The Politics of Dancing

First the bread, my preference is for a fresh bloomer or baguette, though quality bread is increasingly difficult to find, most supermarket bread is crap, if you don’t have a good local baker farmers markets are a good place or a specialised bread stall at any local market. There is potentially so much wonderful bread and it all should be much more widely available. However given that we have located our bread this now leaves the question of the cheese. My own preference is for Camembert,* the king, or queen if you wish, of French cheeses. This should be purchased from a cheese stall; supermarket Camembert is invariably of poor quality and tends to be rubbery. It should already be ripening on purchase and left at room temperature for at least an hour. When ready it should be easily spreadable on fresh bread. Having got our bread and cheese we now turn to the coffee, and I recommend Turkish coffee. Now outside of certain London boroughs it can be difficult to purchase Turkish coffee how...

Not my self naturally inclined to conspiracy theories, of which in the last thirty years there has developed a plethora, they represent an interesting phenomena. The roots of this phenomenon are however complex, I would hazard a guess that one of the reasons for the growing tendency is the reality of powerlessness that so many people experience. Better by far to be the holder of ‘secret’ truths hidden from the mass of the people, to be one who truly ‘knows.’ No end of contrary evidential proof has any traction with these people; a truly held conspiracy theory is evidence proof. From the Kennedy assassination through the ‘hoaxed’ Moon landings to the 9/11 ‘Truthers’ there is no end of fresh recruits to the ever growing army of conspiracy theorists. The latest conspiracy theory involves the ‘myth’ of global warming, which is, disturbingly, increasingly gaining ground in more mainstream media circles, a charge led, incidentally by, among others, the increasingly absurd Lord Lawson. Con...

The Current Archbishop of Canterbury Rowan Williams launches a verbal onslaught on the coalition government in, of all places, the pages of The New Statesman. No fan of the coalition government my self it might be thought that I would welcome this intervention however I have to say that the article made me feel more than a little queasy. The New Statesman has more than a mixed history; however it has historically represented a strong brand of rational secularism. Now it has a regular contributor who believes that The Koran represents the literal word of God* and invites an obscurantist like Mr Rowan Williams to opine on his pages. This to me feels like the sad demise of a once impressive publication of the left. As to the Archbishop’s concerns that the coalition are enacting far reaching legislation that nobody voted for is of course correct, however it comes a bit thick from someone who sits in the House of Lords as a matter of right, don’t ever remember seeing his name on a ball...

With his usual exquisite timing, just as the disgusting war criminal Mladic is finally dragged to the international criminal court at The Hague up pops Mr Ratzinger parading his Christian conscience in Croatia. Now Croatia has an interesting history, one in which the Catholic Church has played a significant role. With the creation of The Kingdom of Yugoslavia after World War One Croatia was incorporating along with the Muslims of Bosnia into a single state dominated by the Orthodox Serbs. The kingdom was inherently unstable with a strong strand of Croatian nationalism pulling at the threads of the new state. With the Outbreak of the Second World War and the German defeat and Occupation of Yugoslavia Croatia was set up as a puppet Nazi state governed by the fascist Ustashe under the premiership of Ante Pavelić. ‘This resulted in a campaign of terror and extermination conducted by the Ustashe against two million Serbs, Jews, Gypsies, and Communists between 1941 and 1945.’* It was dur...

The FIFA affair moves from the farcical to the truly disgusting and absurd. Mr Blatter seeks to appoint Henry Kissinger to oversee the ethics of the organisation!  Kissinger the most mendacious living statesman, a war criminal who more properly should be facing criminal charges, for crimes against humanity amongst many other things, for his role in the destruction of Cambodia, his complicity in the deaths of countless Chileans, Timorese, and for his treason during the 1968 Paris peace talks.* *See the Trial of Henry Kissinger by Christopher Hitchens, also Youtube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9Lq2tlV61WY

Recently the BBC’s news magazine programme Newsnight carried a report concerning the threat to the Library service across the country. As part of the debate a young man from the Institute of Economic Affairs,[ IEA], a right wing pressure group, asserted that there were “...thousands of alternatives to the public library system.” When asked to name one he said that there were lots of cheap books available on e-bay! This cretinous response, was stupid at so many different levels. Leaving to one side the idea that everyone has access to the Internet with a degree of surplus income to spend on second hand books, it misses, I suspect intentionally, the whole purpose of the ‘public’ library. Caught in a Thatcherite time warp, for these people there is no such thing as society. At the weekend the government released some of the weakest reasons given by fraudulent benefit claimants for all of us to have a good giggle over. This is of course part of a broad strategy to undermine the validity...