A couple of signing opportunities.

Labour Friends of Iraq. This is an open letter to the Stop the War Coalition asking why they have not spoken out clearly and forcefully on the murder of Hadi Saleh, International Officer of the Iraqi Federation of Trade Unions.

StWC leaders view the “resistance” as a legitimate national liberation movement. StWC leaders view as ‘collaborators’ the IFTU, all election workers, and all democratic parties participating in the January elections, whether Iraqi Communists, Kurdish Parties or Shia.

This view is quite wrong. The leaders of the ‘resistance’ are an amalgam of Baathists, Islamic fundamentalists, pro-al-Qaeda militants and criminals. There is nothing progressive about their political programmes. If they were ever to take state power

Nick Cohen said something interesting in the Observer the other day:

To take it from the top, the scandal about Britain’s television stations and many of its other cultural institutions is not that they are run by people who are motivated by anything so high-minded as converting the public to a political philosophy, but that they are run by well-educated and very well-paid men and women from the upper-middle class who protect themselves and their privately educated children from competition by feeding the masses mush – the favoured policy of aristocracies down the ages. That they do none the less read liberal newspapers and pretend that their pursuit of profit and market share is a radical blow in the anti-elitist

Some more on fine phrases and their relationship (if any) to parsnip-buttering.

Yet, as
we shall see, in the moment of ritual divination the exclusive dualisms
of subject and object, mind and matter, what is outside and up there
(including stars) and what is down here and inside (including genes), partially dissolve in awareness of
cosmic connection. Multiplicity remains, separation remains, but there
is also relatedness, there is participation. Bringing an anthropological
perspective to bear on the topic of astrological divination, we see the
true business of astrology as participation in the greatest dialogue of
all, the grand conversation of earth and heaven.

That sounds buttery, right? But what does it mean? Relatedness to what? Participation in what? Jupiter? One … Read the rest