Small Beds and Large Bears

… is present in the myth of consumer empowerment:
Capitalism is about power. That’s why so many elements of it are inexplicable. It is not, and has never been, about rewarding hard work. It’s about using a system that pretends to reward hard work in order to reinforce power relations between employer and employee. It is [...]

Today I left work while there was still a dribble of sunlight over the landscape, melting into the valleys just as the frost itself started to solidify. Going from a five-minute-late departure on Friday, to one five minutes early on Monday, always emphasizes the changes in daylight particularly strongly at this time of year. [...]

I went to a gig at The Jericho (with optional Tavern) last night: one of the bands I’d seen before (and contains a friend and co-worker); one of them I missed as I had to catch my bus home; the other one was a sort of emo Subcircus. Now, I’m a fan of early Subcircus, [...]

I heard on the radio this morning that, as the Tories believe that married couples provide the best environment for children to grow up in, they’ll be offering such families £20 as an incentive. That the Tories are effectively proposing themselves as the party of big-spend is of course concealed by the notion that this [...]

Borders has one of the best selections of obscure, niche-market magazines in Oxford. For all its multinational rapacity, and its attempts to package, brand, pre-chew and mulch down literature that a bookshop ought to treat with at least a little more respect, it’s almost the exclusive distributor of such as the is-it-or-isn’t-it-defunct new consumer magazine [...]

I want to do something. You want to do something. How could you not? Our government sanctions invasions; it sanctions torture; it lies to us, misrepresenting dodgy intelligence to compel us to agree. It makes us live in fear; it takes away our liberties; and all the time it says it is protecting us.
How could [...]

The Stop the War meeting on Tuesday night was interesting. Much of what Craig Murray had to say, I had read of before on the web (although I’ll now be buying his book). He explained why the government of gas-rich Uzbekistan was being tacitly permitted to torture its citizens, in a systematic attempt to bolster [...]

Tonight, 7.30pm, Oxford Town Hall: Craig Murray speaks. The Oxford leg of the “Time to Go” tour stars the man sacked from the civil service for revealing the UK’s complicitness in torture. There’s also an eyewitness from Palestine and a speaker from Lebanon. Not exactly balanced, but then you can’t correct an imbalance by putting [...]

These Hungarian chappies need to be taught a thing or two. The proles, I mean, not the government. So what if your chief politician does admit in a semi-private meeting to having “lied morning, noon and night?” So what if he then transcribes it to a waiting amoeba who puts it on their blog (I [...]

K. says:
Jamie Oliver’s next campaign: a giant set of sticking-plasters for every hospital.