Very British Post

Sara Carr's Twitter conversation...

Can one of you come round here and take the bins out? My bed needs me to stay in it. Also, it's pissing down outside.

— David Wearing (@davidwearing) February 27, 2014

@Sarahcarr Agreed. It's what we fought the war for. *Takes bins out while bellowing 'Jerusalem'* "And did those feeeeet...."
— David Wearing (@davidwearing) February 27, 2014

Jewish Origin of Crock Pot Cooking

Take a few minutes to listen to the audio.

Post by John Ballard.

Ukraine Update

Let's hope the Ukrainian parliament can make this stick. 

Gosh I'm glad I was right. History in the making at Ukraine's parliament tonight. Thx @andersostlund for a brief pic.twitter.com/wW8xAFTXtg
— Maxim Eristavi (@MaximEristavi) February 20, 2014

Pokarekare Ana

Post by John Ballard.

Michael Bronner -- Another Tour de Force

Our Man in Africa
America championed a bloodthirsty torturer to fight the original war on terror. Now, he is finally being brought to justice.

This long read will make you sick if you read it closely, a highly-recommended
journalistic tour-de-force. When history looks at the last three decades of the
Twentieth Century, America will be the star player on the stage. And our executive
leadership, beginning with the systemically corrupt Nixon years, lubricated by the
blood-soaked thirty-year period we call the Reagan Revolution, will make the lies
and corruption of the Vietnam Era look like just another day's business.
FP Magazine also employs a Web-friendly format that makes reading, copying and
note-taking much easier than usual. It's an improvement over the "single page"
format. This quote, for example, can be found in section/page #2:

>> Guengueng was dragged to a cell, disappearing into a horrific purgatory. Overtwo and half years, the gentle bookkeeper would be held in three different jails --
first in solitary confinement, then packed so tightly with other prisoners he couldn’t
lie down to sleep, unless someone died. Which they did, every night, at which point
the living would sleep on top of the dead. When the guards deemed the body count
high enough to justify the effort -- five or six -- they would remove the corpses. In a
long, moving interview in N’Djamena recently, Clément Abaifouta, Guengueng’s
friend and fellow former inmate, described being forced daily over four years to bury
hundreds of prisoners claimed by execution or illness. <<

This is why I don't watch movies showing gratuitous violence. When we watch
movies we know those images on the screen are actors enhanced by the magic of
digital creativity. We tell ourselves that such things cannot really happen. But those
images -- and in some way even reports like this -- have a pornographic appeal to
those who embrace savage conflict resolution and internalize the Myth of
Redemptive Violence.