stream of unspectacular runs, and of course the sheer number of hours spent at the crease was of crucial importance in England tying this series.

Oh and one more thing he can catch the ball.

Ian Bell 8/10

You see, I had always said it, “Bell’s best position for England is number 6, put him there and watch the runs flow, I said”

O.K. that’s a lie. I said no such thing, I had given up on him to tell the truth. A quiet unspectacular accumulator of runs, his lapses of concentration had pushed even his biggest fans (of which I numbered myself) to the edge of insanity and beyond. However a new found ability to concentrate for long periods allied to Colly-style grit and determination left us with a new England top scorer for the series. Kudos to Andy Flower for picking him

Matt Prior 5/10

Let’s get this straight, despite recent improvement, Prior is not as good a wicket keeper as James Foster, and he never will be. Therefore the only reason to pick him for England should be weight of runs. So where are they?
His ramshackle, all-action, batting style comes off sometimes, but more often than not, it doesn’t. He managed a 60 at Durban and a 76 at Cape Town, all his other innings were failures. If I was a selector he would be drinking in the last chance saloon.

Stuart Broad 5/10

He’s his father’s son alright. Petulent, argumentative, gets up the noses of the opposition (good) and the umpires (bad). His bowling can be frustratingly inept at times. He has a natural ‘back of a length’ length that he reverts to in times of stress. But in situations where the ball is swinging you need to pitch the ball up, and he seems very reluctant to do that, watching him you sometimes wonder if he has a functioning brain at all. Yes he turned the Durban test around with an excellent after-lunch spell that took 3 key wickets in 15 balls, but he needs more wickets more often if he is going to justify his place.

One more thing, he can’t bat. 75 runs at 10.something apiece isn’t good enough for someone who allegedly has his sights on the number 7 spot. He only scored 1 single, solitary run in any of his second innings outings.

Stewart Broad - England's Mr. Nice-but-Dim.

Graeme Swann 9/10

For my money the man of the series. Swann should have played many more than the 16 Tests he has played in his career. He had a reputation for being a bit of a nutter in his early years, which held back his career. A friend of mine who shared a flat with him for a season in New Zealand confirms his wild-child image, but also that he was a top bloke and a top cricketer, so why did he wait so long? His 69 wickets have come at a higher average than Monty Panesar managed in his first 16 tests, but Swann can bat and field. Speaking of his batting, why on Earth is he behind the hapless Stewart Broad in the batting line-up?

James Anderson 4/10

Who’s is going to turn up today? Good Jimmy, or Bad Jimmy? That was always the question. Yes we know he can swing the ball both ways, but what does he do if the ball isn’t swinging? That’s Jimmy’s problem – no plan B.

As The Guardian pointed out, the 78 bowlers have taken more
wickets in Test cricket than Anderson's 156, have all done so at a lower average than his 34.81.

He’s a top fielder, an increasingly solid batsman, and English conditions will always suit him more, so his place in the team is safe for now, but he could be so much more than he is.

Graham Onions 7/10

F.C. Napoli’s loss is England’s gain. One of the stars of this series didn’t get the statistical reward his efforts deserved. He bowls close to the stumps, wicket-to-wicket and denies batsmen the room to play extravagant shots. Bizarrely he was not played in the fourth test, on a pitch and in conditions that looked like they would have suited him perfectly. Not only did his bowling stats not do him justice, but his batting return does not tell his heroic story. Onions – who has opened the batting at club level, defied the full might of South Africa’s attack on two separate breath-taking occasions, and thereby saved the series for England.

Ryan Sidebottom 3/10

A World top 7 bowler in 2007, a series of injuries has taken away his zip. Don’t understand why he was taken on this tour, his inclusion for the fourth test ahead of Onions was totally baffling.

They are Destroying Cricket - and Nobody Cares

2009-05-23T17:42:00.002+01:00

Look at this monstrosity - it's called The Mongoose, and my sons already want one for their birthday.

Viv Richards must be spinning in his grave.

Or at least he would be if he was dead.

Fear & Loathing at the I.P.L.

2009-04-23T09:02:00.005+01:00

The big question on everyone's lips at the I.P.L. is 'Who is Fake IPL player'?

His blog is causing uproar/consternation/fear/much-hilarity amongst the players, officials and media people.

There are some coruscating put-downs and (perhaps) embittered diatribes against his fellow players and coaches. But despite the deep chips on his shoulder he has a real, nasty sense of humor. Great fun.

It probably better to start at the beginning and work through, so you can work out which player fits which nick name. 'Lordy' is Sourav Ganguly for instance, short for 'Lord Snooty'.

http://fakeiplplayer.blogspot.com

For the record, my money is on Aakash Chopra.

[i]"...The day we had landed in SA, I was sitting at the bar with my teammate, the young former India player who will remain a former India player, the Sheikh of Tweak was also at the bar counter. He was chatting up one giggly, sexy twenty-something. And as a way to impress her, he was cracking jokes on our Phoren coach (someone he had played under a few yrs ago). In fact, he even said that if our coach had done a better job of picking up the balls after nets, they would have won the Ashes a few yrs ago. (Apparently, their main bowler - called a sparrow or parrot or something - slipped on a ball during nets, injured his ankle and flew back)."[/i]

Let's Big Up Franky Beverly.

2009-03-21T14:29:00.009Z

Frank Beverly,I always rated him.

This dates back to his pre-funk days, when he was simply Frank Beverly, and a member of a quartet called 'The Butlers' (later 'Franky Beverly and the Butlers'.)

Not great sound on this video, but this is very, very, rare piece of music. So If you ever find a copy on 7" vinyl in the back of your Aunt Mimi's cupboard, hang on to it, it's worth serious dosh.

Chris Gayle - Good Things Happen to Good People (eventually)

2009-03-09T21:41:00.004Z

By about this time tomorrow, Chris Gayle, officially the coolest dude on planet Earth, will have lead the West Indies to their first series win since 2004. Thirteen series have gone by without a Windies victory, but Gayle along with coach John Dyson has added some much needed steel to this Windies side to go alongside the obvious talent.

Couldn't happen to a nicer guy, let's just hope he cashed that million dollar check from Sir Alan Stanford before the FBI got to him.

More tomorrow.

[Update] PHEW! That was closer than it should have been, but the boys prevailed in the end. Congratulations.

Well I sort of agree

2009-02-14T17:38:00.006Z

I haven't put enough work into this recently. But in my lame defense I've been sick since November.

More very soon.

Americans Should Feel Safer Already

2009-02-07T17:32:00.006Z

Sourav Ganguly - Legend

2008-11-12T08:50:00.008Z

Sourav Ganguly - The Bengal Tiger

Great stuff on the retirement of Lord Snooty in this morning's Guardian.
I've lifted their 'Ganguly's Ten Greatest Hits', shamelessly, from The Spin:

1) India had not forgotten Andrew Flintoff's pecs-out rampage round
the Wankhede a few months earlier when they completed a stunning
two-wicket win chasing 326 in the final of the 2002 NatWest Series at
Lord's. Watching from the balcony, Ganguly took his shirt off and
yahooed it round his head like a tequila-sozzled mercenary. It was
very funny - and very Ganguly.

2) During India's epic 2-1 home win over Steve Waugh's Australians in
early 2001, Ganguly developed a habit of making Waugh wait at the
toss, thus achieving outside the hours of play what few managed to do
inside them: raise the temperature of the Iceman. Waugh pronounced
himself "wound up" by Ganguly's "continued petulance" and, after much
consideration, called him a "prick". Ganguly smiled to himself and
got on with the business of winning a series.

3) Ganguly was once batting with Mike Atherton during his stint with
Lancashire in 2000 when, in between overs, he regally summoned Athers
to his end. Expecting to gain some valuable insight into the quality
of the bowling or the nature of the pitch, Atherton was surprised to
be handed Ganguly's sweater instead. Ganguly may not have said
"dispose of this, my good man," but he probably wasn't far away.

4) Arriving in New Zealand for India's ill-fated visit in 2002-03,
Ganguly and his entourage (wife, child, maid) whizzed through customs
ahead of the rest of India's tour party and allegedly commandeered
the team bus to take them directly to their hotel without waiting for
anyone else. Well, he was the captain.

5) After India's left-arm swing bowler Ashish Nehra was given the new
ball against Namibia during the 2003 World Cup, he retired with
figures of 0.1-0-0-0 courtesy of a twisted ankle. Asked later why he
had opened with Nehra, Ganguly was straight to the point. "We wanted
to see what Ashish did with the new ball," he said. "We found out
that he falls over."

6) India were 1-0 down at home to Australia in 2004-05 when the teams
travelled to Nagpur for the third Test. Ganguly asked the groundsman
to remove the grass from the wicket, only to be presented with a
greentop that prompted the umpire David Shepherd to chuckle "Looks
like home, don't it?" With immaculate timing, Ganguly developed a
groin problem "at the very last minute", according to his coach John
Wright. India lost by 342 runs.

7) In 2006 Ganguly turned out for Northamptonshire. It quickly became
apparent that he had left his best form somewhere in the Bay of
Bengal, and Jason Brown - Northamptonshire's off-spinning rabbit -
was persuaded to strike a bet with team-mates about who would average
more. Ganguly's championship scores during his brief stint were 2, 0,
6, 2, 5* and 9: a total of 19 runs at 3.80. Brown (80 runs at 6.66)
won his bet.

8) After India had lost in the final of the 2001 Coca-Cola Cup to Sri
Lanka in Colombo - their eighth successive one-day final defeat -
Ganguly was summoned to see the match referee Cammie Smith, who felt
he had verbally abused a Sri Lankan batsman. But rumours of Ganguly's
unpopularity must be exaggerated: not one person, including the Sri
Lankans, would testify against him. Cordial relations were regarded
as more important than stuffing Sourav. The Sri Lankans "played the
game," remembers Wright, "and pulled the rug out from beneath Smith's
feet."

9) You must have heard the one about the time Ganguly scored a 50 for
Lancashire, turned round to salute his adoring team-mates on the
balcony and then discovered they were all inside the dressing room
doing more important things like cutting their toenails. Here's how
Flintoff summed up the dynamic: "It's a struggle with him. He wasn't
interested in the other players and it became a situation where it
was 10 players and Ganguly. He turned up as if he was royalty - it
was like having Prince Charles on your side."

10) Ganguly falls out monumentally with Greg Chappell, Wright's
replacement as India coach. One report suggests Chappell's messages
to Ganguly out in the middle, urging him to speed up his batting,
were routinely ignored. He is dropped from the side in 2006, but -
amid widespread outrage - returns soon after. A year later he makes
239 against Pakistan at Bangalore. Post-Chappell, Ganguly averages
46, four more than his career figure. You've got to hand it to him.
And you've got to admit: we'll miss him.

o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o

Cricket Sledging - A Masterclass

2008-10-25T20:03:00.002+01:00

I’m trying to teach my boys the art of cricket sledging, but it’s proving difficult. The subtlety of what is required is, as yet, beyond them. They think it involves shouting “BANG” very loudly at the point that the ball pitches.

In fact sledging is about the subtle drip-feeding of negative thoughts and negative information into the batsman’s brain.

Let’s begin this master-class with the work of a true artist in the field – South Africa’s Mark Boucher.

“What’s your average these days? 9.5? 10 ?”

Genius.

Moving on to a different perhaps less sophisticated style, this is Freddy Flintoff first putting a young Dwayne Bravo in his place, before sledging Tino Best into charging down the pitch. The scorecard should have read ‘Best sledged Flintoff Bowled Giles.’

Of course Freddy got this one very wrong, three years later Dwayne Bravo is now one of the World’s great players.

Another method is to step up the pressure on incoming batsmen. Here is a man I’ve met in the real world – Kumar Sangakkara, a nicer man you will never meet, but here is ladling on the pressure to Shawn Pollock.

To be fair, Pollock’s a crafty old goat, and he doesn’t look all that perturbed.

Of course as we close this initial study, it would be remiss of me not to mention that sledging sometimes backfire.

Seven Billion Rooms of Gloom

2008-10-18T14:58:00.003+01:00

Levi Stubbs (right) dead at 72.

The great ones are dropping like flies aren’t they?

Levi Stubbs is dead.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/music/2008/oct/18/usa

My Four Tops Top Five.

1. Baby I Need Your Loving
2. Walk Away, Renee
3. Still Waters (Love)
4. Reach Out (I’ll Be There)
5. I Can't Help Myself

Closely followed by ‘Bernadette’ and ‘It's The Same Old Song’

Ask me tomorrow, It’ll be a different list

Here he is at his best…

Comedy Gold

2008-10-10T08:14:00.002+01:00

You gotta watch this video.

It's the minutes of a town-hall meeting from Wasila, Alaska when Sarah Palin was mayor read by an unemplyed (I'm guessing) actor.

Train Spotting

2008-10-05T13:55:00.005+01:00

Courtesy of Kdoug via Daily Kos

Everything you will ever need to know about Fox News in 6 minutes and 7 seconds

2008-10-03T21:43:00.001+01:00

Everything you will ever need to know about Fox News in 26 seconds.

2008-10-02T13:30:00.003+01:00

Count how many people raise their hands.

Rest in Peace - Maurits van Nierop

2008-09-26T09:29:00.006+01:00

Maurits van Nierop: 11 May 1983 - 24 September 2008

My family were shocked yesterday at the news of the tragic death of our club-mate Maurits van Nierop at the age of 25. He died in somewhat mysterious circumstances in the early hours of Wednesday morning, he was found dead in a Cape Town street by a security guard at 5.a.m. on 24th September.

He was a fine cricketer and was as widely liked as any sportsman I have ever met. He was the first Dutch player to be given a place on the MCC ‘Young Cricketer’s’ program and had recently been returned to the Dutch national squad after a two year absence. He was just a very nice man, and endlessly patient with my kids in a visit to Amsterdam just a few weeks ago. And typing this about him in the past tense seems almost inconceivable to me now.

Just last week my boys won the annual ‘van Nierop Feather in Your Cap’ award for most committed under 13 player(s). Presented to the club by Maurit’s father, Albert. I told the boys last night that if they grow up to be as good a player as Maurits, they should consider themselves privileged.

We send our heart-felt condolences to all his family and his many friends, as well as all those who were lucky enough to play alongside him.

Oh dear, oh dear, oh dear....

2008-09-24T08:44:00.002+01:00

And this on the very day that the Jean Charles de Menezes Jury visited Stockwell Tube station.

Death of a Soul Legend

2008-09-18T16:38:00.008+01:00

Normal Whitfield - The shy loner who became a sound studio tyrant. The Temptations referred to him as 'Hitler' for his domineering style.

Norman Whitfield, one of the great geniuses of soul music died Tuesday afternoon.

The list of great songs he wrote, reads almost like a Motown ‘Best of’ all on their own.

I Heard it Through The Grapevine, Cloud Nine, Ball of Confusion, War, Just My Imagination (Running Away With Me), Ain’t Too Proud to Beg, Car Wash – the list is endless.

The world is a poorer place without him.

Rest in Peace, big man.

Here's my favorite - Cloud Nine - featuring Denis Edwards' finest vocal performance

Northern Soul Classic Number 5.

2008-07-17T11:22:00.002+01:00

Chuck Wood - Seven Days is Too Long.

This was in Northern Soul parlance a 'stormer' rather than a 'bounce-along'. One of the great choruses in the history of the genre.

No idea what the video is about.

Ho - Li - Day Ce - Le - Brate

2008-07-17T10:03:00.002+01:00

I'm on holiday. Our first vacation for slightly more than two years.

Off to England in the morning catching a very early train - can't wait...

We'll catch some cricket at Old Trafford and Edgbaston, and the boys have signed up with a cricket club local to where we are staying, so they can practice there.

Fan-tas-tic.

Decent beer, decent tea, lousy coffee, pies, cream teas, the politeness of cheerful strangers.

Can't wait

Unsung Geniuses of Soul 3 - Bobby Womack

2008-06-20T13:23:00.006+01:00

I've wanted to post a Bobby Womack video for some time now, but there's not much video of him around.

This is from 'Soul Train' in the late '70's, it's the song 'Looking for a Love' which he had originally recorded fifteen years previously with the The Valentinos as the Gospel song 'Looking for the Lord'.

Bobby could sing, Bobby could play the guitar, but sadly - Bobby couldn't dance.

"Let's have a thunderous welcome gang, for the Superbad...Bobby Womack..."

Smug Germans Get Their Own Back

2008-06-19T14:20:00.005+01:00

Clickey for bigger.

My Brother's New Bike

2008-05-19T09:29:00.012+01:00

All the way from Canada - it's a whole kilogram lighter than my Cinelli, and it's not even Italian! (sniff)

It does look damn cool though.

I have to confess I had never heard of Topolino wheels...

...but they look rather funky.

Not sure what this 'ultra-hollow structure' stuff is all about, they don't have it on my Record groupset. I'm sure those pedals take some getting used to they have a LOT of float, the guys at the shop say it takes about 100 miles.

Cricket - Our Road the the National Championship Starts Here

2008-04-11T15:12:00.003+01:00

Today I received the game schedule for the Cricket team I coach/manage.

It's always an exciting moment, for me, forget cuckoos this is the moment when Spring has finally arrived.

We are starting with two home games, which is always nice, but then we go into a sequence of four consecutive away games. So lots of early morning starts. Bloemendaal will be our biggest threat I reckon, for some reason Rood & Wit don't have an under 11 team to annoy us this year.

Cricinfo described our ground as one of the 'ten most picturesque in the world'.

Wilders, Fitna, and the assault on humanity

2008-04-01T20:58:00.008+01:00

As I have said before Geert Wilders' new 'movie' Fitna can be likened to a march by the Ku Klux Klan.

The KKK march with the express intention of sowing hatred and disharmony, they are supported in their efforts to march by the American Civil Rights Union. Now of course the KKK have a right to march in a democracy, even though they ultimate intention is to destroy democracy. But nobody has the right to call me a coward for refusing to facilitate the KKK in their march.

So it is with Wilders. The latest line form the hysterical wing of the Islamophobe group is that major institutions such as cinema chains and TV channels are guilty of moral cowardice for refusing to show his 15 minute diatribe. Wilders' intention is clearly not to illuminate or inform but to promote racial and religious bigotry in a craven attempt to seek power and subvert democracy. He has a right to make his movie just as the KKK have the right to march and Hitler had the right to write Mein Kampf.

(Incidentally were those few German booksellers who refused to sell Mein Kampf in the 1930's cowards? After all, they were denying old Adolf his free speech rights weren't they?)

But anyway, I digress. Wilders has his rights, but so do I.

The true cowards here are those who support Wilders for they are taking the easy way out, using the right of freedom of speech to ultimately deny that freedom to others. Utilizing idiotic, overly simplistic arguments to complex social problems, and demonizing those they choose to scapegoat with all of societies ills, is a political formula that's as old as time - one would hope that the level of political sophistication of European voters is such that they are now able to resist the simple fixes of the rampant populist . It's easy just to choose one social grouping and hurl hatred and bile in their direction, and (in this particular case) blame Muslims for every failure of modern society. Much tougher to work with and through differing religious and social groups in a sophisticated and nuanced manner in an attempt to deal with problems in a way that might actually work.

Geert Wilders: Anything else you need to know?

Geert Wilders and Osamah bin Laden stand shoulder-to-shoulder. They need each other to achieve their common goals of two different but equal forms of fascism, in a world divided along fault lines of religious fundamentalism and ultimately skin colour. They crave social and religious disharmony, which is why they both must both have been initially delighted with this stupid little film. Though Wilders must be bitterly dissapointed with the Dutch Muslim communities apathetic reaction to the movie. He must have been hoping for riots in the streets, or at the very least young Islamic hotheads demanding his decapitation.

Now you can see this film as a triumph for free-speech if you like, but I see it as a tool of totalitarianism. If you want to call me a coward for saying that, that is your democratic right and I don't give a shit.

To support Wilders and bin Laden is to spit in the face of humanity, and everything that is good and decent in the human race.

Northern Soul Felt Like This

2008-03-31T22:25:00.008+01:00

I've got another video for you to look at. I used to dance exactly like the guy in the P-Funk outfit, but I'm sure I'd dislocate an ankle if I tried that now. I read today that he and I danced in the 'Blackpool Mecca Style'. Who knew? Certainly not me, I was never within fifty miles of the Blackpool Mecca. Also my pants were never as baggy as his. I usually wore a pair of straight-leg black Levi's which my buddy Elridge had sent me from Brooklyn - they were very tough to find in the UK back then.

It's funny how your memory plays tricks on you, but the tune in the video - That Driving Beat by Willie Mitchell - is almost always the one playing in my mind when I think back to those days, (either that or The Yum Yums.)

In my memory this tune was playing as I walked through the doors to my first all-nighter. But there again I'd also swear it was playing that time I threw up in the sink, and then when the girls all went "Euuuuwwggghh" as I rang the sweat out of my T-shirt.

The first Northern Soul All-Nighter I went to was in a smallish subterraneum club in (I think) Wolverhampton. A place called 'The Catacombs' which summed up the rather claustrophobic atmosphere rather well. It was much smaller than that the club shown in this video, ('The Wigan Casino', I'm guessing), which looks a cavernous place to me. The sound system at the Catacombs was quite appalling, distortion was the order of the day. I remember the first time I heard "Girls Are Out to Get You' on 7" disc and being shocked how clear it sounded when heard from a record - this despite the fact it was on the bootleg BJD record label. That's how used to the distortion I was.

(I later briefly met Brian, John and Dave, who owned the label - despite my prejudices they were not bad guys.)

The Holy Grail for us was 'The Twisted Wheel' club in Manchester, or failing that 'The Golden Torch' in Blackpool. I never made it to either place, neither my buddies or I had the disposable income to pay the rail-ticket from Birmingham to the North West. Then there was the issue that we weren't technically old enough to get in to nightclubs. So there was the ever-present fear of traveling all the way to a far-away club, only to be barred entrance by a doorman doing his job properly. The last time we went to the club in Crewe, we were turned away at the door. It was a long way to go for a couple of desultory pints in a spit-and-sawdust pub.

One thing you'll notice from the video is how the boys and girls dance apart. That's exactly the way it was - you did not go to meet girls, you went to DANCE, and show off your moves to your buddies. Chatting up a girl would have been considered uncouth.

In retrospect, I regret not going to the Twisted Wheel. In seemed like a big risk at the time, and with our minute post-high school budgets it would have been a major investment. But had it come off, I could have dined out for years on my 'I was a regular at the Twisted Wheel' stories.

It should be pointed out that you still can go to the Twisted Wheel. Original deejays still run regular all-nighters and bi-monthly Sunday afternoon sessions in the original location.

Looking at the website it looks like fun.

The site also has a handy jukebox feature where you can listen to a variety of classics. In particular I would point you in the direction of the immaculate Homer Banks track, he was the younger brother of Bessie Banks who did the original of 'Go Now' - made famous by The Moody Blues. Also The Incredibles, incredible, 'There's Nothing Else to Say Baby' - one of the all time great "what we have here is a dead shark" tracks. Oh, and of course 'Please Let Me In' by J.J. Barnes - another brilliant Ric Tic Records recording. You can see why Berry Gordy closed 'em down – too much of a threat to Motown, and of course J.J. almost sounded more like Marvin Gaye than Marvin Gaye did.

Later on after Northern soul went into retreat, I continued showing off my moves at the legendary 'Shoop Shoop Stereo' disco every Thursday night at the Golden Eagle on Hill Street in Birmingham. The pub was considered the finest example of Art Deco architecture in the West Midlands. I particularly loved a giant art deco engraving of a Golden Eagle in the front window. Though the music was largely Funk and Reggae, it didn't seem to matter, the 'Blackpool Mecca' dancing seemed to fit anyway. I guess we didn't dance to the rhythm as such it was just part of the mental and physical release.

Sadly, predictably, they demolished the wonderful old Art Deco Golden Eagle pub to make room for a car-park. Looking through the rubble, I came across a small section of the beak of the eagle engraving, and a larger piece of one of the wings - perhaps 30 centimeters across. They were jailing kids for lesser acts of vandalism back then.

Seems like an eternity ago looking back from here, some of the tunes I can no longer listen to because they hold too many ghosts.

All-in-all, great times though.

Life imitating art imitating life

2008-02-21T13:19:00.004Z

Many have commentated on the similarities between Barack Obama and Matthew Santos, the fictional Presidential candidate from the U.S. t.v. show 'The West Wing'.

Both are young(ish), handsome(ish) and charismatic.

Both were originally community activists.

Both are attempting to become the first President from an ethnic minority.

Both are married with two kids.

Both were accused of being inexperienced for the job.

Both are up against another Democratic Senator with close ties to a previous President

Both are likely to be running against an aging Western Republican, whose Liberal views on some issues have made him unpopular with elements of the evangelical base.

Well of course, it turns out this is not a coincidence.

"I drew inspiration from him in drawing this character," West Wing writer and producer Eli Attie told the Guardian. "When I had to write, Obama was just appearing on the national scene. He had done a great speech at the convention [which nominated John Kerry] and people were beginning to talk about him."

Attie, who served as chief speechwriter to Al Gore during the ill-fated 2000 campaign and who wrote many of the key Santos episodes of the West Wing, put in a call to Obama aide David Axelrod.

"I said, 'Tell me about this guy Barack Obama.'"

Full story here.

Now of course Obama sympathizers will hope that life will continue to imitate art imitating life, with Obama beating the aging conservative in the November elections.

It's good to Win

2008-02-05T13:46:00.001Z

Last Sunday the under 11 cricket team I help coach stormed to victory in the annual Kennemer indoor cricket tournament.

Felt good, worth missing Ajax v. Feijenoord for, and almost worth getting out of bed at 7.a.m. on a freezing Sunday morning.

Your Stark American Election Choice - Conservatives vs Extreme Conservatives

2008-01-30T10:46:00.000Z

Political Compass is an organization that looks at people's political views and plots them against two axis. The traditional right/left axis and a libertarian/authoritarian axis - you can take the test yourself on the website.

For the record I polled political right/left -7.75 and Authoritarian/Libertarian -7.88 which put me close to London Mayor Ken Livingstone, and somewhere due south of Mahatma Gandhi. (At one point I was considering calling my company 'South of Gandhi').

Recently they took a look at the views of the current crop of US Presidential candidates. Crucially, the mapping process took note not only of their stated views, but added extra weight to the candidates voting records on any given subject. I guess the only true window into the dark soul of any modern politician is to view their actual voting records - arguably the one time they can be guaranteed to be saying what they mean.

Looking at the results from a European viewpoint the most striking element is that all but two of the original candidates are political conservatives. The exceptions being predictably the dropouts Kucinic and Gravel. All other candidates are of the right, from moderate conservatives such as Edwards, to the hard right of Tancredo and the like.

Amusingly, Ron Paul the supposed darling of the Libertarian Right is shown to be not Libertarian at all! Rather he's an old-fashioned hard-right authoritarian. To be fair, although he's not as Libertarian as Kucinic and Gravel he is the only Republican candidate who is less authoritarian than the bulk of the Democrats.

The results also suggest that the leading Democratic candidates, Obama and Clinton are two of the three most right-wing Democrats. Clinton though marginally to the right of Obama is a good deal less authoritarian than Obama - there's hardly room for a cigarette paper between Obama and McCain's political views.

Could this mean that being further to the right Obama and Clinton are more electable than John Edwards in a general election?

Well apparently not, according to this recent CNN/Rassmussen poll which suggests that in one-on-one polling Edwards is the only Democrat that beats all Republican candidates. So it with some irony then, that we now read that Edwards is about to withdraw from the race.
Ten months is a long time in politics, but the most left-wing (or the least right-wing) of the Democrats was their only candidate who could have been sure of beating McCain and Romney et.al.

There's a lesson to be learned here, but as Phoenix Woman at the Firedog Lake blog pointed out, it's not a lesson that the American public will hear. The American media continues to push two myths, firstly that it is necessary to be of the hard-right to win middle America, and secondly that the John Edwards election campaign didn't exist. For them, mission accomplished I suppose.

And so it goes, come November the electorate will be given a choice between a hard-right authoritarian conservative, and either the corporate lapdog Clinton, or Barack Obama who wants to bomb Pakistan.

Oh well, there's always 2012.

Northern Soul Classics - Second in a series of quite a few

2007-12-30T12:53:00.000Z

'At the Top of the Stairs' by The Formations.

I first heard this one as I walked into my first ever Northern Soul All-Nighter at a small sub-terrainian club in (I think) Wolverhampton. It took me a couple of years to find my own copy on vinyl.

The sound quality on this video is almost as bad as in that club, as I recall - but enjoy anyway.

Islam, evil or not?

2007-10-02T19:12:00.000+01:00

Ayaan Hersi Ali is back in Nederland after being let down by her new American neo-con buddies. So the debate will surely rage in the Dutch media again. Hersi Ali, saint or devil? Islam evil or missunderstood? Well, here’s my twopennyworth. Feel free to mis-interpret it as usual

As a card-carrying militant atheist, I see religion, all religion, as delusional and ultimately dangerous in that it seeks to deny rationality and (increasingly) is anti-science in its stance.

I don’t see any religion as evil, but that is not to say that there are not evil men around willing to twist and exploit religions to get what they want. Christianity gave us Hitler and Stalin; Islam has given us Syeed Qutb and Osama bin Laden, (and before anyone says anything, there have of course been evil atheists too – Saddam Hussein being one that comes immediately to mind). Islam does not teach that women are inferior, or that gays should be hanged, evil men have simply chosen to interpret tracts that were written by sheep rustlers in the Arabian peninsula 1500 years ago as supposed proof that it does – (as if the views of sheep-rustlers could be in any way relevant to 21st century society). There are passages in the Christian bible that say that rape of servants and slaves is permissible, the murder of captured soldiers is cool and that homosexuality is a punishable crime. Yet you don’t hear anyone (other than the worst kind of fundamentalist nutcases) describe these as the fundamental tenants of Christianity as they attempt to do with Islam.

As regards fundamentalist Islam, the House of Saud has spent tens of billions of Rials exporting their extreme conservative form of Wahaabiist Islam to the rest of the world. Their money has funded the building of Mosques and schools all over the world, and they have seen to it that Wahabiists have staffed these institutions. Western governments have not been blind to this, they have been perfectly aware of what has been happening, but have chosen to do nothing because they are paralyzed by the fear of failing oil supplies. Consider for a moment the hypocrisy of those western politicians who ring their hands at the rise of Islamic fundamentalism, and yet have chosen to do nothing about the root cause of this turn to fundamentalism and continue to do nothing, because ultimately it may damage corporate profits.

Then at the confluence of three separate forces that have led to phenomenon of the homegrown terrorist - Fundamentalism, politics and second-generation syndrome. The fundamentalism we know about, the politics we know too – largely the foreign policy of the ‘allied’ governments that is widely interpreted as a genocidal attack on Muslim peoples that has helped radicalize Islamic youth. Finally second-generation syndrome – the same process that led to the rise of Latino gangs in Los Angeles – caused by a feeling of isolation and dislocation from the society they find themselves in, an isolation that can only worsen as the host society reacts to Islamic terrorism, and thus we are caught in a vicious circle of hate and distrust.

In that I oppose religion and fundamentalism, doesn’t mean that I automatically support others who would oppose it. Jami is, as far as I can tell, a good man who deserves the support of all freethinking people. Hersi Ali does not. Not just because she’s a neo-con politician who helped pass a law that would make it difficult for oppressed Muslim women from entering the Netherlands, but also because she is a liar, a liar who would ruthlessly lie about her OWN FAMILY to get where she wanted to go. I don’t know about you guys, but I think the genuinely oppressed women of the world (Muslim or otherwise) deserve a better quality of spokesperson.

Northern Soul Classics - First in a Series of Several

2007-08-24T16:49:00.000+01:00

Frank Wilson 'Do I Love You? (Indeed I do)'

I once saw this described as 'The National Anthem of Northern Soul' - which is a bit of an exageration, but what the hell, it's still a great tune.

Clear a space on your office floor, turn up the volume to 11, and DANCE...

Cartoon Hypocrisy

2007-07-23T11:45:00.000+01:00

About a year ago, some of you may remember the great storm surrounding the publication of Danish cartoons depicting the Islamic prophet in a less than celestially glorious light. Predictably Islamic hotheads go hot under the collar, as hotheads are want to do, and outrage and threats of violence ensued.

The world’s media was full of self-aggrandizing defenders of freedom, who were outraged by this appalling assault on freedom of speech. Danish cartoonists, it was argued, should be allowed to insult anyone they like, it didn’t matter who they insulted or who they provoked, freedom of speech was sacrosanct and dammit – these defenders of freedom would lay down their lives if necessary to ensure that freedom was maintained. Several thousand acres of Scandinavian forests were chopped down to produce the wood pulp on which these outraged opinion pieces were printed. Millions marched, freedom was saved.

Now fast forward to July 2007.

A Spanish magazine has produced a cartoon showing the Spanish Crown Prince Felipe ‘In flagrante delicto’ with his princess.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/europe/6909047.stm

Now a Spanish judge has ordered the nation’s police force to remove every copy of the magazine from every newsagents and newsstand in the country. The magazine has now been forced to reveal the name of the cartoonist, and he now faces the possibility of up to two years in a Spanish jail for insulting the royal family.

You would think, wouldn’t you, that this would become a cause célèbre for the same people who were outraged by the Danish cartoons. The site of police officers ripping magazines from a newsstand in a western democracy, and a cartoonist facing a jail term for simply plying his trade will surely outrage those same people who were so strident last year.

Won’t it?

But where is the outrage?

Where are the marchers? Where are the outraged op-ed pieces? Where are the incensed bloggers? Nowhere to be seen. I’ve looked; believe me I’ve looked. But there is no outrage out there, nothing, niente, nada.

Could it be that there is one law for those who insult Islam, and another for those who insult everything else?

The Fixed Wheel Bike and the Ascent of Man

2007-07-20T10:21:00.010+01:00

Fixed wheel bikes - or fixees as they are known. I’ve always loved ‘em, dating back to my all to brief career in competitive track cycling. There’s something so clean and simple about them that appeals to my minimalist sensibilities.

My brother Mat just sent me these photos of his new 'Surly' Fixey earlier this week, as modeled by his daughter Maddy. It’s looks very fine, clean, simple, uncluttered, understated.

Coincidentally I had just been chatting online with fellow Cinellisti earlier this week, and we had got talking about fixees, and of course, the conversation got round to the gorgeous Cinelli Laser.

Details are important.

Some people see the Jaguar E-Type, as the pinnacle of modern design engineering, the more up-to-date auto enthusiasts may suggest the Aston Martin DB9.

The Aston Martin DB9 Volante - Naaaaaaaaaaaah!

While others may point to the (admittedly gorgeous) new Milau bridge in France.

But for me the Cinelli Laser marks the high water mark of human ingenuity and our ability give beauty, fitness to purpose. That something so exquisite could win no less than 28 World Championship and Olympic Gold Medals tells us all we need to know about the what the human race is capable of at its best. In 1991, it won the Compasso d'Oro, highest italian award for industrial design, and remains the only bicycle ever to have been so awarded. It's also permanently exhibited in New York's MOMA museum of modern art.

Look at these things, the bikes, the cars, the bridges - they are things, objects, but they are beautiful and fit-to-purpose. This is what the human race is capable of creating, when they lift their aspirations above the craven and the self-serving.

On a darker note, here is an image of a beautiful, minimalist Cinelli Olympic that someone in the USA found thrown in a dumpster (!) What kind of world are we living in that fails to recognize this level of beauty when they see it?

Unsung Geniuses of Soul 2. Magic Sam

2007-07-11T13:54:00.000+01:00

Magic Sam was always a hero of mine. At the age of 12 one of the first albums I ever brought was a Magic Sam retrospective called simply ‘Magic Sam 1937 – 1969’. I guess he stands at the extreme ‘soul’ end of the blues spectrum. His best album ‘West Side Soul’ is one of the great classics of American R&B.

He had a wonderful soulful voice, but was also a fine songwriter and an influential guitar player, in his inimitable, tight, staccato style.

I was unaware of any film of him until I came across this last week. It’s from a German documentary, filmed in his highly successful European tour in 1969.

In true blues style, he died of a heart attack at age 32 just a couple of months after this film was made. Allegedly a tour promoter had made him honour a contract to embark on a lengthy tour after his doctor had recommended rest. He never really recovered.

This poignant little film shows a short road interview leading into his best-known song and biggest hit “All Your Love.” There follows an instrumental wrongly identified here as “Magic Sam’s Boogie”. In fact it’s called “Looking Good”.

Enjoy.

Unsung Geniuses of Soul - The First in a Series of erm, Several

2007-06-07T21:50:00.000+01:00

Terence Trent D’Arby was a strange one. Convinced of his own genius, he spent much of his waking hours telling us that he was more brilliant than Prince – which he wasn’t. Or that he was the best British based soul singer of his day – which he was.

His first album ‘Introducing The Hardline According to…’ was widely praised by critics and sold ten million copies, spawning four hit singles ‘If you Let me stay’ ‘Sign Your Name’ ‘Wishing Well’ and ‘Dance Little Sister. The second album ‘Neither Fish Nor Flesh’ was widely reviled by critics and sold just two million copies, and spawned precisely zero hit singles. His third album 'Symphony Or Damn: Exploring the Tension Inside the Sweetness' had an astonishingly pretentious title, and was widely ignored by critics and the general public alike. It's become a staple of charity shops and record shop remainder bins ever since.

Which is a bit of a shame, because in a way, it sits in the same class as Dexy’s Midnight Runner’s classic ‘Don’t Stand Me Down' as one of the great un-heralded moments of genius of recent British music. Or at least 75% genius 25% pretentious codswallop.

Listen to this it's a live version of a song from the album ‘Symphony or Damn’ and tell me it isn’t one of the sweetest things you have ever heard.

It’s called ‘I still Love You.’

The more things change, the more they stay the same...

2007-04-18T10:23:00.000+01:00

So England's World Cup ends not with a bang, but a sorry, useless, weak-willed whimper.

My marks out of 10.

Michael Vaughan (capt) - 4/10. Rubbish batting, mediocre captaincy, out-dated strategies.

**

James Anderson - 6/10. England's best new-ball bowler (not saying very much I know). Developed a nice line in early innings in-swinging yorkers.

**

Ian Bell - 7/10. The best technique in England. He's better batting at three though. One of the world's best very-close fielders.

**

Ravi Bopara - 5/10 Probably worth persevering with for now. He's a decent late middle order batsman, but so far a deeply average bowler.

**

Paul Collingwood - 6/10 Did what he could in that flinty 'look at me I'm a norvern hard case, me' way of his.

**

Jamie Dalrymple - 4/10 Out of his depth.

**

Andrew Flintoff - 6/10 Still England's only world-class bowler. He batted better before he lost all that weight - go figure.

**

Ed Joyce - 4/10 Out of his depth.

**

Sajid Mahmood - 5/10. England's most naturally talented seamer, but not ready yet. The winter tour came one year too soon and that clearly knocked his confidence. Looked crushed yesterday.

**

Paul Nixon - 5/10. Comedic relief, doesn't throw his wicket away, irritates the opposition, hates Michael Vaughan apparently. All good things.

**

Monty Panesar - 5/10 Not yet, Monty. Not yet.

**

Kevin Pietersen - 8/10 The stats don't lie, the world's number one rated ODI batsman. Should be the next captain, but won't be.

**

Liam Plunkett 4/10 - Pie-throwing mediocrity.

**

Andrew Strauss - 3/10 A bigger fucking whimp even than Steven 'big girl's blouse' Harmison. Has no place in international cricket until he develops a backbone.

**

Jon Lewis -?/10 Can't remember that far back.

**

Fletcher. 4/10. Excellent technical coach, but his strategies would have seemed out-dated 20 years ago. Doesn't know how to motivate players. Stay on as coach, but drop him as a selector.

**

David Graveney - 2/10. Nazz says that Graveny should have been fired even when he was captain. Things haven't improved.

My 11 for the next test.

1 Cook
2 Vaughan ©
3 Bell
4 Pietersen
5 Shah
6 Collingwood
7 Foster (w)
8 Flintoff
9 S.Jones (If not fit, then Anderson)
10 Panesar
11 Hoggard

My 11 for the next ODI

1 Flintoff
2 Cook
3 Bell
4 Pietersen (c)
5 Shah
6 Collingwood
7 Foster (w)
8 Bopara
9 Broad
10 Panesar
11 Andersen

Coach: Steve Waugh

Chairman of Selectors: Me

Cheats Never Prosper?

2007-03-28T13:01:00.000+01:00

Brilliant 'Panorama' documentary concerning the history of doping in cycle sport on Belgian TV last Sunday night. It gave massive volumes of information that I struggled to keep up with given the limitations to my knowledge of the Flemish language - I only wish I’d taken notes. It pulled no punches, named names, dates, times etc, and put those who denied the problem seriously under the cosh.

Here's a review of what I can remember:

• Telekom were the first cycling team to take EPO on board seriously and systematically. Depressingly this was done at the insistence of their riders lead by Uwe Ampler, and against the wishes of then team-leader Walter Godefroot. Medical staff at the University of Freiburg where the EPO itself was also sourced devised the doping plan.

• According to his seigneur, Jef D'hondt, the most enthusiastic partaker of EPO was Bjarne Riis. At the time that he won the 1996 Tour de France, his haematocrit levels were at a staggering (not to mention seriously dangerous) 64%. His blood was so thick and jell-like he had to set his heart-rate monitor to awaken him at night if his pulse rate became too low. Only after exercising enough to raise his pulse to a normal rate could he return to his bed. Thirteen other professional cyclists were not so lucky, and died in their sleep during this period. These massively raised haematocrit levels caused him to experience extreme arthralgia and rheumatism, to such an extent that in the final week of the tour he was barely able to walk or use his hands for eating.

• One honourable exception to this pattern was Eric Zabel, he refused to participate in EPO doping, and the program speculated that the extreme length of his professional career - fifteen years and counting - may have be related to that refusal.

• Blood doping, (also known as blood dumping), is also widespread. When Tyler Hamilton was caught with two different types of blood in his body he claimed that the strange blood originated from his unborn twin brother! An alibi that caused much hilarity in the anti-doping fraternity.

• There was also a lot of attention paid to the story of a young Spanish rider, Jesus Manzano. He almost died after he was given his own blood that had been stored improperly. He collapsed on stage 7 of the 2003 Tour de France, and as he was loaded into the ambulance you could clearly see the Kelme team-leader whispering into his ear. Manzano insists these were instructions to refuse all blood tests at the hospital. This of course was a request he was unable to comply with, as he lay unconscious in Intensive Care. As well as the poor storage, the labelling of the blood was wholly inadequate; it’s entirely possible that he received another rider’s blood. He was later fired from the Kelme team officially for sleeping with a woman during competition, however Manzano insists the real reason for his dismissal was that he disobeyed instructions not to talk to his team mates about what had happened. His point remains that given that his team mates lives were at stake, he had no choice but to talk.

• The evidence against Lance is massive and compelling. Former seigneurs, mechanics, drivers, and assistants queued up to tell their damming stories. The evidence of an Irish woman who worked as Lance’s seigneur (can’t remember her name, sorry) was particularly striking as she kept contemporary notes on Armstrong’s condition including blood test results that told a damming story. She was also party to conversations were alibi's were cooked up to explain away errant dope-test results.

• Johan Bruyneel’s defence was that all the people in the documentary or the sources in the 'L.A. Confidentiel' book were embittered, sacked former employees who were seeking revenge. Odd then, that all these witnesses told such similar stories of systematic abuse. Although very few had a kind word to say about Lance, the full ferocity of the anger seemed to be reserved for Bruyneel, who appears to be widely reviled.

One last thing, Belgian's most famous cycling journalist was asked when the last 'clean' Tour de France winner crossed the finishing line, he answered, 'Greg LeMond in 1986'. Probably true, though interesting that he chose to name the year 1986, because LeMond won the tour for a second time in 1989, after he recovered from gunshot wounds.

Jamaican Bob Slaying

2007-03-28T12:55:00.000+01:00

The murder of Bob Woolmer has cast a giant shadow over one of the world’s great sporting events. It’s a tragedy for him, his family, (whose dignity in the face of the terrible events that have unfolded around them is awe-inspiring) for the sport, and for the tournament organisers.

When the first autopsy report came back as ‘inconclusive’ I discounted the murder theories. You can't strangle someone without breaking their hyoid bone, and no pathologist worthy of the name would miss a hyoid fracture. Bob Woolmer, 58, an overweight diabetic in a high-stress job, who had just seen his team humiliated by Ireland had died alone in his hotel room. It didn’t seem quite so surprising if you viewed it in that context. However a second autopsy in Florida later confirmed there was indeed a hyoid fracture.

What has happened since, tells us more about the world’s sports media than anything about cricket, crime or Pakistan. How quickly the nationalist clichés came out. As Mike Marqusee pointed out in a typically lucid article:

“But never mind the facts, it's easier to stick to stereotypes. We all know that south Asians take their cricket too seriously (which they do), that corruption is rife in these societies (which is true), and that wiliness and duplicity are part of the oriental (or Muslim) character (which is idiocy).”

$1 Billion are gambled on each and every single cricket game played by India or Pakistan, a further $250,000 are bet on games featuring the other test nations. Any time this kind of cash is splashing around it is going to attract some pretty unsavory characters. Like many others I suspect that the perpetrators of this murder are in some way connected to this industry. It doesn’t matter that Woolmer’s missing manuscript probably did not name names as has been alleged, as long as the perception was that it did so, that could have been enough.
So now I’m participating in exactly the kind of speculation that has irritated me so much, so I’ll stop here. If we are going to speculate, let’s at least stay away from quasi-racist or religious bigotry we’ve seen this last week, and let’s just allow the Jamaican Police to do their job. We owe the Woolmer family and the great game of cricket that much at least.

It's time to do the Iraq thing, I'm afraid

2007-03-15T11:49:00.000Z

I know, I know, just what the world doesn’t need right now, another blog piece concerning the Iraq war.

However my irie was raised by this piece in the Washington Post.

This guy, Robert Kagan, informs us that the recent American troop surge, or ‘troop augmentation’ as Condy Rice prefers to call it (stop sniggering at the back, there) is actually working already. We Liberals apparently “don’t have a plan B for it’s success” - just as the allies didn’t have a Plan A for winning the war, I suppose.

This theme of Liberals hoping for allied failure in Iraq is taken up by someone called ‘Gene’ at the conservative British blog ‘Harry’s Place’.

He says:

“Perhaps at this point the main division of opinion would be not so much between "pro-war" and "anti-war" as between those who hope (with varying degrees of skepticism) that Kagan is right and those who are smugly sure he is wrong.”

No actually Gene, the division is between those of us who live down here on planet Earth and can see the real-world evidence in front of us, and those of you who inhabit an obscure alternative world where the turning point in this war is forever ‘just round the next corner’. A view only sustainable if you borrow the idiotic “this story is all about the biased Liberal media” shtick from the American Right.

In 1991 we stabbed the Iraqi opposition in the back, not just by asking them to rebel and then failing to support them, but also by ‘Stormin’ Norman Schwarzkopf’s decision to permit an exception to the ‘No Fly’ zones that allowed Iraqi helicopter gun-ships to mow the Kurds and the Shi’a’s down in the streets. These very same people we had so brutally betrayed would (we were told) now greet the allied troops “…with sweets and flowers”.

Fucking hell.

Now in the midst of the carnage, where a day with 7/7 levels of violence on the streets of Baghdad is seen as evidence that the situation is improving, we are left with just two options. A) a return to totalitarianism or B) the break-up of Iraq.

I dunno about you guys but I favor option B. I’m fairly sure the talks with Syria and Iran will lead to the eventual Balkanization of Iraq, which I think is our one hope for a sustainable peace. Iraq was in reality always an idiotic concept; Winston Churchill was in many ways a complete prick.

It’s just a shame that it took the death of 600,000 people to get us to this point.

Incidentally, what Kagan failed to mention is that his brother Frederick is one of the architects of the surge strategy, so Robert is not exactly an impartial source. Secondly, as the Daily Kos points out, his record in predicting the outcome of this conflict is pretty dire.

The Strange Alternative Universe of the Wingnut Blogger

2007-03-05T13:35:00.000Z

Here's the thing, I’m all for reasoned debate, and truth be told I’m not adverse to a little unreasoned debate as and when the occasion fits. However there comes a time when you observe a phenomenon and all you can do is scratch your head and say, “What the f*ck going on here?” Such a case is Debbie Schlussel and her blog

You’ll remember I mentioned Debbie’s blog in my earlier ‘swift-boating of Obama’ article a few weeks ago.(Incidentally her false accusations are still online even though Fox News TV has since backed down from them.)

Debbie is obsessed with Islam (bad) Jihad (very bad) black people (very, very bad) and illegal immigrants (unspeakably bad).

Compare and contrast her attitudes to two rape stories on her blog.

In the story “Quote of the Week: Islam, Molestation & Rape; Palestinians Gang-Raped Jews for Revenge" There are a couple of stories stitched together about various Muslim groups worldwide who are suspected or wanted for rape. Despite the fact that no one to date has been charged for the crimes (yet alone convicted) the assumption is one of guilt, and of course outrage because the men are Muslims.

However in the story “How to Satisfy Duke's "Diversity" Recommendations” – the presumption is that if a Black woman accuses middle-class white boys of rape she must be lying, and the boys are clearly victims of ‘political correctness.’

Incidentally, can anyone define for me what PC actually is? Right-wingers are forever accusing me of it, yet none of them can say what it is when I ask them.

Now I don't like men who rape. Just one rapist is of course one too many, but the bitter truth is that there are clearly millions of men who rape all over the world. One in seven British women report that they have been raped, that's a horrifying statistic, and though I don't know what the statistics are for the USA I don't suppose they are much different. Here then is where the wingnuts give themselves away. They are single-issue obsessives who are outraged about rapes that occur on the other side of the planet, yet willfully ignore rapes that occur on the street where they live, or on their university campuses. Why? Because Muslims aren't involved, so it must (presumably) be some lesser kind of rape.

This is how the wingnut process works. Debbie scours the many anti-Islamic hate-sites (of which there are legion) looking for any news story she can cut-and-paste that shows Islam in a bad light. Sometimes these are real stories (because there is indeed much that is despicable about Islamic fundamentalism) some times there are seeds of truth in an otherwise exaggerated story, or sometimes they are out-and-out lies. Her readers, who are trapped in a limited paradigm of your own making, read these stories and are delighted to have their bigotry confirmed and reinforced. They are all caught up in an ever downward, self-re-enforcing, cycle of hatred and lies.

Debby is a desperate Ann Coulter wannabee who is out to make a fast buck. Fuelled by racism and religious bigotry she is exploiting her readers naive and limited world-view to get rich by promoting hatred of their fellow man. If she weren’t so laughably bad at what she does, she would be dangerous.

If you doubt that Debbie is a racist and a bigot, go to the thread where she reviews the movie "Indigenes". This is Debbie's review of a movie that Debbie hasn't actually seen yet. (!)

(Though to be fair, she plans to see it in April.)

Her 'review' is full of petty insults and minor inaccuracies, and one out-and-out lie, namely:

"Supposedly, this movie is about four Algerian Muslims who enlisted in the French Army to fight the Nazis. But let's get real. The liberators were Americans (and British), and most North Africans--Arab Muslims--helped the Nazis and maintained concentration camps of Jews there."

In fact, tens of thousands of North (& West) African troops were amongst the 400,000 men who fought for the Free French to liberate their own country. (No less than 1.2 million Free French troops were eventually utilized in the attack on Germany itself). American Four Star General Mark Clarke (who let's face it knew a few things more about WW2 than our Debbie) was massively impressed by the courage and skill of the North African troops he saw. He called them "magnificent".

But nevertheless she is outraged by the movie anyway. It is, as I say, a movie about brave North African soldiers who fought well and valiantly for the Free French Army AGAINST the Nazis, and their disgraceful treatment by their own (White) officers. Debbie is outraged as far as I can tell, for three reasons.

1. It gives the lie to her pet theory that ALL Muslims admired Hitler and were in favor of the holocaust.   

2. It gives the lie to her other theory that America liberated Europe on its own, or perhaps with very minor help from the Brits.

3. (And worst of all) It shows Muslims as real human beings, with hopes and dreams of their own, capable of both courage and cowardice.

That for Debbie, is very dangerous ground indeed, it's much easier for her to sell her world view if people view Muslims as monsters, evil ciphers, and of course rapists. It will get difficult for her, and others like her, when Americans start to realize that Muslims are not evil but just ordinary flawed human beings, trying to get by the best way they can - much like everybody else.

There was a time when the American political classes - like Debby Schlussel - sought to gain power, status, wealth and influence by selling dreams - the American dream.

These days they seek to attain those same things by selling nightmares.

Ashes of English Flags

2007-02-14T10:51:00.000Z

So the tour is over, I had planned a brilliantly incisive strategic document analyzing England’s failures and laying out a strategic road map for future recovery, but frankly, the thing is, I can’t be arsed.

So you’ll have to make do with a bunch of random thought cobbled together in no particular order.

***

England won the 2005 Ashes because they had a set of bowlers with complimentary skills, and because the Aussie's were clueless against reverse swing.

They've lost the 2006 Ashes because those same bowlers are injured or out of form and the Kookaburra ball doesn't reverse swing anyway.

***

I still think Saj Mahmood is the best young quick in England but as Fletcher said recently, this tour has come "one winter too soon" for him. I'd keep in the team though ahead of Plunkett, who still has to learn to bowl straight, and Harmison – who is just a big girl’s blouse.

***

Fletcher should continue as coach, but shouldn't be on the selection panel because it creates a conflict of interest. If you are a batsman with a particular problem batting against (say) Shane Warne - you are going to be reluctant to go to the coach for advice, if that same coach is then likely to drop you because you've got a problem batting against Shane Warne.

***

Can someone please explain what Andrew Strauss' alleged capabilities for the England captaincy are? Other than that he went to a posh school, and doesn't speak with a 'norvern monkey' accent?

***

My test team:

Strauss
Joyce
Bell
Pietersen
Shah ©
Collingwood
Flintoff
Foster (wk)
Panesar
Mahmood
Hoggard

***

A long-term England captain needs to be recruited from outside the current England squad. I suspect Vaughan is permanently crocked. Flintoff is smart enough, but suffers from still wanting to be seen as ‘a decent bloke’ and ‘one of the lads’. He lacks that edge of spitefulness that a great captain needs and Vaughan had in spades. Strauss can’t buy a run at the moment, so he’s not suitable. Robert Key is a possibility, but my vote would be for Owais Shah.

Any other ideas?

***

I wouldn’t take Strauss to the World-Cup because he seems to me to be the sort of batsman who likes the ball to come on to the bat, and the slo-lo West Indies pitches won’t suit him. The experiment of having Mal Loye opening has not been a raging success but I would stick with it because England have to start scoring runs during the first power-play period.

Other than that I see no reason to change a one-day outfit that has just won four in a row, and beaten the Aussies three games out of three.

So my one-day squad:

Joyce
Loye
Bell
Pietersen
Collingwood
Flintoff ©
Dalrympel
Nixon (wk)
Anderson
Broad
Panesar

Reserves:

Mahmood
Bopara
Davies (wk)
Giles

***

They won’t win it of course, but that line-up would do OK, I reckon.

As for who will win it; my head says it’s too close to call between the Aussies and the South Africans.

My heart says the West Indies; I’m an incurable romantic.

Why aren't conservatives funny?

2007-02-06T09:51:00.000Z

Even conservatives have noticed...

Go here then click on the link to 'It's time for Conservatives to take comedy seriously'.

You can't argue really, there's not one funny conservative comic, writer, or TV show host that I can think of. Even a brief perusal of the right-wing blogosphere will fail to reveal any spark of wit (let alone wisdom) from any of our regular wingnuts. That's odd given how frequently tenuous their connection with reality is. People bordering on the edge of nuttyness are usually funny occasionally, even if unintentionally.

I remember a few years ago an English right-wing millionaire offered a GBP10.000 prize for the funniest script from a conservative writer. He abandoned the project even before the final cut-off date, complaining that the stuff he was getting "...wouldn't have been funny even ten years ago."

It's an interesting cultural phenomenon. A couple of years back two Scandinavian psychologists produced a research paper that suggested that conservatism, if not actually a disease, was certainly a psychological condition (amusingly this research had been funded by the U.S. government). Anyway, this research characterized the conservative mind-set as being completely incapable of nuanced thinking - maybe there's a clue there. Maybe conservatives with their black/white, 'you're-either-with-us-or-against-us,' mindset are completely incapable of seeing the subtleties, nuances and irony in a situation that you need to see to be genuinely funny.

In many ways irony is the key to genuine humor, and Conservatives are seemingly incapable of irony.

That leads me to wonder if that Canadian singer Alanis Morissette is Conservative - well you never know, she's just whiney and irritating enough. She wrote a song 'Ironic' that listed a string of supposedly ironic incidents, none of which were actually ironic. "Rain on your wedding day" - is not ironic, it's sad, but not ironic. Ditto, " a traffic jam when you're already late" - that's a pain in the ass, but it's not ironic. In fact, the only ironic thing about the whole song is that a woman wrote a song called 'Ironic' who clearly had no idea what the word means.

Let's hope the Republicans recruit her to write their next electoral battle hymn. She could use it to list all the ironic things that have happened to the conservatives recently, like hitting out at illegal Latino immigrants, then losing an election when legal Latino voters turned against them. Or starting a War that was intended to demonstrate their cojones in fighting the war on terror, and ended up being the terrorists greatest ever recruitment device.

Now that would be funny.

The Truth With a Joke

2007-02-02T13:06:00.000Z

Throw a couple of Walleyes on the grill and open up a couple of bottles of Leinenkugel's Red, Al Franken is running for the Senate race against Republican incumbent Norm Coleman in 2008.

Coleman, reagrded as one of the most vulnerable incumbents has already said that Franken will be a “very strong candidate for the far-left.” Arf.

I’m looking forward to this one.

Music that will turn you Gay

2007-01-27T11:35:00.000Z

This website caused quite a stir in the blogosphere for a couple of days by satirising the religious Right's attempts to impose their values on the general public. It pretended to provide a valuable public service in maintaining a regularly updated list of band's whose music 'will turn you gay'. In fact it's a clever parody by an actor called Todd Quillen.

Some of the acts listed went almost without saying, Pet Shop Boys, Elton John,(very gay, by all accounts) and Morrisey - but really, Ted Nugent?? Two of my favorite acts Wilco and Ghostface Killah were also on the list and I'm not yet gay, so this was also a clue that all was not what it seemed.

I guess the point of all this is that it demonstrates just how far the religious right has gone in it's nuttyness, that people didn't immediately see it as an obvious joke. I also have to wonder just how many contributers added to the list thinking that they were contributing to God's war against gayness.

Whilst we bleeding-heart, hand-wringing, bed-wetting Liberals, may balk at the concept that gayness can be 'caught' at all. There are many religious fundamentalists out there (Christian and Muslim in particular) who really believe that homosexuality can be caught like the measles. Perhaps they are right, and we should take care not only of what music our kids are listening too, but also who they stand next to at bus-stops!

Rest assured that I shall be removing all the offending CD’s from my rack and melting them down to make a small shrine to good heterosexual music.

Does anybody know any?

The Swiftboating of Barack Obama

2007-01-24T13:10:00.000Z

The far-right’s long knives are already out for Democratic presdential hopefull Barack Obama, I’ve got a feeling we are going to have to put up with a lot of this crap for the next couple of years.

Take for instance desperate Anne Coulter wannabee Debbie Schlussel, who has written a column called ‘Barack Hussein Obama; Once a Muslim always a Muslim.’

The central thrust of her argument appears to be that because Obama's middle name is Hussein his father must have been a Muslim, therefore Obama cannot be trusted to lead the country. Of course Schlussel is a German name, so if we apply her own logic to her own case she must be a dangerous National Socialist, and thus not to be trusted.

Her article quotes from a piece written by the respected writer Scott Turow, this quote mentions that Obama studied at the Basuki School, an Islamic school in Jakarta, Indonesia. Oddly she fails to quote other passages from the same article that explains that Obama only studied at Basuki from the age of six, and left after just two years to enroll in a Catholic school.

The next phase of the attack came from the website of Insight magazine, which is owned by the same company as the notorious Washington Times. The website reported that the Basuki school was in fact a ‘Madrassa’ or a school for Islamic militancy if you like, and that campaign staff of Obama’s Democratic opponent Hilary Clinton were engaged in spreading that information around. This story spread like wildfire through the right-wing media and blogosphere, Fox News for instance reported the story several times.

In fact neither story is true. CNN did what real news organizations are supposed to do, i.e. send a reporter to find out. He discovered that the Basuki School in Jakarta is a fairly normal Indonesian school with Muslim, Christian and Buddhist pupils all studying together. The story that this rumor had originated from the Clinton camp was also shown to be without foundation. The entire story, with video is here.

(Interestingly, you’ll note that the article neglects to mention that CNN’s very own Glenn Beck also repeated the story on air).

Fox News have since retracted the story, amusingly claiming that the story wasn’t ‘news’ but simply the opinion of their presenters. However others on the right are still reporting the story as fact, including (at the time of writing) Debbie Schlussel – despite the very public de-bunking of the lie.

These are desperate times for the right-wing in America, and their desperation will lead us to a campaign of hatred, lies and disinformation the likes of which we have never seen before.

Hold onto your hats boys and girls, it’s going to be a bumpy ride.

So Today it Begins

2007-01-18T13:20:00.000Z

This time I'm going to find the time to make it work.

I promise.

/m