Pete Hegseth, the DUI hire, this one's for you. This endless complaint on "declining" Is often no more than mere whining About white men displaced From previously-placed Positions of lazy reclining
False consciousness, left and right (a limerick)
Limericks, quatrains and haiku are coming. For, well, reasons. The Kool-Aid some gladly imbibeAs the price of joining the tribeThey might be left blindedThey're not all that mindedSo deep is their ache for a "vibe" (clean limericks are such a letdown!) Marc Hudson, who has never ever believed something ridiculous because it was conveient or... Continue Reading →
Letters in the FT: On Henry Ford, competitive consumption and our doom
IMO, the only two national UK daily newspapers worthy of your close attention are the Financial Times and the Morning Star. I've yet to have a letter in the Star, but I am now in double figures in the pink'un... Here's the latest. I didn't mention positional goods because of space. History already provides a... Continue Reading →
Of Tony Blair, the struggle against power and doubting Thomas
Te late Milan Kundera said that the struggle of man against power was the struggle of memory against forgetting. And the powerful want us to forget - induced amnesia is just one of the many weapons they have. So, I do a website called "All Our Yesterdays", mostly about climate change. I just bashed this... Continue Reading →
J.A.B.B.E.R.W.O.C.K.Y – tortured retronym for a social movement (well, civil society actually) pathology
I found some old scribbled notes - see photo. I can't place the when or where (possibly Adelaide during a 'Festival' of Ideas) , but it doesn't matter, because the pathology is there in Australia or the UK or - my hunch - any other "advanced" Western "democracy." People get together for what could be... Continue Reading →
Essential podcast – “Letter from an American” (esp April 22)
We are in what Leonard Cohen once sang of as "the Blizzard" - information, misinformation, disinformation coming at us at impossible velocity and size. To have any hope of making sense of any bit of it, we need speicalists who can communicate - "public intellectuals." This being a public intellectual is harder than it looks,... Continue Reading →
Juggling: Cold feet and Kylie Minogue
Dew does two things - well, more than that, but for me, today a) cold feet (shoes are a good invention b) makes club handles more slippery - but now manageable, thanks to a few weeks of experience and confidence. And Kylie? Well, spinning around... https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t1DWBKk5xHQ&pp=0gcJCdgAo7VqN5tD I can now do short sequences of double spins... Continue Reading →
A joke about Trump/Maga….
Heard this one on the Why Theory podcast. A MAGA-hat wearing guy goes into a bookshop. He says to the bookseller "I'm looking for a copy of the new book by Donald Trump about his immigration policy." The bookseller leans forward, looks him in the eye and says "Get the fuck out of here and... Continue Reading →
Skin in the game – a tattoo of the Keeling Curve
Today I got a tattoo. Mrs Hudson (not her real name, or title, in fact) has plenty - crows, beetles, angels of the apocalypse etc. Me? When my turn came, I went for a Keeling Curve. The lovely and steady-handed tattooist I went to (Deviant Ink, in Stone, Staffordshire) knew exactly what it was, and... Continue Reading →
Spirals of silence, the BBC’s real role and… Billy Joel.
Always with the stunt-headlining. Oi vey. So, this morning the Grauniad ran a piece based on some academic research about how climate action is more popular than most people think, with everyone underestimating other people's "support" for climate action. The scare quotes are there because, you know, if people gave that much of a damn,... Continue Reading →