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20 December Off for Christmas queasily early tomorrow morning, but in a very good mood. I spent Sunday planting an orchard of rare fruit trees that a couple of friends and I have been planning for a while. Rows of apples, pears, greengages and plenty of fruit bushes are now standing proudly in a sea of mud which will be sown with wild flowers next spring and may even provide us with its first fruits next autumn. This is just the first stage of a bigger plan we have to create something which will hopefully last for decades and preserve some of the thousands of old apple varieties that are being lost thanks to the armlock that supermarkets have on the fruit trade in Britain. See a great article about this here, by one of my fellow orchardeers. Talking of ancient things being lost, I'm currently working on a newspaper feature about the decline of the English pub. I'm focusing on the way the traditional local is being squeezed out of existence by the rise of the pub corporation and its identical chain pubs. I want to find as many examples of this happening from around the UK as I can - stories of pubs being tarted up into yuppie bars, or sold off for housing, but also stories of communities standing up for their pubs and saving them from the marketing men. So if you know of anything like this happening in your area, please let me know by posting something on here or emailing me. In the meantime, have a good Christmas. And if there are any good old pubs near you I advise spending as much time in them as possible, purely for political reasons of course. Posted by paul at 05:36 PM | Comments (1) 16 December So, one ugly beardie is gone, to be replaced by another. I wonder if anything will change? Mr C has just announced his intention to plough ahead with the ID cards bill, but perhaps it would be a good time to renew campaigning against it anyway, just in case. There are two campaigns that I know of running against ID cards at the moment. One of them looks like yet another SWP front group (the same three names keep popping up, and they've used that font again for all their banners!), but you can judge that for yourself and let me know. The other doesn't seem to have any Trots involved and is consequently likely to be both more democratic and more badly organised. C'est la vie. Talking of Trots, isn't it interesting that so many New Labour ministers were hardline reds in their youth - this applies to both Blunkett and Clarke. These days they're neoliberals who think nothing of flogging off schools and hospitals to corporations or introducing indefinite detention without trial for people who look a bit foreign. This might seem like a 180 degree political shift but one thing has remained the same since their communist glory days - their authoritarian streak. They knew they were right then, they know they're right now and they're going to get their own way whatever it takes. Once a totalitarian, always a totalitarian. Speaking of which, I really want to direct you to one of my favourite ever websites. It's the HQ of the Maoist Internationalist Movement, which is home to the best collection of film reviews on the internet. As far as I can tell, MIM are a real organisation and these reviews are not spoofs. Consider these wonderful extracts: Men In Black: 'We have no complaints about the acting or the editing, but the script is bourgeois propaganda.' The Matrix: 'We can use the movie to educate people about dialectics, modes of production, Lenin's book "Materialism and Empirio-Criticism" and the drawbacks of anarchism and individualism.' A Bug's Life: '"A Bug's Life" has as good side and a bad side. The good side is that it portrays the successful collective struggle of the apparently weak oppressed and exploited (in this case, an ant colony) against the apparently strong oppressors and exploiters (in this case, a band of grasshoppers). So it could be used as a parable about the struggle against u.$. imperialism. The bad side is that it never directly ties its oppressors (the grasshoppers) to the biggest oppressors in the real world, the imperialists.' There's much, much more of this kind of eye-watering joy here. Go on: while away a few hours while you wait for Christmas to come. You won't regret it. Posted by paul at 10:05 AM | Comments (1) 15 December So, the big question of the day is whether Kimberley Quinn used David Blunkett's improper influence to contact the Austrian embassy and fast-track a visa for her nanny and if so, what implications this has for the Home Secretary's future and .... Christ, another day of being depressed in the extreme by 'news values'. Still nothing in the media about those 15,000 Papuans starving to death on that mountainside, I see. No room left after all the columnists have weighed in with their valuable opinions about trust and infidelity, I suppose. You'd also be forgiven for not knowing that, four days ago, the biggest war since the end of World War Two (it's already claimed nearly four million lives) resumed again - the conflict in the Congo. George Monbiot wrote a column about this yesterday but hardly anyone else has bothered to mention it. It's part-funded by the British government, and is in essence a resource-battle over who gets to control the coltan mines of the Congo. Coltan is used to make the mobile phones we all use every day. Cheery stuff, eh? And these aren't the only examples of this sort of thing, of course. It goes on all the time. I suppose the eternal message remains the same: millions of dead black people don't sell newspapers. Unless there's a charity single involved. Happy Christmas! Posted by paul at 01:33 PM | Comments (0) 7 December
An appeal has been set up to raise money for the people who have been burned out of their homes. If you have anything to give, please visit this site and make a donation. Every penny they get will go straight to Papua, to help the refugees buy food. It's much more direct than Band Aid and you don't have to listen to Bono. Posted by paul at 11:07 AM | Comments (1) 3 December It's twenty years exactly since a massive poison gas leak at Union Carbide's Bhopal chemical plant in India caused one of the worst industrial disasters in history. An estimated 20,000 people have so far died as a result, and 120,000 still suffer from illnesses caused by the leak. Union Carbide is now owned by Dow Chemicals, which refuses to clean up the site, provide safe drinking water for the people of Bhopal, whose wells are still poisoned, or compensate the surviving victims. Dow also refuses to disclose the composition of the gas leak - information that doctors could use to properly treat the victims. Here is the website of Dow Chemicals. Here is a website that looks very much like the website of Dow Chemicals. If you look closer, though, you'll see some differences; most notably that this second site is more honest about how this company actually makes its money. This morning, someone claiming to be a spokesman for Dow gave an interview to the BBC, in which he accepted responsibility for the Bhopal disaster and promised to fully compensate the victims. It took the BBC a while to work out they'd been spoofed by people who wanted to draw attention to the anniversary and to Dow's continued and shameful lies about what happened that night. There's no confirmation yet, but something tells me this was the work of the Yes Men, a pair of genius imposters who are gradually dismantling capitalism from within, armed only with chutzpah and satire. The Yes Men - creators of the spoof Dow site - are a shaft of light in this grubby world. Here is an interview I did with one of them a few years back, which was a lot of fun to write. Here, more importantly, is a website at which you can learn more about Bhopal, and make a donation to help the victims. And if you hear anyone else from Dow on the radio today, listen very carefully. Posted by paul at 01:55 PM | Comments (0) 2 December Stupid and yet strangely compelling website of the day: moonthehoon, in which people hacked-off with New Labour's foreign policy can take photos of their arse and email them to Geoff Hoon. I suspect that this probably won't succeed in changing the government's foreign policy direction, especially since at the time of writing there are only twelve arses prepared to stand up and be counted. And yet ... and yet, somehow there is an absurd genius about it which I can't quite pin down. Posted by paul at 02:11 PM | Comments (0) 1 December Apparently it's National Tree Week. Pretty good time to have posted up my latest article, about the stunningly huge trees of Tasmania and the people who want to log them, then. National Tree Week is organised by the Tree Council, which is doing some very heart-warming things with trees, like raising peoples' awareness of them and trying to get us all off our fat lazy arses and out into the woods. This good news is dampened slightly by the fact that National Tree Week is sponsored by nasty multinational mining company Anglo American, which is currently being sued by South African miners for allegedly giving them asbestosis. It has its fingers in many other dodgy pies too. Greenwash at its best, then. Still, promoting trees can only be a good thing. Together with a couple of friends I recently got hold of a couple of empty allotments, on which we're going to plant loads of rare varieties of apples, berries and other fruit. The plan is to be self-sufficient in yummy, healthy and rare fruit all year round, so we never have to go to Tescos and buy air-freighted African apples ever again. I recommend it. Apart from the bit where you have to dig bloody great holes to put all the trees in. Inspired by all this, I was going to post a picture of my favourite tree up here. It's a 1000 year-old yew tree in nearby Iffley Churchyard and it's stunning. Unfortunately I can't get the stupid blog technology to work properly. But if anyone out there wants to post anything about their favourite tree up here - or about any tree at all - please do. Pictures are even more welcome. I've had enough of depressing blogs and I want some good news! Posted by paul at 11:42 AM | Comments (2) | TrackBack |
This a picture fresh out of West Papua, of a refugee camp - one of many set up on the side of a freezing mountain as a result of a mass attack last week by Indonesian soldiers on thousands of innocent villagers. I wrote about this on the 30th of November. 15,000 people are still homeless, and the media silence goes on.