2010

[T]his readiness to assume the guilt for the threats to our environment is deceptively reassuring: We like to be guilty since, if we are guilty, it all depends on us. We pull the strings of the catastrophe, so we can also save ourselves simply by changing our lives. What is really hard for us (at least in the West) to accept is that we are reduced to the role of a passive observer who sits and watches what our fate will be. To avoid this impotence, we engage in frantic, obsessive activities. We recycle old paper, we buy organic food, we install long-lasting light bulbs__hatever__ust so we can be sure that we are doing something. We make our individual contribution like the soccer fan who supports his team in front of a TV screen at home, shouting and jumping from his seat, in the belief that this will somehow influence the game's outcome.

New Labour leader Ed Miliband announces plan to 'make this party slightly less unelectable by 2015'. He added: 'I am Ed, the Almighty One.'Defeated brother David Miliband overheard muttering: 'Now I know how Wayne Christ felt after little Jesus came along.

What we have witnessed in our own time is the death of universities as centres of critique. Since Margaret Thatcher, the role of academia has been to service the status quo, not challenge it in the name of justice, tradition, imagination, human welfare, the free play of the mind or alternative visions of the future. We will not change this simply by increasing state funding of the humanities as opposed to slashing it to nothing. We will change it by insisting that a critical reflection on human values and principles should be central to everything that goes on in universities, not just to the study of Rembrandt or Rimbaud.

McChrystal's defenders at the Pentagon were making the case Tuesday that the president and his men_(the McChrystal snipers spared Hillary)__ust put aside their hurt feelings about being painted as weak sisters. Obama should not fire the serially insubordinate general, they reasoned, because that would undermine the mission in Afghanistan, and if that happens, then Obama would be further weakened.So the commander in chief can be bad-mouthed as weak by the military but then he can't punish the military because that would make him weak? It's the same sort of pass-the-Advil vicious circle reasoning the military always uses.

So this is where all the vapid talk about the 'soul' of the universe is actually headed. Once the hard-won principles of reason and science have been discredited, the world will not pass into the hands of credulous herbivores who keep crystals by their sides and swoon over the poems of Khalil Gibran. The 'vacuum' will be invaded instead by determined fundamentalists of every stripe who already know the truth by means of revelation and who actually seek real and serious power in the here and now. One thinks of the painstaking, cloud-dispelling labor of British scientists from Isaac Newton to Joseph Priestley to Charles Darwin to Ernest Rutherford to Alan Turing and Francis Crick, much of it built upon the shoulders of Galileo and Copernicus, only to see it casually slandered by a moral and intellectual weakling from the usurping House of Hanover. An awful embarrassment awaits the British if they do not declare for a republic based on verifiable laws and principles, both political and scientific.

For the hundreds of thousands of Californians in gay and lesbian households who are managing their day-to-day lives, this decision affirms the full legal protections and safeguards I believe everyone deserves.

The socioeconomic impact of such a minor outburst is due to our technological development (air travel)__ century ago, such an eruption would have passed unnoticed. Technological development makes us more independent from nature. At the same time, at a different level, it makes us more dependent on nature__ whims.

Military guys are rarely as smart as they think they are, and they've never gotten over the fact that civilians run the military.

This week, Zuma was quoted as saying, 'When the British came to our country, they said everything we are doing was barbaric, was wrong, inferior in whatever way.' But the serious critique of Zuma is not about who is a barbarian and who is civilised. It is about good governance, and this is a universal value, as relevant to an African village as it is to Westminster. If you are unable to keep your appetites in check, you are inevitably going to live beyond your means. And this means you are going to become vulnerable to patronage and even corruption. That is why Jacob Zuma's 'polygamy' is his achilles heel.

Here was a temporary solution. Parole would get Mofokeng and Mokoena out of jail as quickly as possible. Other details could be sorted out later. I accompanied Nyambi to Kroonstad jail at the end of October and remember that as he told Mofokeng and Mokoena the news__hat they would be home for Christmas__miles slowly but surely transformed the sombre, cautious expressions on their faces.Big problem: it was discovered in December, a full two months after the judgment was made, that the court order does not mention the NCCS at all. Consequently, the NCCS interpreted the court's order as having removed the NCCS's jurisdiction to deal with any "lifers" sentenced pre-1994. The members of the NCCS packed their briefcases and went home.No one knows why the judgment didn't mention the NCCS; maybe the judge who wrote it, Justice Bess Nkabinde, simply didn't know how the parole system operates; but eight of her fellow judges, the best in the land, found with her.The Mofokeng and Mokoena families, who are from 'the poorest of the poor', as the ANC likes to say, are distraught.But the rest__he law men, the politicians and the government ministers__ell, quite frankly, they don't seem to give a fig. Zuma has gone on holiday, to host his famous annual Christmas party for children. Mapisa-Nqakula has also gone on holiday. Mofokeng and Mokoena remain where they were put 17 years ago, despite not having committed any crime.

There wasn't even enough meat to make proper fun of [....] I keep waiting for somebody else to come on TV, maybe a cabinet member, to read the real speech, the one that tells us ... I dunno ... stuff. Seriously, sorority girls have done the Walk of Shame home from frat parties feeling more satisfied.

When first asked if he would grant an interview with TIME, Greene responded by asking a question of his own: 'Does the candidate get paid?

If Feingold does it, if he wins this race in this year, it will not be as just another Democratic senator. It will not be as a maverick, nor even as an idealist. It will be as a signal that maybe, just maybe, people power can still beat the money power. That senators aren't just extensions of parties and presidents, and that politics can be about something more than Democratic toothpaste versus Republican toothpaste.

Monotonous talk of the end of American hegemony, the universal cliché of the period, is mostly a way of avoiding mounting a serious opposition to it.

[F]or the most part football these days is the opium of the people, not to speak of their crack cocaine. Its icon is the impeccably Tory, slavishly conformist Beckham. The Reds are no longer the Bolsheviks. Nobody serious about political change can shirk the fact that the game has to be abolished. And any political outfit that tried it on would have about as much chance of power as the chief executive of BP has in taking over from Oprah Winfrey.

I thought I was getting away from politics for a while. But I now realise that the vuvuzela is to these World Cup blogs what Julius Malema is to my politics columns: a noisy, but sadly unavoidable irritant. With both Malema and the vuvuzela, their importance is far overstated. Malema: South Africa's Robert Mugabe? I think not. The vuvuzela: an archetypal symbol of 'African culture?' For African civilisation's sake, I seriously hope not.Both are getting far too much airtime than they deserve. Both have thrust themselves on to the world stage through a combination of hot air and raucous bluster. Both amuse and enervate in roughly equal measure. And both are equally harmless in and of themselves _ though in Malema's case, it is the political tendency that he represents, and the right-wing interests that lie behind his diatribes that is dangerous. With the vuvu I doubt if there are such nefarious interests behind the scenes; it may upset the delicate ears of the middle classes, both here and at the BBC, but I suspect that South Africa's democracy will not be imperilled by a mass-produced plastic horn.

The great cause of the new Republican intake is the reduction of the deficit but to anyone seeking evidence of sincere attempts at deficit-reduction the evidence is baffling. The Republicans showed before Christmas that they would seek to reduce the deficit but not when it came to a matter of the tax breaks that had aggravated the deficit in the first place.Now there's a date set for the abolition of Barack Obama's healthcare plan, parts of which only came into operation at the start of this month. The Republicans are out to destroy the plan. Or, more precisely, to pretend to destroy the plan in the name of making good on election pledges. The measure won't get past the Senate.But suppose it did get past the Senate, what effect would this have on the deficit? The answer is it would aggravate the deficit. Somehow, somewhere, there's an override mechanism that makes destroying Obamacare more important than destroying the deficit. If only one could figure out how it works.

Proximity to power has an unsurprising ability to mutate a politician's spinal cord into bright yellow jelly.