A series of photos by Ben Roberts.
Instead of trying to do another portrait series, Roberts spent one evening poking his head into protestors’ tents and photographing them without their inhabitants. “It’s much easier to focus on someone’s face but I wanted to look at the traces they left behind,” he says.
I do like how Jay Smooth’s brain works. via himself.
Hey superhero comics types. You’ve had, let’s see now, thirty years to sort our your sexual politics and it’s still fucked.
via Catherine Bray
Always essential reading, this man. Always.
It’s no good being a little bit in favour of human rights, or a little bit skeptical of the idea that health and safety means the end of society as we now know it. You have to denounce the whole fantasy; just like you’d denounce someone who believed in the Procols ofthe Elders of Zion. There is no human rights culture. There are no elf and safety fantatics. There is no political correctness brigade. The Queen is not a telepathic alien lizard. Nothing is eating away at the fabric of society and no-one banned Christmas.
I’m always quite astonished that this sort of thing needs to be said, but there you go.
Screen-cap from The Daily Show. (What is it with USAmericans and censoring light swearing?)
via Tim Carmody
To be fair Buffett has form here, but I would love one of our native billionaires to say something similar to George Osbourne. Howabout it Branson? Dyson? Rowling?
Back in the 1980s and 1990s, tax rates for the rich were far higher, and my percentage rate was in the middle of the pack. According to a theory I sometimes hear, I should have thrown a fit and refused to invest because of the elevated tax rates on capital gains and dividends.
I didn’t refuse, nor did others. I have worked with investors for 60 years and I have yet to see anyone — not even when capital gains rates were 39.9 percent in 1976-77 — shy away from a sensible investment because of the tax rate on the potential gain. People invest to make money, and potential taxes have never scared them off. And to those who argue that higher rates hurt job creation, I would note that a net of nearly 40 million jobs were added between 1980 and 2000. You know what’s happened since then: lower tax rates and far lower job creation.
via many Americans
Given he’s a Birmingham-ish based MP who’s relatively savvy on issues related to the Internet (you may remember his staunch defying of the party line during the Digital Economy Bill last year) I’ve come to know Tom Watson a bit over the last couple of years. Not in a particularly chummy way but to a point where I’m surprised by those who might attack him. He seems okay to me. A politician, for sure, who does what needs to be done to get elected, but not one of the baddies.
So this interview, off the back of his epic work in the Murdoch / hacking affair, is a welcome look at his 10 year career putting a lot of things into context. Yes, he was a bastard back in the day, one of Gordon Brown’s bruisers, but he’s changed.
“This has been a profoundly life-changing event for me, in many ways. It’s certainly changed my politics. When I was first elected, I was a completely naive and gauche politician. You look at the pillars of the state: politics, the media, police, lawyers – they’ve all got their formal role, and then nestling above that is that power elite who are networked in through soft, social links, that are actually running the show. Why didn’t I know that 10 years ago, and why didn’t I rail against it? Why did I become part of it? I was 34. I’m 44 now. I was naive. But I’ll never let that happen again.”
I’m glad I know him now rather than then.
Chris Morris’ Brass Eye Pedophile Special was a defining artifact in the splintering of the culture on lines of rational thought and emotional reaction. While the Daily Mail deliberately gets it wrong in this report, how it does so is fascinating and, some might say, worth understanding if you wish to understand how some people think.
via Cook’d and Bomb’d / Neil Holland.
Nice chart from the Guardian showing when our glorious leaders met Murdoch and his people.
Just in case you’re one of those people under the impression Europe is about to be wiped out by invading hoards of Muslims…
So in most of Europe, there was no terrorism. And where there was terrorism, the trend line pointed down.
As for who’s responsible, forget Islamists. The overwhelming majority of the attacks- 237 of 294 – were carried out by separatist groups, such as the Basque ETA. A further 40 terrorists schemes were pinned on leftist and/or anarchist terrorists. Rightists were responsible for four attacks. Single-issue groups were behind two attacks, while responsibility for a further 10 was not clear.
Islamists? They were behind a grand total of one attack. Yes, one. Out of 294 attacks. In a population of half a billion people. To put that in perspective, the same number of attacks was committed by the Comité d’Action Viticole, a French group that wants to stop the importation of foreign wine.
It’s accepted that the banks, in some form, are responsible for the economic mess we’re in, but any accepted truth should always be questioned so this long and comprehensive article is essential reading. I can’t say I now know who to blame but I feel more aware of the complexity of the situation. (Actually, I suspect we’re all to blame.)
via Longreads.
This is mildly astonishing. Moore, previously editor of the Spectator and the Telegraph, goes through the recent excesses of deregulated free-market capitalism, specifically the Murdoch affairs, and realises those museli-eaters at the Guardian might have a point.
I particularly like the imagery in this bit:
And when the banks that look after our money take it away, lose it and then, because of government guarantee, are not punished themselves, something much worse happens. It turns out – as the Left always claims – that a system purporting to advance the many has been perverted in order to enrich the few. The global banking system is an adventure playground for the participants, complete with spongy, health-and-safety approved flooring so that they bounce when they fall off. The role of the rest of us is simply to pay.
via Steve
There’s a lot of “what the hell does it all mean???” going around but John Harris nails a few things for me here.
Yesterday, in the wake of yet more arrests and resignations, I listened to another media appearance by Steve Hewlett, the Guardian columnist and presenter of Radio 4′s Media show – who, in the midst of droves of talking heads coming close to losing theirs, has sounded a dependable note of calm and real insight. As far as I know, he has not talked about the “British Spring”. But when he popped up towards the end of the Today programme, he seemed to agree that something absolutely remarkable was afoot.
“It’s almost as if the whole establishment – the political-media elite – is in a state of wobble,” he said. “Any association with Murdoch and his papers, which quite naturally everybody has had in some form . . . is now so toxic that any mention of it is . . .”
A pause.
“I mean, look: it’s carnage. It’s almost as if the light has suddenly come on, and everybody has said: ‘Good lord – were we doing that?’”