In Defence of John Prescott – it’s better that he shafts his secretary than the country

An invitation to a party – Compulsory voting as a pseudo-Shakespearean farce.  Or something.

“As Hobbes observes, all mental pleasure exists in being able to compare oneself with others to one’s own advantage… Nothing is of greater moment to a man than the gratification of his own vanity.” —Arthur Schopenhauer

“It is so depressing to think that we suffer because we are fools; yet, taking mankind in the mass, that is the truth. For this reason, no political party can acquire any driving force except through hatred; it must hold up someone to obloquy.” —Bertrand Russell

“Political lies can be dangerous, but what is more dangerous is the irrational bias against politics and elected politicians.”
“It must be something to do with us that we hate those we elect.” —Steve Richards

Were politics to be personified, it would be a manic depressive. It would be a chaotic cauldron of a human being that would quickly drown in its own bile and introspective rage, were it not scornfully spitting it out over all and sundry in an insomnious fountain of vitriol.
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British kids, as anyone who’s met one can attest to, are stupid. Their English, so new research tells us, is worse than those for whom the empyrean tongue is a second language. Half of them can’t spell ‘separate’. Almost four in five think that there’s an apostrophe in the possessive form of ‘its’. And all this from students of one of the country’s top universities. Egad!

Were they not so insignificant, one would undoubtedly shudder when considering what the standards are like lower down the age and ‘intelligence’ groups. Morons to a man, most probably.
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Over the last couple of decades, Europe and the USA have been playing with the world’s Power like two kids bouncing up and down on a seesaw. Or at least they would’ve been were America not so fat.
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Last night, sat in the plush and felicitously comfortable artier-than-thou cavern that is the South Bank’s National Film Theatre, I hoped to receive an answer to a question that had been puzzling me for a long time. I wanted to know just what Michael Winterbottom, the director of A Cock and Bull Story, was thinking when he decided to try to film The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman, one of the finest—and one of the craziest—books ever written.

Having now seen the film, and having listened to the entertainingly enlightening post-performance Q&A with Mr Winterbottom, I’m afraid I’m still not sure.
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As anyone who is—or has been—a student in the days of the denigration of the degree knows, pecuniary problems beset one to an alarming extent. If it wasn’t for the ‘credit-card-ignorance’ factor that accompanies every student loan (that £12,000 doesn’t exist until I’m into my thirties right?), university finances would be a cause for some rather critical concern.
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“An idealist is one who, on noticing that a rose smells better than a cabbage, concludes that it will also make better soup.” —H.L. Mencken

New Labour Soup, the snazzily-packed, dark red gloop with an oddly-familiar aftertaste that is the chosen brand of the most important 21 per cent of people ever to have graced Great Britain is an odd concoction. Decried for placing false hope in the minds of many, while concurrently denounced for failing to fulfil the different desires of many more, the story of Tony’s gang is at the very least an interesting one.

This is partly because no one has ever worked out just what the hell was going on: what did this gobble actually mean? Francis Wheen’s assertion that the Third Way “was somewhere between the Second Coming and the Fourth Dimension” remains as good as any.
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A lot has been said by a lot of people concerning the legality of the war in Iraq. Personally, I couldn’t care less whether it was legal or not. It’s a technicality. The idea that someone gets to dictate an international law determining just when war is legal and when it is not is as frivolous as most wars themselves – especially when the ‘law’ is inevitably as toothless as the EU’s Growth and Stability Pact – if the big boys break it, who is going to dish out the punishment?

An awful lot of people have got very angry over something that, like most drawn-out processes involving lawyers, is a pointlessly confusing fudging of words which ultimately take us no further towards the advancement of reason and common sense. Read More