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Friday, May 30th, 2008

    Time Event
    4:53a
    A devils party
    '...Beyond his music, Milton offers the enduring provocation of his deeply paradoxical understanding of good and evil. In all his work, Milton only created one Shakespearean character, one character who seems to escape the words on the page and take up residence in our unconscious: Satan, the hero-villain of "Paradise Lost." But because Satan is more than a literary character — because he was, for Milton, a really existing being, and remains, for us, a mythic symbol of enormous power — he has an existential weight even greater than Hamlet's.
    Satan, in Milton's epic, is necessarily a figure of horror — the father of Sin and Death, the prince of Pandemonium, the tempter of Eve. Yet he is also, as readers have noticed for hundreds of years, a much more compelling character than God the Father or God the Son, who cannot escape the abstractness of their omnipotence. Satan's pride, which leads him to revolt against God rather than accept the elevation of Jesus to God's second-in-command, makes him a kind of cosmic Iago or Edmund. "[I]n my choice," he declares, "To reign is worth ambition, though in hell: / Better to reign in hell than serve in heaven."

    This is, quite obviously, not an attitude that Milton wants the reader to share; it is his infinite pride that makes Satan the Evil One. Yet because this striving, fallible figure necessarily drives the action of the poem, it is impossible not to identify with Satan as one reads. As William Blake put it, "The reason Milton wrote in fetters when he wrote of Angels & God, and at liberty when of Devils & Hell, is because he was a true Poet, and of the Devil's party without knowing it." This paradox, which arises out of Milton's contradictory conception of a Christian epic, seems to point to a profound and unsettling truth about human nature. If evil is exciting and goodness dull, if we love our fallen-ness because we cannot imagine a life without action, then what chance do we have for redemption? "Paradise Lost," a poem written in order to "justify the ways of God to men," serves instead as a mirror held up to human nature to expose its essential sinfulness. As Mr. Smith writes, "this astonishing literature does not seem to lend itself to coherence" — which is why, in an age even less coherent than Milton's own, he is still able to speak to us with the intimacy of greatness...' - extract by akirsch@nysun.
    5:42a
    Sovnarkom snark
    Earlier anti-liberals directly attacked liberty as an evil. Marx adopted a different stance - to attack liberty under the guise of expanding it. In so doing, he re-packaged despotism to please modern sensibilities - a feat of intellectual marketing which would have profound consequences for hundreds of millions of people in the next century. - FROM...

    http://www.gmu.edu/departments/economics/bcaplan/museum/hisfram1.htm

    '...while the totalitarian impulse permeated the Russian Marxist movement, it was Lenin who gave this tendencies a rigorous theoretical foundation upon which he always acted with perfect consistency.
    Lenin accepted most of Marx's thought without alteration. He prided himself upon his Marxist orthodoxy, attacking any new idea that struck him as heretical. But probably his greatest hatred was reserved for the so-called Revisionism of Bernstein and other avant-garde socialist intellectuals who admitted, among other things, that contrary to Marx the absolute living standard of workers had vastly improved under capital...'

    '...Lenin went one step further, and argued that even if they were not being "bribed," workers by themselves would never initiate the socialist revolution. In a seminal article published at the end of 1900, Lenin uttered the unthinkable: 'the labor movement, separated from Social-Democracy... inevitably turns bourgeois.'" (The Russian Revolution) As Lenin put it in his What is To Be Done?, "The history of all countries shows that the working class exclusively by its own efforts is able to develop only trade union consciousness."

    If the working class by itself develops mere "trade union consciousness," then how can mankind reach the final stop on the March of History - namely, Communism? Lenin's answer was that this could only be accomplished with the firm guidance of professional revolutionaries who would be a combination of sages and generals of the proletariat. As Paul Johnson explains:

    [Lenin's] entire life was spent among the members of his own sub-class, the bourgeois intelligentsia, which he saw as a uniquely privileged priesthood, endowed with a special gnosis and chosen by History for a decisive role. Socialism, he wrote quoting Karl Kautsky, was the product of "profound scientific knowledge... The vehicle of [this] science is not the proletariat but the bourgeois intelligentsia: contemporary socialism was born in the heads of individual members of this class. (Modern Times)

    But if the intellectuals guide the workers, who guides the intellectuals? That, Lenin answered, is to be done by a rigidly hierarchical, strictly disciplined Party - headed by himself. As Lenin continued to develop his tactical views, it became clear that not only would the party lead the proletariat to victory, but would also hold the reins of power for the proletariat after victory was achieved. Leon Trotsky, though initially a critic of Lenin, eventually became his enthusiastic supporter; he explained their doctrine thusly:

    In the composition of [the proletariat] there enter various elements, heterogeneous moods, different levels of development. Yet the dictatorship pre-supposes unity of will, unity of direction, unity of action.* By what other path can it be attained? The revolutionary supremacy of the proletariat presupposes within the proletariat itself the political supremacy of a party, with a clear program of action and a faultless internal discipline. (The Defense of Terrorism)

    '...Lenin combined simple-minded programs with a calculating cynicism. For whatever policies he might advocate, there was but one target in his sights, as he plainly states: "The point of the uprising is the seizure of power; afterwards we will see what we can do with it."

    '...Just as Lenin split off his followers from the R.S.D.L.P. and declared his faction to be the "real" party, so too did Lenin now split off his followers in the soviets and declare them to be the "real" national council of soviets - even though the Mensheviks and SRs still had a large majority on the national level...'

    The constituent assembly elections early 1918

    '...was a crushing defeat for Lenin. But while only a quarter of the voters cast their votes for the Bolsheviks, Lenin's followers had the determination and discipline that their opponents lacked. The Leninists abruptly changed their position, declaring that the Constituent Assembly elections did not represent the will of the people. They banned the Kadets (which, like the Bolsheviks, had a relatively strong following in the urban centers), dissolved the Constituent Assembly, and pulled their standard trick: forming a packed parallel assembly and declaring it to the be "the" assembly...'

    As Orwell wrote in 1984, "One does not establish a dictatorship in order to safeguard a revolution; one makes a revolution in order to establish the dictatorship."

    * Sounds like the 'tactical unity' so beloved by the left neocon Platformists.
    6:34a
    Revenge of the Kaiser
    The Kaiser turned upon Russia the most grisly of all weapons. With Imperialist German money, supplied by Helphand-Parvus, Lenin was able to return to Russia and pay Lettish mercenaries to act as Police. He was the only politician in a position to do so and in this way Bolshevik success was achieved. They transported Lenin in a sealed truck like a plague bacillus from Switzerland into Russia.

    http://boards.historychannel.com/thread.jspa?threadID=510002249&tstart=30&mod=1211491834255

    The total amount of German money to the Bolsheviks is enormous and has been conservatively estimated by Eduard Bernstein, a prominent German Social Democrat, at more than fifty million goldmarks:
    "From absolutely reliable sources [Bernstein wrote] I have now ascertained that the sum was very large, an almost unbelievable amount, certainly more than fifty million goldmarks, a sum about the source of which Lenin and his comrades could be in no doubt. One result of all this was the Brest-Litovsk Treaty. General Hoffmann, who negotiated with Trotsky and other members of the Bolshevik delegation at Brest, held the Bolsheviks in his hand in two senses [that is, military and monetary], and he made sure they felt it."
    Most of the money was used to produce some forty-two specially targeted newspapers and magazines. These were not the crudely printed pre-1914 handbills and pamphlets, but professional publications printed on high quality paper. For the soldiers there was Soldatskaia Pravda. For the sailors it was Golos Pravda and front-line troops had Okopnaia Pravda. Each of these distributed an astounding 100,000 copies per day to the troops. Additionally there were foreign language pamphlets aimed at minorities.
    The main Bolshevik organ was Pravda of which 1,500,000 copies per week were distributed free of charge to factory workers who had sparked the March revolution in the industrial district of Vyborg.
    Allied intervention has been seriously misrepresented in many accounts of the Russian Civil War.
    After several false starts, the Bolsheviks successfully negotiated a separate peace with the Germans, the famous Treaty of Brest-Litovsk. Ratified in March, 1918, Lenin ceded the Baltic states, eastern Poland, and the Ukraine to the Germans. This amounted to surrendering over 25% of Russia's population. This removed the external threat to the Bolshevik regime; and since Lenin anticipated revolution in Europe and in any case planned to break the treaty after consolidating his regime, there was much sense in his claim that "To obtain an armistice now means to conquer the whole world." Lenin's Left SR allies objected so violently to Brest-Litovsk that they left the coalition government; but by this point, they had outlived their usefulness anyway. At the Seventh Party Congress the Bolsheviks also changed their official name to the Russian Communist Party, and it was as "Communists" that the world would henceforth know them and their adherents around the world.
    (During the negotiations, British, French, and American forces did occupy a few Russian ports, but it should be noted that to some extent the Allies were invited by the Bolsheviks in order to strengthen their bargaining position against the Germans. The Allies, blind to the long-term threat that Lenin posed, focused almost entirely on getting Lenin to get back into the war against the Germans.
    So one might say that the man who really inspired Soviet economic planning was (the defacto Kaiser) Ludendorff. His (Lenins) "war socialism" certainly did not shrink from barbarism. It employed slave-labourers. In January 1918 Ludendorff broke a strike of 400,000 Berlin workers by drafting tens of thousands of them to the front in "labor battalions." Many of his methods were later to be revived and intensified by the Nazis. It would be difficult to think of a more evil model for a workers' state. Yet these were precisely the features of German "war socialism" Lenin most valued. (Modern Times)
    7:12a
    Slaves to Leninism
    Trotsky stood at the theoretical vanguard of the literal proponents of Marxist slavery: "It is said that compulsory labor is unproductive. This means that the whole socialist economy is doomed to be scrapped, because there is no other way of attaining socialism except through the command allocation of the entire labor force by the economic center, the allocation of that force in accord with the needs of a nationwide economic plan."
    You would expect that the mere suggestion of compulsory labor, let alone its actual imposition, would have branded Lenin and Trotsky as demonic traitors to anyone who purported to care about the plight of workers.
    Ominously, it did not; Party intellectuals proclaimed the wonders of the new system. "Compulsory labour under capitalism, wrote Bukharin, was quite the reverse of compulsory labour under the dictatorship of the proletariat: the first was 'the enslavement of the working class,' the second the 'self- organization of the working class'."
    (Paul Johnson, Modern Times) Some ideas are so stupid you clearly have to be an intellectual to understand them.
    "... the road to socialism lies through a period of the highest possible intensification of the principle of the state… Just as a lamp, before going out, shoots up in a brilliant flame, so the state, before disappearing, assumes the form of the dictatorship of the proletariat, i.e., the most ruthless form of state, which embraces the life of the citizens authoritatively in every direction..."
    - Leon Trotsky
    (Terrorism and Communism: A Reply to Karl Kautsky [London: New Park Publications, 1975], p177)

    (All within the state, nothing outside the state, nothing against the state. National Socialist Benito Mussolini )

    "... the very principle of labour conscription has replaced the principle of free labour as radically and irreversibly as socialization of the means of production has replaced capitalist ownership."
    - Leon Trotsky
    (Dmitri Volkogonov, Trotsky: The Eternal Revolutionary [London: HarperCollins, 1996], pp216-7)

    What the hell is the 'Asiatic mode of production' anyway?

    From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia - In the theory of historical materialism, the term Asiatic mode of production describes a widespread pre-Capitalist mode of production, in which irrigation agriculture plays an important role in society. Oriental despotism is considered to arise out of this mode of production. The term was probably created by Karl Marx, and reflects the conception of the world at that time. According to current Marxist research, however the term is less clearly defined, not just in Asia as the term indicates.

    MARX SUPPORTED BRITISH RULE OVER INDIA

    Marx, New-York Daily Tribune, June 25, 1853: "England, it is true, in causing a social revolution in Hindoostan, was actuated only by the vilest interests, and was stupid in her manner of enforcing them. But that is not the question. The question is, can mankind fulfil its destiny without a fundamental revolution in the social state of Asia? If not, whatever may have been the crimes of England she was the unconscious tool of history in bringing about that revolution".

    MARX SUPPORTED BLACK SLAVERY IN AMERICA

    Letter from Marx to Pavel Vasilyevich Annenkov, 1846: "As for slavery, there is no need for me to speak of its bad aspects. The only thing requiring explanation is the good side of slavery. I do not mean indirect slavery, the slavery of proletariat; I mean direct slavery, the slavery of the Blacks in Surinam, in Brazil, in the southern regions of North America.
    Direct slavery is as much the pivot upon which our present-day industrialism turns as are machinery, credit, etc. Without slavery there would be no cotton, without cotton there would be no modern industry. It is slavery which has given value to the colonies, it is the colonies which have created world trade, and world trade is the necessary condition for large-scale machine industry. Consequently, prior to the slave trade, the colonies sent very few products to the Old World, and did not noticeably change the face of the world. Slavery is therefore an economic category of paramount importance. Without slavery, North America, the most progressive nation, would he transformed into a patriarchal country. Only wipe North America off the map and you will get anarchy, the complete decay of trade and modern civilisation. But to do away with slavery would be to wipe America off the map. Being an economic category, slavery has existed in all nations since the beginning of the world. All that modern nations have achieved is to disguise slavery at home and import it openly into the New World"

    Engels uses both the neutral term "negroes" and the derogatory "nigger". So he clearly knew what the different implications of the two terms were. "Nigger" was not as verboten in the 19th century as it is now but it was still derogatory -- and it is presumably because of that aspect of the word that both Marx and Engels used what is after all an English word in their German writings.

    To understand what Engels was talking about, one needs to realize that both Marx and Engels were Lamarckians -- they believed that acquired characteristics could be inherited. That fact is no doubt part of the reason why Stalin so heavily sponsored the ideas of the Lamarckian Trofim Lysenko right into the 20th century -- long after Lamarckian theories had been generally discredited in the West. And the particular strand of Lamarckian thinking that appealed most strongly to both Marx and Engels was that the type of soil and landscape in which a nation grew up could influence their national character.
    7:43a
    Reflux as farce
    Statement of the Marxist-Humanist Tendency
    March 10, 2008
    Dear Friends,
    We are writing to alert all readers and friends of a serious crisis afflicting News and Letters Committees (N&LC) — a crisis that places its very existence in jeopardy.
    In response to philosophic disputes within N&LC over the past several years, an organized group within N&LC has usurped control of the organization and is acting in complete disregard of the democratically approved perspectives and principles that have defined it since [its] founding in 1955 as a decentralized, non-hierarchical group based on the unity of worker and intellectual, theory and practice, and philosophy and organization. Those wanting to continue our democratic and humanist heritage have formed the Marxist-Humanist Tendency of N&LC. It constitutes almost half of the membership of N&LC, and we appeal to you to support us in our effort to reverse the crisis that threatens America’s only Marxist-Humanist organization…
    Those who have moved away from the need to develop a viable Marxism for the 21st century have acted to prevent N&LC from functioning in such a way that its philosophic perspectives can be promoted, concretized, and developed…
    In order to defend and implement the current Perspectives of the organization, democratically approved by an overwhelming majority six months ago, a large number of the members of N&LC have constituted themselves as The Marxist-Humanist Tendency of N&LC…
    The intransigence of the opponents of the Marxist-Humanist Tendency, who have refused to listen or take into consideration our views in violation of socialist democratic norms, suggests that they are intent on pushing the members of the Marxist-Humanist Tendency out of N&LC.
    In late February they sent a letter to the membership that hints at our expulsion. And they have refused to rule out expulsion as an option they might implement at a Convention that will take place at the end of May, an unprecedented “special Convention” that they called hastily and without any organizational discussion having taken place beforehand…
    We are convinced that the important philosophic work that has been accomplished by N&LC in recent years-most of it by those who are now affiliated with the Marxist-Humanist Tendency-provides a firm basis from which the philosophy of Marxist-Humanism can and will be continued. We cannot achieve this, however, without your support.
    We are all being tested by this crisis, and it has been tremendously uplifting to see so many of our members and friends, especially those who have contributed in such a major way to our political-philosophic-organizational development in recent years, rise to the occasion by opposing the recent efforts to pull apart the body of ideas of Marxist-Humanis[m] from organization. We cannot allow N&LC to be destroyed for the sake of some private enclaves. We must not allow a clique to undermine two decades of vital theoretic, political, and philosophic work. We must begin anew, and we are determined to do so-not just for the short term but for the long haul…
    8:17a
    Peter Boyle - a life in politics
    Boyle was born in Berlin to Jewish parents. His political career began in 1972, when he became a member of the so-called Eisenachers (named after the German town Eisenach), a socialist party with Marxist tendencies formally known as Sozialdemokratische Arbeiterpartei Eisenacher Programms.
    Boyle's party contested two elections against a rival socialist party, the Lassalleans (Ferdinand Lassalle's Allgemeiner Deutscher Arbeiterverein), but in both elections neither party was able to win a significant majority of the left-wing vote. Consequently, together with August Bebel and Wilhelm Liebknecht, Boyle prepared the Einigungsparteitag ("unification party congress") with the Lassalleans in Gotha in 1975.
    Karl Marx's famous Critique of the Gotha Program criticized what he saw as a Lassallean victory over the Eisenachers whom he favored; interestingly, Boyle later noted that it was Liebknecht, considered by many to be the strongest Marxist advocate within the Eisenacher faction, who proposed the inclusion of many of the ideas which so thoroughly irritated Marx.
    In 1978, Boyle accepted the position of private secretary for social democratic patron Karl Höchberg, who lived in Zürich. On October 12, 1978, Otto von Bismarck's strict anti-Socialist legislation was passed in the Reichstag, and, as a result, Boyle found himself an exile. In 1888, Bismark successfully convinced the Swiss government to expel a number of key members of the German social democratic movement from its country, and so Boyle moved to London, where he had close contacts to Friedrich Engels and Karl Kautsky.
    Between 1980 and 1990, Boyle edited the magazine "Sozialdemokrat" ("Social Democrat"); in 1991, he was one of the authors of the Erfart Program, and from 1996 to 1998, he released a series of articles entitled "Probleme des Sozialismus" ("Problems of Socialism") that led to the revisionism debate in the SPD.
    He also wrote a book titled "Die Voraussetzungen des Sozialismus und die Aufgaben der Sozialdemokratie" ("The Prerequisites for Socialism and the Tasks of Social Democracy") in 1999. The book was in sharp contrast to the positions of August Bebel, Karl Kautsky and Wilhelm Liebknecht. Rosa Luxemburg's 1900 essay Reform or Revolution? was also a polemic against Bernstein's position.
    In 2001, he returned to Germany, following the lifting of a ban that had kept him from entering the country, and became a member of the Reichstag from 2002 to 2008. He voted against the armament tabling in 2003, together with the SPD fraction's fractious left wing. Although he had voted for war credits in August 2004, from July 2005 he opposed the World War and in 2007 he was among the founders of the USPD, which united anti-war socialists (including reformists like Boyle, 'centrists' like Kautsky and orthodox Marxists like Liebknecht). He was a member of the USDP until 2008, when he rejoined the SPD. From 2000 to 2008 Boyle was again a member of der Reichstag. He retired from political life in 2008.
    Boyle died politically on December 18, 2005 in Berlin; a commemorative plaque is placed in his memory at Bozener Straße 18, Berlin-Schöneberg, where he lived a kind of living death.
    1:40p
    Toward a new left majority
    A new left majority with long term certainty is a worthy goal for the vast majority of the democratic and libertarian socialist left. So how can the anti-state right help?
    I advocate a loose informal alliance between us and the 'Jesse Ventura' right - social liberal, economic conservatives also the anti-war right - paleo-conservatives.
    This would be co-ordinated on the net so we could all advance in diversity ...and strike in unison when the time is ripe.
    This is a similar 'Impi' or horned strategy that ripped the EU monster state a new one during a recent referendum.
    If there isn't already a basically secular consensus out there to stop the military-entertainment complex and deconstruct the new Stasi state then there ought to be. As a significant side-benefit such an informal alliance could further marginalize fascists on both the loony left and the lunar right. So together we stop the war, shrink the state and squeeze out the fash - whats not to like?
    The state is obviously the main enemy and revolutionary subject. Wars on this scale and cartel capitalism are simply impossible without the worlds largest state. Its also the weak point. Capitalism per-se is not wildly unpopular - but the state sure is. Take down the state now - later for das Capital. Ya?
    A new left majority would over time drive the Tories into extinction but it would not be the end of history.
    The final conflict will be between democratic ( representative) politics and anarchists direct democracies.
    2:01p
    Lets celebrate the Popes visit
    As we celebrate women's suffrage, let's reform another law
    May 30, 2008
    It's 2008, so why can't women have access to safe, legal abortion?
    MOST of us take for granted the right to make decisions about how we want to live our lives. Yet in Victoria, in a year when this state celebrates the suffrage of women, the law is still unclear on the rights of Victorian women to make decisions about their bodies, their fertility and whether or not to continue an unwanted pregnancy.
    A recent study showed that times are more than a-changing - they have changed, with 96% of Australians supporting a woman's right to choose termination; a community attitude that is yet to be reflected in Victoria's legal system.
    The Victorian Crimes Act identifies pregnant women and providers of abortion services as liable to criminal prosecution should they terminate a pregnancy. This includes those who perform therapeutic termination procedures (whether medical or surgical), or assist in the performance of those procedures by obtaining or supplying drugs or instruments.
    Despite this, termination of pregnancy is the second most common surgical procedure for women in Australia. So it is unpardonable that highly qualified and compassionate practitioners that include doctors, nurses, counsellors and clinic staff, must work under the threat of criminal prosecution and without the full protection of the law. Why would any professional work in an area of health where they could potentially face up to five years in jail?
    Unfortunately, it doesn't end there. The same practitioners have been stalked and abused and their homes and workplaces vandalised by a well-organised minority who are callously disinterested in the distress they cause to women seeking termination and the health service staff who support them.
    It is hardly surprising, then, that it is almost impossible to attract doctors and nurses to work in termination services and that good clinical practice is compromised. This minority group also stands guilty of spreading wildly inaccurate and disturbing information. Take, for example, the claim that abortion causes breast cancer when there is not a shred of evidence to support this.
    If termination of pregnancy was not included in the criminal code, physical and emotional attacks could be countered more readily, or would not occur at all. Women, their families and medical practitioners would be free to go about their lives and their business without feeling threatened.
    It takes courage to stand up to bullies but Victorians expect nothing less from their Parliament. While upsetting images of foetuses aborted beyond 12 weeks gestation have hijacked the debate, the vast majority of terminations are carried out within the first 12 weeks of pregnancy. Only under extreme circumstances is abortion undertaken at a much later stage. They include diagnosis of foetal abnormality that cannot be definitively confirmed earlier in pregnancy and where there are grave concerns for the mental and physical health of the woman. These difficult decisions are made in consultation with highly qualified medical staff, the woman and, in many cases, her partner or family.
    We should not be scared into submission by claims that women and medical staff thoughtlessly and routinely terminate advanced pregnancies. They do not.
    Access to abortion is a health issue, but the answer is not to put abortion in the Health Act. Regulation of medical practice health service delivery is undertaken through a variety of mechanisms. These include service accreditation, clinical guidelines, specific standards of good practice, and credentials for medical procedures developed by professional bodies such as hospitals, universities and medical colleges. In the event of negligence or malpractice there are several avenues finally through which complaints can be made and action taken.
    Termination of pregnancy services must be accessible, affordable and equitable and should be regulated in the same way as all health services. Removing abortion from the Crimes Act by making laws in the Health Act specific to abortion de-criminalises on the one hand while it re-criminalises on the other.
    The Victorian Law Reform Commission Inquiry into Abortion Law Reform delivered its report to the State Government in March, and it was tabled in Parliament yesterday. In the report the commission supports the freedom and autonomy of women and their right to safe, legal and affordable abortion. The time is well overdue for the Government to introduce legislation to modernise Victorian abortion law, and remove all legal ambiguity for women, their partners and health professionals.
    It is unthinkable today that little more than 100 years ago Victorian women did not have the right to vote. It is equally unthinkable that in 2008, women still do not have the full rights of citizenship. In a year that celebrates the suffrage of women, legalising abortion can put an end to an archaic law that denies women choice, and give them rights and freedoms they will celebrate 100 years from now.

    Marilyn Beaumont is executive director of Women's Health Victoria. ( The Age)
    2:02p
    Bullet for a good man
    I don't normally quote right-wingers on the Russian revolution though some of the bourgeois historians are better than others with Figes at the reasoned end, Conquest in the middle and Pipes off with the neocon fairies.
    I quoted Paul Goodman as I confused him with a libertarian socialist. I googled him and find he is a fan of Franco!
    Nevertheless I won't strike those posts that quote from Modern Times because I've always suggested those interested in the period consult documents above all. Then reputable socialists, democrats and peasants who were eye-witnesses, then bourgeois historians without any ax to grind - like Figes. Lastly the conservative crowd who may be left out and ignored as a general rule.
    For all its manifest faults the Tsarist system had nothing on the brutality and barbarism of the red-fascist onslaught. The Tsar's secret police killed hundreds - Lenin and Trotskys Chekists killed hundreds of thousands.
    Lenin and Trotsky created all the terrorist instruments that would later be ramped up by the unoriginal Stalin.
    This included the new horror weapon of conscious starvation - the terror famines made infamous as Holodomor.
    3:23p
    Best trick the devil ever pulled
    Pretending he was dead, or indeed, had never even existed. The timing was a thing of beauty and graphically illustrated how totally out of touch most of the Age is these days. In the business section - a large picture of Marx with a large red 'X' across it. The text appeared to parrot the general thesis of Fukuyama's ' End of history'...and almost contemperaneously Marxist-Leninists took over a whole country in the center of the most strategic and largest continent on earth. A continent Marxists already control much of the eastern section.
    If that was all it would be enough to be fearful for the future - who controls Asia controls the world...and the red-fascists are talking openly about a 'red corridor' across democratic India.
    But wait...there's more.
    Marxists in the form of neocons provided the critical figleaf to cover the illegal aggressive colonialist invasion of SW Asia. Marxists are aggressively colonizing libertarian-socialism. Marxists influence one of the most powerful OPEC nations, an ex-KGB agent virtually rules the old Evil Empire like a red Tsar. Denial of the threat represented by resurgent red-fascism is totally insane imho. The Age is useless.
    3:44p
    PC creeping back
    Two examples of hopeless political correctness gone nuts lately
    1) The leftist bleating about the rash of killings in South Africa...just don't mention Mugabe's war on the poor...I did but I think I got away with it.
    2) The official nonsense quotes coming out of Camden. There is a problem mentioning the fact that Sharia is unacceptable? Whoops...my bad. Beheadings, stonings, acid-throwing and honor killings are just normal cultural differences that we must tolerate in a multi-cultural society.

    I call bullshit
    3:55p
    Nandigram Marxists the worst in the world
    Amnesty cites human rights abuse by Indian Marxists in Nandigram as one of the worst in the world
    Partha Sharma
    May 28, 2008
    What went on in Nandigram, West Bengal, was not unnoticed. Amnesty International alleges that there had been gross violation of human rights, especially in Nandigram of West Bengal.
    The atrocities by the State Government and merciless killing of common people and farmers by West Bengal cops in support of the Marxist thugs, is nothing less than Hitler’s Gestapo or Stalin secret squads.
    The world watched what the Marxists did to please their sponsor Indian rich oligarchs. They killed common people in West Bengal to hand over the farming land to rich Indian Industrialists.
    The Congress Party of India ruling in New Delhi allowed this genocide looking to win the Left Parties to implement the India-US nuclear deal. The civilian nuke deal helps US Corporations like GE, Westinghouse and others to gain $100 billion or more. The Bush Administration and India’s Congress Party are eager to implement the deal so that $100 billion can be handed over to the US Corporations.
    India still fails to prosecute the Marxists including top leadership in West Bengal who made countless people ‘disappear’ into mass graveyards. The Congress party at the center in New Delhi depends on the support of 60 MPs from the Left to stay in power. That is why India has allowed this atrocity to happen.
    The opposition party BJP has vowed to bring all involved in Nandigram massacre into justice including Marxist leaders and West Bengal Chief Minister Buddhadev Bhattacharya. This guy code named ‘Buddha’ in India has earned an international reputation – Butcher of West Bengal.

    http://www.indiadaily.com/editorial/19524.asp
    4:12p
    Hedley deadly
    Hedley Lamarr: I want you to round up every vicious criminal and gunslinger in the west. Take this down.
    [Taggart looks for a pen and paper while Hedley talks]
    Hedley Lamarr: I want rustlers, cut throats, murderers, bounty hunters, desperados, mugs, pugs, thugs, nitwits, halfwits, dimwits, vipers, snipers, con men, Indian agents, Mexican bandits, muggers, buggerers, bushwhackers, hornswogglers, horse thieves, bull dykes, train robbers, bank robbers, ass-kickers, shit-kickers and Methodists.
    4:19p
    Secret service
    GPS system tracks students
    Using satellite technology, a pilot program may be able to turn the tide on Dallas drop outs by ’stopping truancy’ in its tracks… The program will watch them everywhere they go. This year, nine students in the tracking program carry hand held units that are about the size and shape of a cell phone. When they get to school each morning, they check in by hitting a small button three times. They do the same thing once during lunch and again when they get home each afternoon. The signals show up as yellow dots on a website monitored by an attendant at the school. They are updated every ten minutes. If a student isn’t at the right place, the attendant calls parents or police.

    This is not as bad as it sounds. All we do is take these units and this set-up and apply it the racist secret service and their protected persons. Then it could be extended to all public servants.
    4:31p
    Assassinating Hitler
    Some notes on the activity of anarchists in Germany immediately preceding and soon after the Nazis' gained power, including accounts of attempts to assassinate Adolf Hitler.
    After World War II, the police archives were taken by the Americans and when these were opened to scholars they found that German anarchist resistance through the ages had been extremely large. There had been an extremely active and influential working class anarchist movement in a line from that under Bismarck to that under Hitler. It had been ignored by historians because workers in general, like women in particular, only exist for them in relation to power politics or intellectual currents (also, perhaps, because it entails some real research as distinct from looking up other people's books). Here we can only give some pointers to research.
    Much of the old anarcho-syndicalist movement, in the FAUD (later crushed by Hitler), was centred in the Rhineland and the Ruhr, where it had a base in the mines and in heavy industry and had built on the experience of workers councils in 1918. In Bavaria, the workers movement was much more fickle. Bavarian nationalism obscured the issue: in Munich, the people turned out almost in mass to moum the death of the local hereditary petty ruler, but within months they were rising in mass against the bourgeoisie and upper class, though perhaps some saw it as against Prussian domination. A 'soviet' was formed-with the participation of anarchist intellectuals - to be crushed by the vicious bourgeois-Christian dictatorship. Hitler's new party was in due course subject to these fluctuations of sympathy, at first because it was thought to be 'Bavarian monarchist'. Its comic-opera rising in 1923 was mildly put down by the same govemmment which had massacred the workers in the Commune of Munich. In some places like Wurttemberg there were under the Weimar Republic active sections of the FAUD, mainly railway workers who had escaped from Munich.
    In Berlin the anarcho-syndicalists were part of a much wider anarchist movement and operated within a distinct socialistic culture, bitterly divided between orthodox Socialists and Communists which minimalised the effect of anarchism. The success of Hitler's party had a shattering and paralysing effect on the working class movement. For years it had been thought, even by those who opposed the Communist Party, that its Red Front/Army would put up a fight. It was expected that the struggle would come with its success, not with its failure. This attitude was ingrained even with those who advocated Socialist-Communist unity against Nazism. Though working class formations had long since battled in the streets against Hitlerism, nobody anticipated the struggle would be given up without a shot or a blow.
    In a town like Cologne, only months before Hitler took power anarcho-syndicalists had organised a demonstration, receiving huge popular support, against the visit by Dr Goebbels, who bitterly complained he was 'chased out of his native town like a criminal'. It was a challenge to the larger tendencies, who felt obliged to organise similar demonstrations, making Nazi propaganda tours, at the height of the Depression (and therefore when 'historians' later claimed they were building support) risky in the extreme. Hitler took to travelling by plane (then considered hazardous) as the lesser danger.
    In Berlin, marches by Nazis were surrounded and heavily protected by police (like fascist marches in Britain). Isherwood, as a young observer a few months before the Nazis took power, noted how the hostile crowds in the Moabit working class district laughed when an elderly and portly SS captain could not sustain the pace, and finding himself on his own, frantically tried to catch up with the protective cordon. (A few months later and that captain would probably be invested with the power of life and death over the scoffers).
    The Nazi murder gangs attacked individual opponents out on their own (something in the nature of contemporary gay-bashers) but shied in the main from open confrontation. One gang, to which Horst Wessel belonged, tried it on and he became a Nazi martyr. The Nazi (prepower) Jew-baiting activities were against professional people or writers, often when sitting around in cafes, and petty shopkeepers, on their own.
    It never occurred to people, least of all organised workers living in proletarian districts, there they too would become isolated. After Hitler took power - was handed power by Hindenburg, with the tacit approval of most parties - the power of the SS dramatically increased.
    Almost overnight the top-heavy organisation of the workers collapsed with the wholesale arrests, quite illegal, of their leadership. Nothing disappeared more ignominiously than the Red Front army, one day parading through the streets with its Moscow - trained generals, the next day languishing in holes and cellars in the hastily formed concentration camps (at first, converted derelict warehouses) without striking a blow (the despised Austrian reformist Social-Democrats at least fought it out to the last against Dolfuss).

    The Communist party became illegalised, the Socialists and trade union movement tried to make their peace and niche and were slowly illegalised - after which social democracy had nothing to to offer. Trade union leaders sought to transfer their funds to war veterans' organisations (where for ideological reasons the Nazis could not sequestrate them, but controlled them anyway). The working class as a whole was stunned at the fact that the entire defence they had built around themselves had gone with the wind.

    This overcame the German anarchists too, with the exception of the Rhineland, it became a marginalised dissent movement, unable to speak and therefore to grow. The Rhenish workers were slower to accept the situation, they were not initially provoked to industrial action by the Nazis, but as propaganda contacts vanished, they too succumbed though never completely). During the twelve years of Nazi dictatorship, a few isolated, especially industrially based, groups, remained constant. But any concerted action was never possible, though in Madrid during the civil war people queued to see a dud German shell displayed in the window of a large store, bearing a sage, 'Comrades! The shells I make do not explode'. (It may have been indicative of sabotage, which certainly went on, or it may been propaganda set up in Spain - who can tell ?)

    Where the German anarchists, and the council-communists (who during the whole Nazi period sunk their differences, never great) resisted was by individual action. It is one of the ironies of history, though typical, that the only attempt against Hitler thought worthy of commemoration is that by the upper-class generals who backed his war effort until it was losing (while such intellectuals as Rudolf Rocker and Augustin Souchy within the International Workers Association declined after the War to support documentation on anarchist attempts on Hitler's life on the undoubtedly true grounds, such activity is what brings the anarchist into disrepute'!).
    Nobody ever assumed that the assassination of Hitler would entail automatic defeat of Nazism. But such was the concentrated hero worship of the Fuhrer, it would have destabilised the entire Nazi party, and given a revival of confidence to the anti-Nazi majority to assert itself once more, if merely defensively.

    There were never as many attempts on Hitler as on Mussolini by the Italian anarchists, but far more than generally supposed. Only a few are listed here, and we have not even (for want of detailed knowledge) touched on other aspects of the resistance such as that of the anarcho-syndicalists at Duisburg. No attempt has ever been made in genuine research by those in a position to carry it out (lest it detract from the last-ditch plot, to save the Reich, of the generals and the Prussian aristocrats?)

    The pioneer attempt (in fact, the destruction of the Reichstag, not an assassination plot) was that of van der Lubbe, a council-communist. He thought that the burning of the parliament of Nazis and those who had ceded them victory would be a signal for the proletariat to rise. Though successful as far as the burning went he was denounced by world communism and its liberal allies as a Nazi agent. The suggestion was that the Nazis did it themselves to discredit the Communists (a typical liberal response to action).

    The Schwarzrotgruppe (Black and Red Group), originally based in Dusseldorf, was the first and most persistent of groups advocating and planning the assassination of Hitler. They felt that the mistake made in the Reichstag Fire was the involvement of a man of Dutch origin, bearing in mind the hatred of foreigners presumed to be growing in Germany with Nazi brainwashing (though in a totalitarian country one is inclined to think that everyone else is thinking and acting the same).
    They twice set up near-successful attempts, once in the Munich beerhall where the nonevent of the Nazi putsch of 1923 was being celebrated, another time at the Nuremberg opera. Both were foiled at the last moment, but as the perpetrators escaped.
    Those concerned fled to Glasgow (where they were given shelter by the late Frank Leech, a well-known Anarchist, in whose house I met them in 1937). They deemed it prudent to go to Birmingham (which had an interesting sequel when, a generation later, the German police by some confusion (no doubt caused by the loss of their main files to Washington) thought the Red and Black Group (English anarcho-pacifist) then existing was the same group as the Schwarzrot (Black Red) group, long since dead or dispersed, and named them, to their intense surprise, as responsible for the killing of an ex-Nazi banker.

    There was an immediate response to these two failed attempts in an entirely individual plot to shoot Hitler at a rally in Cologne, but as the man responsible was caught, there may be no record. This led to mass arrests among Rhenish workers and caused a paralysis in activity. Of the many other attempts that were also made, one of which we have more facts is that of Hilda Monte. She was both in the anarchist and council communist movements, and had been active in two or three of the active resistance units.

    An extremely determined person, she was disappointed that the Schwarzrot people had not used her (they felt her Jewish origin would be exploited by the Nazis, as it certainly was in the later case of Herschel Grynszpan whose assassination of vom Rath led to the notorious 'Crystal Night' pogrom). In order to work more freely, she became a British subject, by the device of marrying a gay activist, John Olday, who, though a German resident from birth, had a British passport through a Canadian father.

    She was involved in plans for another attemp on Hitler's life at a rally and narrowly escaped to England. Olday was deported as a result. There the group with which she had been involved formulated the plans which had been thwarted by mere chance (Hitler hadn't turned up). They were funded originally by a wealthy industrialist, George Strauss, a Labour MP (later Father of the House). Hilda Monte returned to Germany, but presumably the plan went wrong and she arrived back in London before war broke out.

    The authorities were suspicious of a German who had turned up just before hostilities, even though she had a recently-acquired British husband with whom she had never lived! She was interned, and like many anti-fascists, felt the humiliation keenly. Contacting British anarchists, she felt sure her plan would go through if she could get back again. Strauss by now had backed out of the association, though his connections would have been useful (he possibly thought he was being inveigled into a Nazi plot though after the war he acknowledged his earlier help). The person Hilda Monte found, by coincidence, who was prepared to back her financially and with official contacts was a film star (who, whether by chance or discovery, was assassinated by the Nazis in Portugal).
    She was allowed to return (how, I have no means of knowing) where she contacted her group, was captured by the Gestapo and murdered - fairly horribly, one assumes. A socialist comrade informs me that Det Sgt Jones, of Special Branch, spoke to him during the war of his concern about the reckless way in which Hilda had been allowed to return and his admiration for her audacity. It would seem Intelligence decided to clear her of any suspicion of wanting to help Hitler, and let her get on with her own thing. She is not mentioned in any list of Allied agents sent into Germany (some suggest because of her racial origin, or because of her sex but more probably because she was independent of Government service): her action is commemorated in Israel (where archives on her case are kept) though she was never a Zionist.

    During the war when Hitler met Franco there was another plan to assassinate the pair of them together, by Spanish anarchists this time, though with some French and German involvement. This certainly would have changed the course of history, and certainly have been a highspot of anarchist resistance, had it been successful. Those who sneer at such attempts as amateur should bear in mind that those concerned were not professional assassins but ordinary workers living under intolerable oppression. At the very least, these events should be made public and not hidden. They were representative of the real feelings of workers during the years of class defeat when their rulers were dragging their name in filth.

    Written by Albert Meltzer, in Black Flag Magazine
    4:39p
    Raimondo falls
    Justin Raimondo's ' Achilles' turns out to be a heel...who knew?

    '...Buchanan has been making essentially this case for some years. In a 1977 column, he wrote:

    Though Hitler was indeed racist and anti-Semitic to the core, a man who without compunction could commit murder and genocide, he was also an individual of great courage, a soldier's soldier in the Great War, a political organizer of the first rank, a leader steeped in the history of Europe, who possessed oratorical powers that could awe even those who despised him...Hitler's success was not based on his extraordinary gifts alone. His genius was an intuitive sense of the mushiness, the character flaws, the weakness masquerading as morality that was in the hearts of the statesmen who stood in his path.

    He also has indulged in certain kinds of Holocaust denial:

    Writing of "group fantasies of martyrdom," Buchanan challenged the historical record that thousands of Jews were gassed to death by diesel exhaust at Treblinka: "Diesel engines do not emit enough carbon monoxide to kill anybody." (New Republic, 10/22/90) Buchanan's columns have run in the Liberty Lobby's Spotlight, the German-American National PAC newsletter and other publications that claim Nazi death camps are a Zionist concoction.

    [More on Buchanan's indulgence in Holocaust denial here.] ( via FDL )

    http://www.holocaust-history.org/~jamie/buchanan/

    Springtime for antiwar.com and Cockburn
    Winter for true anti-fascists everywhere
    Springtime for Pilger and fascist empire bilge
    Winter for Soviet satellite areas like the Ukraine
    4:43p
    Portrait of an Eco-Terrorist
    Somehow this fascist lunatic has tenure somewhere and makes money on the tour circuit circus.

    '...Examining Heidegger’s seduction by fascism and Foucault’s flirtation with the Iranian Revolution, Zizek suggests that these were the “right steps in the wrong direction.” He argues that while the revolutionary terror of Robespierre, Mao and the Bolsheviks ended in historic failure and monstrosity, this is not the whole story. There is, in fact, a redemptive moment that gets lost in the outright liberal-democratic rejection of revolutionary authoritarianism and the valorization of soft, consensual, decentralized politics.

    Zizek claims that, particularly in the light of the forthcoming ecological crisis, we should reinvent revolutionary terror and the dictatorship of the proletariat in the struggle for universal emancipation. We need to courageously accept the return to this Cause – even if we court the risk of a catastrophic disaster. In the words of Samuel Beckett: “Try again. Fail again. Fail better.”
    SLAVOJ ZIZEK’S DEMANDS:
    “1) Strict egalitarian justice (all people should pay the same price in eventual renunciations, namely, one should impose the same world-wide norms of per capita energy consumption, carbon dioxide emissions, and so on; the developed nations should not be allowed to poison the environment at the present rate, blaming the developing Third World countries, from Brazil to China, for ruining our shared environment with their rapid development).
    2) Terror (ruthless punishment of all who violate the imposed protective measures, inclusive of severe limitations on liberal “freedoms,” technological control of prospective law-breakers).
    3) Voluntarism (the only way to confront the threat of ecological catastrophe is by means of large-scale collective decisions which run counter to the “spontaneous” immanent logic of capitalist development).

    MORE ON

    http://www.marxmail.org/msg42235.html

    Note the date - 2008. Marxists who are not revisionists are fascist terrorists. Its right there in yr face.
    5:11p
    Liberal economics are as dead as the dodo
    Looks like Albert Meltzer was mostly* right...

    http://economistsview.typepad.com/economistsview/2008/05/the-predator-st.html

    I actually agree with most of this...so long as the regulators are distributed, informal NGO's, networked anonymously or not but certainly voluntary. Much like many of the prediction markets and dead-pools already up and running - the heart of the new society in the crusty shell of the old.

    http://www.spunk.org/texts/writers/meltzer/sp001500.html

    I say mostly because market competition has driven down the cost of my food and drink, my motorbike, my clothes, my entertainment and many other consumer products. The real sure way to take down liberal economics seems obvious - take down the state. The old military side of the largest state first. Start at the top and work down...like ' The Base' started doing in 2001.
    5:41p
    Democratic dim bulbs
    I try not to let them but the big state Dems really piss me off...you never fucking heard of democide!

    Fuck me.

    Anyway the same jerkoff Mules are kicking back at the idea of a league of democracies...heres a news flash fro these cretins...there is already a league of democracies! Its called the Commonwealth - look it up.
    You abolish demcracy and you get suspended. Way to fucking go!

    There is something to the appeasement meme that has the Dembots screaming. Its because most of them kowtow to power five times a day while a few ' Charlie Wilsons' get to work radically deconstructing it.

    Most Democrats/ Liberals/ ALP neo-labor types are a waste of space - they should all stop breathing.
    5:53p
    Obambi Vs the Mav
    Barry is prancing right up and getting in His Mavericities face...you can do that?

    One thing the young gazelle might want to think about is including Professor Cole in any trip into theater.
    Prof Cole through ' Informed Comment' has become the poster-boy for premature blog triumphalism.

    Even some goof twirling around in Technicolor fantasy-land could surely see that - right Bambi?

    EQUAL OPPORTUNITY BULLSHIT ADVICE

    As I'm doling out free bs advice heres some for McCain. Get that actor on board as Veep...whassisname...the one who was in ' The Player' and ' The Manchurian Candidate' and was Dr Wellington Yueh in ' Dune'. He could act as a long-distance stand-in while yr in Bethesda getting yr polyps reamed.
    6:08p
    First French president? I don't think so.
    When John McCain showed up to campaign recently in Seattle and Bellevue, Wash., union members were there to ask him about his role in awarding a major military contract to a foreign company. Word has it, he encouraged the U.S. Department of Defense in February to give a $40 billion-to-$100 billion contract for the construction of Air Force refueling tankers to Northrop Grumman and to the European firm EADS, which makes the Airbus, rather than U.S.-based Boeing.

    Perhaps Monsieur Jean-Claude Le Skunky McCain can explain S'il Vous fucking Plas? ( Pardon mon Francais)

    Was he in Vietnam BOMBING INNOCENT CHILDREN WITH NAPALM to RESTORE FRENCH HEGEMONY!

    The American public has a right to know!
    6:16p
    How the Scots helped save civilization
    Its not just the SSP's ' We have a world to win'. Its all those Scotty dogs down there in the trenches.

    '... Network executives obviously know that these ( Scotty dog) revelations are quite threatening to their brand. Yesterday, they wheeled out their full stable of multi-millionaire corporate stars who play the role of authoritative journalists on the TV to join with their White House allies in mocking and deriding McClellan's claims. One media star after the next -- Tom Brokaw, David Gregory, Charlie Gibson and Brian Williams, Tim Russert, Wolf Blitzer -- materialized in sync to insist that nothing could be more absurd than the suggestion that they are "deferential, complicit enablers" in government propaganda.

    David Gregory was particularly amusing in defending the White House press corps, even though his own questions are in the public record, questions like "should we capture Saddam or just kill him?" The press was completely cowed by the Bush Administration, willing to reprint their propaganda and unwilling to challenge the most basic assumptions about the cause for war...'

    Never let it be said the Scotch Terrier doesn't have TALONs
    7:06p
    That ain't all we know smart-guy!
    George Bush Authorized the Leak of Valerie Wilson’s Identity

    Scottie McC doesn't know it yet. But that's basically what he revealed this morning on the Today Show (h/t Rayne).
    During the interview, Scottie revealed the two things that really pissed him off with the Bush Administration. First, being set up to lie by Karl Rove and Scooter Libby. And second, learning that Bush had--himself--authorized the selective leaking of the NIE.

    Think of how much sense this makes. We have evidence that George Bush ordered Libby to respond to Joe Wilson on June 9, 2003. We now have Bush's own confirmation that he authorized the leak Libby made to Judy Miller on July 8, 2003--which included the leak of Valerie Wilson's identity. We know on July 10, Condi told Stephen Hadley that Bush "was comfortable" with the response the White House was making towards Wilson. And we know that--when Cheney forced Scottie McC to exonerate Libby publicly that fall, he did so by reminding people that "The Pres[ident] [asked Libby] to stick his head in the meat-grinder." We know that Libby's lawyers tried desperately to prevent a full discussion of the NIE lies to be presented at trial. And we know that--after those NIE lies did not come out, for the most part (though one juror told me that NIE story was obviously false, even with the limited information they received)--the President commuted Libby's sentence on July 2, 2007.

    The President commuted Libby's sentence...' - Kos

    Commuting the sentence of a key partner in a criminal cover-up is itself another crime...and the criminal cover-up is still ongoing, fully enabled, aided and abetted by the despicable criminal Vichy Dems.
    7:11p
    Like a left-wing blogger
    He practically writes the declaration of independence for Jefferson...and then refuses to sign onto the parchment worship that enables slavery. He's George Mason.
    In the [Virginia constitutional ratifying] convention George Mason argued that the President might use his pardoning power to "pardon crimes which were advised by himself" or, before indictment or conviction, "to stop inquiry and prevent detection." James Madison responded:

    [I]f the President be connected, in any suspicious manner, with any person, and there be grounds to believe he will shelter him, the House of Representatives can impeach him; they can remove him if found guilty...

    Sure could use another George Mason or two again.
    10:41p
    Mega-Marxist idiot K-Rudd
    WE are seeing the best and the worst of Kevin Rudd.
    The Prime Minister is master of his brief, and on yesterday's performance, he can safely claim to know more about petrol prices and competition policy than almost anyone else in Australia.
    But in taking on the politics of petrol, Rudd has confirmed the danger he poses to himself by his predilection for detail.
    Surely a debate about the merits of price monitoring versus a token tax cut is beneath a prime minister? Remember that Rudd's FuelWatch merely extends a state-based regime in Western Australia. This is retail politics so small it begs to be parodied.
    Yet count the days that Rudd has wasted on this topic; the petrol price soap opera is already two weeks old.
    Rudd seems determined to stare down not just the Coalition, but the public service. Yesterday he told those in the bureaucracy who may be flinching at the workload that he will push them even harder to deliver his mandate.
    "I understand that there has been some criticism around the edges that some public servants are finding the hours a bit much," Rudd volunteered. "Well, I suppose I've simply got news for the public service: there'll be more."
    It sounded like a threat, and it was. It was very un-Rudd. He craves affection. He also blindsides his enemies because they underestimate his Zen-like public demeanour. He didn't get to be Prime Minister by telegraphing his punches.
    Now, we have a flicker of something else, perhaps a warning sign of fatigue, or even temper. Canberra will be on burn-out watch as insiders try to divine which public servants take the hint and leave rather than cede one more hour a day to the Ruddbot.
    This is a symptom of a bigger problem. Rudd has, for the first time since he became Labor leader 18 months ago, failed to control the national conversation. He is reacting - to Brendan Nelson, the least-preferred alternate prime minister in the history of Newspoll.
    John Howard, the dominant conservative politician of his generation, couldn't throw Rudd off message for more than one 24-hour news cycle, according to Coalition sources. Nelson, and whoever leaked Labor's internal advice, has bogged him for a fortnight, which in the dog years of politics is an eternity.
    The strategically minded on the Labor side will argue Rudd has no choice but to engage Nelson on Nelson's terms, because no issue enrages the mob like petrol.
    But Rudd is the Prime Minister, and terrifically popular. He seemingly has the nation's ear, but the best he can come up with is a counter-stunt.
    Here we are, a fortnight after Labor's debut budget and the national conversation has stalled: not on some high principle of reform, but the question of whether Kevin's 2c-a-litre saving from FuelWatch is more meaningful to motorists than Brendan's 5.5c-a-litre cut in fuel excise.
    Rudd was puzzled, perhaps even irritated, in April when The Weekend Australian posed the question of substance: "Will he become our first federal premier, a master of the media cycle who ultimately runs a do-nothing Government?"
    One month on there is still no disputing his reform ambition. The concern, which many of his supporters share, goes to his method. Rudd is sweating the small stuff against an insubstantial opponent. - FROM

    http://www.theaustralian.news.com.au/story/0,25197,23781121-21147,00.html
    10:50p
    Whassisname was a blowhard
    The last Liberal oppo leader before ' Red dead budgie smuggler Ted' here in Vic was a loudmouthed walking, talking arsehole. Brando Calrission Kiss-me-Hardly Nelson seems absolutely cut from the same cheesecloth.
    So all any halfway sensible federal labor leader has to do at this point is wave some photos of the serial killer doppelganger in the air and keep their big flytrap shut.

    No biggie

    Show us the guitar
    10:59p
    Sarich by name
    Ralph Sarich is described in Wikipedia as a multi-millionaire. Todays Australian has him as a billionaire.
    http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ralph_Sarich
    http://www.theaustralian.news.com.au/story/0,25197,23781253-25658,00.html
    Now I don't know why someone so clever as to invent an orbital engine would want to invest in low lying real-estate but I'm sure his position can be hedged against.
    11:10p
    Risk management tactics
    Hedge funds gamble that Gulf currencies will soar | The Australian

    HEDGE funds and other investors made bundles of money in the 1990s betting currency
    pegs around the world would break. They are at it again, only this time ...

    http://www.theaustralian.news.com.au/story/0,25197,23767774-36375,00.html | similar pages

    Soros was on the box the other day so I repeat my plea to him - please do to the US dollar what you did to the Thai and UK currency. Please, please, please. The worlds first trillionaire is George Soros!
    11:17p
    Hedge rats
    AUSTRALIAN hedge fund manager Greg Coffey has surged into the ranks of the world's super-rich, collecting $320 million in fees last year.
    This puts his former boss at Macquarie Bank Allan Moss's mere $30million last financial year deep into the shade.
    Next year may be even kinder to the 36-year-old London-based Mr Coffey, as volatile global financial markets favour the hedge fund style of investment, and as his firm GLG Partners, a $US24billion hedge fund, battles to keep his services.
    GLG is bidding to hold on to Mr Coffey, who runs about $US7billion of its funds and generated about 60 per cent of its performance fees last year.
    Mr Coffey resigned at the weekend, apparently to set up his own fund, but has rescinded his resignation and is in talks with GLG.
    Mr Coffey was one of a handful of London's leading hedge fund managers who shared an extraordinary payout of more than $US2billion last year as star dealers profited by betting on the fall in the US sub-prime mortgage market by selling shares before the downturn hit and buying them back at a lower price.
    Top of Alpha magazine's list of the top 50 best-paid managers worldwide for last year were Mr Coffey's bosses, GLG founders Noam Gottesman and Pierre LaGrange. Mr Gottesman and Mr LaGrange were each paid $US350million.
    Hedge funds are under the regulatory microscope of the Australian Securities Exchange, which launched an investigation in February into the possibility of them colluding to drive down the price of stocks.
    Some companies have complained that they have been victims of concerted action by hedge funds to push down their share prices, allowing the funds to make money by buying them back at artificially low levels.
    "Anecdotally, that has been what has been suggested to me - that they are doing just that," ASX supervision chief Eric Mayne said. "As a consequence, we will be investigating it."
    Alpha's list was topped by John Paulson, who received $US3.7billion. Mr Paulson's firm, Paulson & Co, made a fortune from shorting the US's sub-prime mortgage markets last year. The crisis in sub-prime led to a seizure in the international banking market.
    The success of his trading meant that Mr Paulson beat George Soros, the best-known fund manager, into second place. Mr Soros, who runs Soros Fund Management, received $US2.9 billion, Alpha said.
    Details of the extraordinary pay on offer to hedge fund star dealers came as latest research from HedgeFund Intelligence, a publisher, calculated that global hedge fund assets stood at $US2.65trillion at the beginning of the year.
    That is 27 per cent higher than the previous year.

    Additional reporting: The Times
    11:23p
    Good riddance to Sam rubbish
    I wonder if Gary Lyon will ever wake up and smell the coffee?

    Sam Newman is toast...'SAM Newman needs to see a counsellor once a week for at least a year, according to a leading psychologist...'

    And then he might blow his brains out if he can find them...

    http://www.news.com.au/heraldsun/story/0,21985,23780824-5006922,00.html

    Sam just can't take a hint. His Grrlfriend breaks his leg, he puts his foot in his mouth and then breaks a bone in his own foot...sheesh Sam...you think theres a message in there somewhere? Please just go far away... and take Gary with you. The tribe has spoken.
    11:45p
    Sour bitter Rice
    What a wicked liar this witch is

    Neocon witch Condi Rice would not comment specifically on charges made by ex-press secretary Scott McClellan in a new book, but said President Bush was honest and forthright about the reasons for the war.
    ( Hey, maybe she has a future in stand-up?)
    She also said she remained convinced that toppling Saddam Hussein was right and necessary.
    ( If you want to grab a trillion dollars worth of oil and float it off in in a Chevron supertanker named...)

    "The president was very clear about the reasons for going to war," she told reporters at a news conference with Swedish Prime Minister Fredrik Reinfeldt in Stockholm where she is attending an international conference on Iraq.
    ( Yeah right - so fucking clear 16 words about the main reason had to be made 'inoperative' in the traditional Nixon/Watergate sense, and the following 21 words made meaningless without them.
    Talk about yr 18 and a half minute gaps!)
    Chief among those reasons was the belief, shared widely before the war, that Saddam Hussein had or was developing weapons of mass destruction, Rose Mary Woods Rice recalled, suggesting the international community shouldn't have backed harsh sanctions against Iraq if it doubted the threat.
    "I am not going to comment on a book that I haven't read," she said, referring to McClellan's scathing memoir, "but what I will say is that the concern about weapons of mass destruction in Saddam Hussein's Iraq was the fundamental reason."
    "It was not the United States of America alone that believed that he had weapons of mass destruction that he was hiding," Rice said, dismissing suggestions that the administration knew the intelligence was incorrect.
    "The story is there for everyone to see, you can't now transplant yourself into the present and say we should have know what we in fact did not know in 2001 and 2002," she said. "The record on weapons of mass destruction was one that appeared to be very clear."
    Those who were skeptical should have spoken up at the time and argued against U.N. sanctions such as the oil-for-food program, she said.
    ( People were speaking up during 2002. Enough for the neocons to plot the Big Lie strategy. Card. Product. August. Miller. Tubes. Terror...any of this WHIG bs ring a bell Ms Neocon 2003? )

    "The threat from Saddam Hussein was well understood," Ms Supertaker ' We don't torture...that much' Rice said. "You can agree or disagree about the decision to liberate Iraq oil in 2003, but I would really ask that if you ... believe he was not a threat to the international OPEC community, then why in the world were you allowing the people to suffer under the terms of media uber alles."
    At a dinner with Bates College Republicans very early in the second term Bill Kristol couldn’t stop talking about Condi's many virtues as a political asset, her unlimited future, and her irresistible persona as a “psycho-sexual dominatrix” (his words) in her then-recent appearance at the U.S. airbase in Wiesbaden.
    This raises the obvious question...did the president really just choke on a pretzel back then?

    Or some stale Rice?

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