Some Exhibitions to Check Out...

Here's a suggested pick of some local exhibitions that you might like to check out...

The Catcam
Images taken by a cat! Q: What could be cooler? A: Nothing! Centrespace Gallery. 6 Leonard Lane, Bristol, BS1 1EA, Friday 28th May - Wednesday 2nd June 2010.

EDL Photo Exhibition
At The Junction, Stokes Croft until 9th June. 5pm - 1am. its free entry before 8 but may be a small charge after due to gigs.

Street Photography Exhibition
"This is my first photography exhibition, it features over a 100 street photos of Bristol. It is running as part of the Bristol Festival of Photography." 19th May to 19th June 2010 - at Cafe Kino, Nine Tree Hill, Off Stokes Croft Road.

Making the Working Class Support the Ruling Class II

Part 2 in and ongoing series: Making the Working Class Support the Ruling Class... This is a great article about how right-wing propagandists have taken the populist ideas of the rich and powerful and turned them upside down...

Regular middle class folks, he tells us, have been inveigled into leading unsustainable lifestyles. Instead of going to church and home-schooling their children as they once did, they hunker down in their over-leveraged houses and watch porn on the giant screen TVs that they bought on credit. America has lost its way; we are headed over a cliff.

And who is to blame for this sad state of affairs? Not the bankers who supplied our citizenry with mortgages and credit cards and addicted them to debt; not the merchants who sold them the TVs; the advertisers who seduced them away from the pay-as-you-go thrift that was their birthright. Business and businessmen are still the font of everything good. No, the villains are the Statist bureaucrats in Washington who despise everything commonsensical and homely and just. Unregulated commerce is still the ultimate expression of freedom; political Progressivism is the cancer that enslaves and kills.

Indeed - the enemy is not those that led you to this point, but the 'others' - those the rich point you to as the enemy. It's a world turned upside down.

When Quoting a 'Dr' State His Area of Expertise...

This is a great demolition of the media coverage of the recent hacked climate email hearings:

What really irked me about the BBC piece however is its concluding section in which we find: Dr Benny Peiser, director of the Global Warming Policy Foundation, criticised the panel for producing a report that was “not even-handed” and appeared to be the product of a “rushed job”. He said: “This has produced a very superficial report. The panel should have taken more time to come to more balanced and trustworthy conclusions. They should have heard evidence from critical researchers who have been working in the same field for many years.”

First of all, for those who aren’t familiar with Benny Peiser while he is indeed an academic, simply describing him as a Dr within an article concentrating on science and scientists is somewhat misleading. Peiser is a senior lecturer in social anthropology and sports sociology. Yup that’s right, instead of getting information about climate science from climate scientists, or maybe physicists or atmospheric chemists the Beeb turns to a sports sociologist. Right… Well he has published peer reviewed papers. Three in fact, in the following journals: Sports Medicine, 2006; Journal of Sports Sciences (2004); and, Bioastronomy 2002: life among the stars (2004).

What clearer way could the omission of information allow the reader to form a misleading reading of the text. So to quote again:

Dr Benny Peiser, director of the Global Warming Policy Foundation, criticised the panel for producing a report that was “not even-handed” and appeared to be the product of a “rushed job”.

This clearly gives the impression that the man quoted is some kind of a related expert - else why else call him a doctor. Now add in the area of expertise:

Dr Benny Peiser, director of the Global Warming Policy Foundation and a doctor of the sociology of sport, criticised the panel for producing a report that was “not even-handed” and appeared to be the product of a “rushed job”.

How does that read now? Truthier, I think.

Israel Offered Nukes to Racist South Africa

Undermining any shreds of moral credibility the state of Israel may have had, is the revelation that it had friendly - as in selling weapons sort of friendly - with the Apartheid era South Africa. If we are judged by the company we keep - this is shocking...

Whether it was intentional or not, the double standard in the UNSC concerning Israel’s nuclear weapons (including the recklessness with which its leaders have hinted they would use them, and the willingness to proliferate) and Iran’s civilian enrichment program, which may well never lead to a bomb has been underlined by Polakow-Suransky’s revelations. The research discoveries make it at least a little more difficult for the US and Israel to persuade other UNO states that Iran is a rogue and needs special intervention, while Israel is held harmless.

And here...

But South Africa and Israel were bound together in their respective battles against the ANC and PLO by much more than a shared anti-communist agenda. In their private correspondences, as Polakow-Suransky documents, leaders from the two countries described their alliance as a holy war against the dark-skinned hordes. As Israel’s former ambassador to apartheid South Africa, a Likudnik named Eliahu Lankin, wrote to his South African allies in 1987, "What the ANC is demanding today is nothing less than ‘one man, one vote’… If the whites were to agree to this in present circumstances, they would be committing suicide, not only politically but physically as well." Eitan made no secret of his fears about empowering the demographic majority, warning before an audience at Tel Aviv University that blacks "want to gain control over the white majority just like the Arabs here want to gain control over us. And we, too, like the white minority in South Africa, must act to prevent them from taking us over."

Axis of Evil: JP Morgan and Exxon

Credit Default Swaps are one of those clever little financial tools that the finance posse came up with to continue buy and selling things that don't exist. There were a major factor in the recent financial collapse that has cost hundreds of thousands of workers their jobs and homes. What's more they have a murky history: thye were invented by JP Morgan to help Exxon deal with the fall out of a major oil spill:

The Boca Raton meeting first bore fruit when Exxon needed to open a line of credit to cover potential damages of five billion dollars resulting from the 1989 Exxon Valdez oil spill. J. P. Morgan was reluctant to turn down Exxon, which was an old client, but the deal would tie up a lot of reserve cash to provide for the risk of the loans going bad. The so-called Basel rules, named for the town in Switzerland where they were formulated, required that the banks hold eight per cent of their capital in reserve against the risk of outstanding loans. That limited the amount of lending bankers could do, the amount of risk they could take on, and therefore the amount of profit they could make. But, if the risk of the loans could be sold, it logically followed that the loans were now risk-free; and, if that were the case, what would have been the reserve cash could now be freely loaned out. No need to suck up useful capital.

In late 1994, Blythe Masters, a member of the J. P. Morgan swaps team, pitched the idea of selling the credit risk to the European Bank of Reconstruction and Development. So, if Exxon defaulted, the E.B.R.D. would be on the hook for it—and, in return for taking on the risk, would receive a fee from J. P. Morgan. Exxon would get its credit line, and J. P. Morgan would get to honor its client relationship but also to keep its credit lines intact for sexier activities. The deal was so new that it didn’t even have a name: eventually, the one settled on was “credit-default swap."

You could not make it up...