Everyone knows the Smoking Ban is killing our Pubs and Clubs but why worry. The coalition have promised to Reform Labours Nanny State and to protect Businesses, so we can look forward to the Pubs and Clubs being allowed to Choose to be smoking or non smoking,what a wonderful concept. Fairness in Britain. Its a win-win situation for the coalition,not only will they honour their promise to the public and put Fairness back into Britain,they will also save our Hospitality Industry and Thousands of jobs.
Lets All hope that the coalition does not let the Country down.

Leaving Bluewater, it struck me how differently its story and that of the town emerging around might have been. In Crawley in 2004, a trio of middle-class British Asians took up the Islamist cause, with plans to blow up Bluewater and the “slags” at the Ministry of Sound in London. Had this happened it’s doubtful that Ebbsfleet would have risen from the dust, blood and ashes. Yet it wasn’t only potential terrorists who saw Bluewater as the epitome of western decadence. “Many of us share the Crawley terrorists’ dislike of Bluewater,” wrote Guardian columnist Catherine Bennett. “But that is not to say we have any interest in their plans to improve it.” In the London Review of Books, Ian Sinclair wrote that visitors to Bluewater “wander… under the soft cosh of muzak, feeling the life-force drain. These are the retail undead.”

Isn't it just another attempt by image consultants to get people to form an opinion (and here we are) in what is otherwise an over-saturated pool of well-rinsed, bland, formulaic, meaningless and inconsequential crud? As a whole heap of manufactured pop manekins and rappers can testify, notoriety sells records - especially to the thirteen year olds who buy most of this piss poor crap - a sales tactic going right back to the fifties.

As has been said about small traders, some are most definitely shits, but some are just people trying to survive, escaping having a boss, are avoiding paying taxes, etc. or even just trying to have some creative control over their working life. They are, much like skilled tradesmen (and women), a reflection of life I guess. Like every business, they set themselves up to make money and inevitably become a target for expropriation in one form or another.

PS Does there really need to be a line on everything, even Rihanna?

cashmere grey jumper, blue shirt, black rubber-strap watch, brown leather belt, vans

Intellectual Opportunism

The implication is usually that ideas are no longer being pursued because of their intrinsic merit or worth, or out of a genuine concern with what is at stake in an argument or idea, but only because of the instrumental value of ideas, i.e. the selfish advantage that can be gained from pursuing some ideas in preference to other ones. Observably ventilating or "advertising" suitably formulated ideas is then merely a means or a "tool" for self-advancement or the promotion of a group or organization, giving rise to accusations that the real intention of particular ideas is being twisted around to serve an alien or improper purpose. The general outcome may be that the ideas involved, though plausible at a superficial level, lack any deeper coherence, the coherence being ruled out by lack of regard for relevant principles.

rather like Owen Jones. He can write, and while I tend to raise a weary, seen-it-all, cynical eyebrow at the sort of left agit-prop he tends to come out with, it’s at least coherent and cogent, which makes it better than 95% of stuff that emanates from laptop and newspaper column

Labour gets its candidate – a Price Waterhouse corporate lawyer with a plummy accent and a Chelsea townhouse – elected on a turnout of 28%…..of which she got about half meaning 86% didnt vote for her…..factor in the 20% peoople not on register and she got under 10% of people in Feltham voting for her.

ANTI-POLITICS

"Anarchism is not a beautiful utopia, nor an abstract philosophical idea, it is a social movement of the labouring masses."
–--Dyelo Truda Group

When we start to fight against the conditions of our lives, a completely different kind of activity appears. We do not look for a politician to come change things for us. We do it ourselves, with other working class people.

Whenever this kind of working class resistance breaks out, politicians try to extinguish it in a flood of petitions, lobbying and election campaigns. But when we are fighting for ourselves, our activity looks completely different from theirs. We take property away from landlords and use it for ourselves. We use militant tactics against our bosses and end up fighting with the police. We form groups where everyone takes part in the activity, and there is no division between leaders and followers. We do not fight for our leaders, for our bosses or for our country. We fight for ourselves. This is not the ultimate form of democracy. We are imposing our needs on society without debate—needs that are directly contrary to the interests and wishes of rich people everywhere. There is no way for us to speak on equal terms with this society.

This tendency of working class struggles to go outside and against the government and politics, and to create new forms of organization that do not put our faith in anything other than our own ability, has at times been called anarchism.

The EU is not something you are ‘sceptical’ of.

You might as well be sceptical of the Income Tax, or Death, or the Atlantic Ocean, or sleet. It exists, no question of that. The difficulty is, what do you do about it? And the choice is simple. You stay in it, as it is and will always be. Or you leave.

I've come to dislike LinkedIn. It's like a perpetual class reunion.

Bunch of people you used to know, waving around their electronic cocks and bragging about their new promotion or how much they earn. The whole premise to the site is that you are your CV - that you're defined by your job title.

You're not a person, with ideas, interests, relationships and feelings. You're a Managing Director, or Burger Boy. That's your entire purpose in life. It's just another continuation of the modern trend to shoehorn people's entire existence into a job that they do. YOU ARE YOUR JOB. YOU ARE YOUR JOB.

It's like some kind of mass patronisation tool.

Oh, and that's before I even get started on the recruiters. The slimy, lying weasels who act like your mate so they can sell you off like a chunk of meat. Meat that can type.

The labour party used to employ people like Prescott to do the dirty work of the bankers. He may have been a venal servant of wealth and privilege, but you could buy him for a pittance, and sell him to the proles as ‘one of them.’
Now even that subterfuge has been abandoned, and the billionaires who bankroll the party would rather represent themselves.

Stripped of the specifically Christian element, these views were also echoed in the recent remarks by the Chief Rabbi, Lord Sacks, when he inveighed against the consumerist ‘I-society’ as exemplified by the contemporary obsession with iPads and iPhones.

A 79-year-old woman has died from head injuries after trying to fight off teenage muggers who robbed her of the bag containing her husband’s ashes.

Of course these youths didn’t know what the bag contained. But what a terrible commentary on our society, where not even the dead are safe from muggers who have no qualms about robbing an elderly woman.

Attempts to portray the right’s rise as a return of trends in the 1930s, when Mosley’s Blackshirts marched the streets, with grand self-flattering claims from ‘anti-fascists’ that by opposing the EDL they are repeating the Battle of Cable Street, fails to address its very modern causes. The mainstream left must realise its own role in any rise of right wing populism in Britain. By abandoning much of their traditional constituency or treating them with disdain, and embracing culturally divisive politics, they have created a space and for the far right to fill.

What about, for instance, South Africa or Venezuela; want, squalor and ignorance do prevail in these places to the extent that people may be forced to turn to crime simply to survive. Asks John Blance.
One of the miracles of the human condition is the fact that in many places around the world, people are able to live in conditions of real poverty and deprivation without turning to crime or living in squalor. Such people live on less money than we can imagine here in the west and yet are honest, clean and proud. They have not lost their self-respect. Once you lose that, no amount of money will satisfy you. Here in our lazy decadent society, we not only worship money but our modern heros are often those who managed to acquire it effortlessly, without working.
Yes, there is great poverty in this country, but it has nothing to do with money

“Well, it is about time that every rebel wakes up to the fact that "the people" and the working class have nothing in common.”
--Joe Hill


We have our lives run by them. The newspapers and television put forward their view of the world. Schools teach about the great (or unfortunate) history of their society and produce a spectrum of graduates and dropouts fit for different kinds of work. The government provides services to keep their society running smoothly. And when all else fails, they have the police, the prisons and the army.

This is not our community.

Whenever this kind of working class resistance breaks out, politicians try to extinguish it in a flood of petitions, lobbying and election campaigns. But when we are fighting for ourselves, our activity looks completely different from theirs. We take property away from landlords and use it for ourselves. We use militant tactics against our bosses and end up fighting with the police. We form groups where everyone takes part in the activity, and there is no division between leaders and followers. We do not fight for our leaders, for our bosses or for our country. We fight for ourselves. This is not the ultimate form of democracy. We are imposing our needs on society without debate—needs that are directly contrary to the interests and wishes of rich people everywhere. There is no way for us to speak on equal terms with this society.

We are brought together with other workers and assigned different tasks. We specialize in different aspects of the work and repeat these tasks over and over again. Our time at work is not really part of our lives. It is dead time controlled by our bosses and managers. During our time at work we make things that our bosses can sell. These things are objects like cotton shirts, computers and skyscrapers or qualities like clean floors and healthy patients or services like having a bus take you where you want to go, having a waiter take your order or having someone call you at home to try to get you to buy things you don’t need. The work is not done because of what it produces. We do it to get paid, and the boss pays us for it to make a profit.

As for the ever-fascinating ‘what if’ of the Second World War, can we please be spared such tedious comments as ‘if we lost the war, why are we speaking English and not German?’ . Appearance and reality are not the same thing, and one doesn’t have to be physically conquered and subjugated to be defeated. You could argue that our principal rivals in World War Two were the Americans, and we are now speaking American. But our laws are made in Brussels and Luxembourg, by an organisation wholly dominated by Germany.

Similar sentiments voiced by Irving earned censure during his well-publicized lawsuit against Deborah Lipstadt. [See note] To Judge Charles Gray's castigation of him as a "racist," for example, Irving retorted: "My own feelings about race are precisely the same as 95 percent of the people of my generation ... If the British soldiers on the beaches of Normandy in 1944 could look forward to the end of the century and see what England has become, they would not have bothered to advance another 40 yards up the beach."

"We rightly complain that young people cannot get work. So why import foreigners to do that work, while paying our own children to take to crime and sit at home smoking dope?".

I think that's a little unfair, many immigrants do no work and take to crime and sit at home smoking dope but still we welcome them with open arms, I suppose they are trying to be good citizens. Then there are all the illegal immigrants who can't be deported because they have formed an attachment to a pet hamster or goldfish.

Neve mind we are promised, not that we believe it, that immigration levels will be cut but the figures quoted, even if they were true, are still ludicrously high.

*****I attended a meeting organised by ORA at York university round this time to set up such a national organisation. It may have been that i was taking too many drugs att this time but i have the vague memory that The Who were playing York university that night and that the anarchists pushed one of their Rolls Royces into a lake and we were later confronted by an enraged Pete Townsend. I know there is a later WHO album cover with similar roller in lake cover so I may have confused reality in a drug haze. Anyone remember?

"Frankie Cokeupthenozza"

I'm not being patronising and shit. I honestly don't know how to talk to people about politics if they don't understand class

Nothing will change in this country with regard to social mobility and the dominance of an inbred ruling class till the public schools are brought down. Consider the absolute absurdity of millions of working class people in London submitting to the rule of an old etonian prime minister and an old etonian mayor.

reinstitute grammar schools

What passes for architecture today is usually just a load of boxes piled on top of each other. Great art is an unmade bed. Could it be that the kings and the aristocracy had impeccable taste and, as they were paying for it, expected value for money? Now we have committees and we get 'The Angel of the North'.

Apparently. the key to high government office in Britain, is a first class Oxford degree in Modern Greats, preferably from Magdalen. Magdalen is unjustly proud, that five of its members are part of the present government.. Of these Huhne, Hunt and Hague were brilliant scholars of PPE, as is the PM Cameron (Brasenose). Therefore it is a legitimate concern to examine the subject matter, that these outstanding scholars were taught, to produce the less than superb state of the country they govern. Politics and economics are tangible subjects and one can more or less guess the tenor of these courses. But what is the content of the course in philosophy? Well, Doctor Ralph Walker, a most amiable Magdalen fellow, and eminent faculty member for nearly half a century, recalls his experience in the present number of “Oxford Philosophy” (Summer Editon 2011, page 7):


“...Oxford philosophers shared a conception of what the important philosphical problems were and how to resolve hem. ….In 1970 Davidson came to Oxford: suddenly we stopped talking about Wittgenstein and turned to Tarskian truth- theories. In 1972 we all agreed with Quine`s `dismissal of Aristotelian essentialism; then everyone read Kripke and by the autumn, the only question was about necessity of origin.” . Later Prof Walker made a side trip to OU Administration. “When I went there, Dummett`s anti realism was a central concern. When I returned the interest had died.” ditto.

Surely it is not surprising, that students fed on such a diet of trivia can not be expected to solve the real and essential problems of present day society and the policy of wasting scarce financial resources on the teaching of these esoteric doctrines, benefits no one but the erudite teaching staff.

I wish more power to your elbow to stop this rubbish

Gambino like a call girl, FUCK YOU PAY ME - Brand new whip for these niggas CALL IT slavery.

We fought and "won" a war for the "rebels" in Libya so a nutcase sharia law spouting loony could take control. Great job to all involved and a special thanks to Obama! Where would we be without you!?

D Bunker simply ‘knows’ that evolution took place. This level of certainty can only come from his atheist faith, as he has not (a) investigated the scientific evidence for and against Darwinism/evolution himself (b) observed a debate between experts on Darwinism/evolution such as was initiated a few years ago over AGW, in which Channel 4 made ‘The Great Global Warming Swindle’ and the BBC replied with their views in ‘Climate Wars’. But of course we all know that all further documentaries critical of AGW were blocked from the TV media, with the BBC shouting and screaming and giving maximum publicity to those who complained to Ofcom about GGWS. So the debate was successfully terminated and the Climate Change Act was passed that will cost us £400 billion (over a period, by the government’s own figures).

A similar wall of protection that currently exists for the AGW beliefs in the TV media also exists for the Darwinism/evolution beliefs, although the latter wall has never been breached, unlike the breach of the AGW wall by Channel 4, once and once only.

I do not see how an open-minded person can conclude that a theory such as AGW or Darwinism must be a ‘fact’ without having gone through either (a) or (b) above. But I suppose we all think differently and some are content to form an opinion after hearing one side only without experiencing any feeling of unease.

On your other point, yes, I am agnostic and I have already ranked the alternatives to Darwinism in terms of credibility in a list going from least plausible to most plausible, in my opinion. Yet you still ask me “at least give me your preference” so you can ‘debunk’ it. Okay, one that I ‘like’ is John Wheeler's explanation of the meaning of the universe. More to do with a 'mathematical' reason for designing us than from ‘love’. I am not expert enough to fully evaluate it, but I take you up on your offer to ‘debunk’ it.

It is not necessary to refer to alternative explanations in order to evaluate Darwinism from a scientific point of view. It should stand or fail on its own merits. It makes predictions. Let these be tested, as in (b) above. This is how proper science works, and this is the only way to make true progress in science. Blocking scrutiny of a theory is a violation of the principles of science, and only serves to hinder progress in science. Progress in science has always been kept back by closed minds that do not tolerate scientific scrutiny of favoured theories.

as Private Eye turn 50, and after last week's Frost/Nixon Night on BBC Two, consider that the satire boomers of the early 1960s were so anti-Establishment that they were able to establish themselves in the West End and on the BBC while still in their early twenties, and in some cases while still at university. Look at them now, and do not marvel that they have somehow sold out. They never bought in. Rather, they were born into.

As for Private Eye, I cannot argue against that . Its obvious to any with political nous .Even Hislop is now the BBC cuddley uncle Ian now. Also very similar Is the socialist workers party, trying to con the youth of today they too are radical .with there ready made placards for all occasions.
A state owned nationalised bunch of losers protesting at the drop of a hat. Didn't see them protesting the release of Magrahi. As it was all part of a carve up that the Diplomatic service of this country has as an art form. Mind you with Libya going down the tubes .I bet he wished he'd stayed in that Scottish Guest House, Three squares and the best medical hogwash money could bribe.