Syria - why the Assads will not give up

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I have avoided writing about Syria because I did not feel I had anything particular to say about this horrific situation. I've never been to Syria - plans to go there last year never happened because of the uprising. I did meet a few Syrians recently when I was in Jordan and talked to them about the situation in their country. The view of those I spoke to was that the Assads, with their violent crackdown against unrest, had made preserving the existing regime impossible. Too much blood had been shed. But should the outside world do more than condemn the violence and impose sanctions? I found this comment on an FT article by Gideon Rachman arguing against western military intervention:

The trouble with threatening Assad and his supporters is that they are now quite literally fighting for their lives and those of their families. If they let up at Homs the opposition will gain traction and soon Damascus will become a war zone. Since the West allowed the brutal slaying of the heads of state of Iraq and Libya, Assad has no option but to fight tooth and nail - otherwise the garrot awaits him, his pretty wife and his children - and he knows Britain, America and France will not lift a finger to give him due process or proper legal protection. A law-based West would have been better than the anarchy instigated by Bush and Blair in other people's countries.

This seems to me is the tragic consequence of the West's wars of choice over the last decade - including drone wars and assassinations in Pakistan, Somalia and Yemen. It makes little sense to demand that Assad 'step down' when their is no means to enforce such a demand. Who are we to tell a foreign head of state to step down? The Assads, like Gaddafi of Libya, can no more 'step down' than could Saddam Hussein in 2003. The only way out for dictators who rule by the gun is death. The horrific deaths of Saddam, Gaddafi and even Osama bin Laden show that the West too lives by and endorses the law of the gun. Unlike Saddam or Gadaffi, the Assads still have a few friends left, primarily Russia. Without this they would be doomed. They are, in the long run, doomed anyway so they might as well go down fighting. They have too much blood on their hands to negotiate now, going back to the massacre in Hama in 1982, when the regime killed perhaps 20,000 people in putting down an armed uprising by the Muslim Brotherhood. Every death of a child makes us want to intervene and stop the violence. But every intervention since Afghanistan, including Libya, shows that military intervention has consequences we cannot know.

Sacha Baron Cohen can't send up his own

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Sacha Baron Cohen's new film is called The Dictator and features - guess what? - a mad Arab dictator. I've nothing against lampooning dictators, but Baron Cohen has spent a large part of his career sending up Muslims - starting with Ali G, the idiotic (and presumably Muslim) rapper from Staines, then the admittedly hilarious Borat, onto Bruno's forays into the Middle East and now this new film. I had an unpleasant feeling when I watched his last film Bruno, particularly when he used Palestinians as part of a sketch where Bruno tries to make peace and confuses Hamas wuth humus. In this clip from Sky News in 2009 Baron Cohen reveals his views about Israel-Palestine when he repeatedly described the Fatah Al Aqsa member who he interviewed in Bruno as a 'terrorist'. He also clearly exploited the guy in the film to get a laugh. That's fine when it's a western politician, not so clever when he's a man who is fighting for his people's right to enjoy freedom in their own land. Essentially Baron Cohen repeats the official Israeli government line toward Palestinians who resist Israeli oppression - they are terrorists, plain and simple. I don't support terror attacks on civilians, but the Israeli government has killed thousands of Palestinian and Arab civilians over the years, and are the true terrorists in this conflict. Bruno meanwhile told US interviewers that the Middle East problem was Muslim fashion - Burkhas made Muslim women want to blow themselves up (geddit?). Is that satire, or just unsubtle anti-Muslim prejudice? May be I just don't get the funny.

Baron Cohen has just put out this unfunny clip as the dictator to complain about the Zionists controlling Hollywood - sorry but the whole mad Arab routine seems stale. If a Syrian sent up a dictator like the bloodthirsty Assads, that would be satire. Satire is a weapon of the powerless against the powerful. But when comedy is used to send up the oppressed and marginalised it is no longer satire, but some other kind of comedy, a bit like the racist, sexist and homophobic jokes of old school standup. I am not saying that Baron Cohen is racist - he is a very funny and at times brilliant film maker. But until he turns his satire on Zionism, Jews and / or Israel, his schtick will fall short. As a Jewish actor-provocateur isn't it time he created a new character, also from the Middle East? After Borat and Bruno, his name could be Bibi.

AMLO gets second crack at Mexico presidency 2012

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I was surprised and gladdened to see that former Mexican  Presidential candidate Andrés Manuel López Obrador (AMLO) was selected as presidential candidate - it actually happened in November in an official poll of left wing voters. Somehow I missed this until now, perhaps because Mexican news is hardly reported at all in the UK - except when it comes to drugs violence. This means AMLO gets a second chance to win the presidency of Mexico, a country racked by a violent drugs insurgency and extremes of poverty and wealth. AMLO and his supporters claim, and have strong evidence to believe, that the presidential election of 2006 was stolen by the ruling PAN party and its candidate Felipe Calderon. His term has seen the worst period of violence in the country for decades with over 50,000 killed. The British media ignores news from Latin America, and the western powers were very happy to see AMLO denied the presidency in 2006, even as they supported the so-called colour revolutions in Eastern Europe. Support for democracy around the world has too often been conditional on the political positions of those demanding democracy and fair elections. Hugo Chavez of Venezuela has been called a dictator in our media for years despite the fact that Venezuelan elections have been declared free and fair many times.The Mexican elite will not want to see AMLO win, given the level corruption and wealth polarisation they have enjoyed there for decades, with strong support from Washington. The whole war on drugs, while utterly failing to deal with the drugs violence, has allowed the US to get ever greater control of Mexican security forces, as it used to have elsewhere in Latin America until the pink tide that swept the rest of the continent.
That political tide has seen American backed governments fall like dominoes right across the continent, leaving only Colombia and Chile firmly in the American camp. AMLO will have to play a very strategic game to win the election in a country that has twice seen the left denied the presidency by the mass theft of votes, first in 1988 and then in 2006. At the moment he appears to be trying to reassure the Mexican business class that he will not expropriate them if he wins.
The Mexican election will fall four months before the US presidential election this November. For some unaccountable reason, the winning candidate has to wait FIVE MONTHS before taking office in December. (I guess that is how long it takes for the former government to hide all the bodies and empty the coffers.) The coincidence of campaigns north and south of the border may just possibly mean that US meddling in the election will be minimised, but I won't hold my breath. If AMLO begins to look like he could win, the Mexican right will definitely be begging their friends in the north to help avert that outcome. Any amicable encounter between AMLO and BO (that's Obama) will be used against Obama by the Republicans.
But for the long suffering Mexicans, the election of AMLO is the best chance they have of turning the corner after one of the darkest decades in the country's history. A late January poll found Andrés Manuel López Obrador in an easy first place with 41.7% support, Enrique Peña Nieto of the former ruling party PRI in second place with 34.18% and Josefina Vázquez Mota of the current ruling rightwing PAN party in third place with 24.12%. Most polls however put the PRI's Nieto 20 points in front, with AMLO on 15-20%. Mexico’s giant Grupo Televisa multimedia company and Grupo Prisa, Spain’s largest media conglomerate, dominate the airwaves and will make it hard for AMLO to get his message across.

Astounding evidence of false flag in Underwear bomb case

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February 16, 2012
Kurt Haskell Exposes Government False Flag Operation During Underwear Bomber Sentencing
by Kurt Haskell
Every victim of a crime in Michigan is entitled to make a statement in open court regarding the impact of the crime on their life. The statement is limited to the victim’s physical, emotional and financial well being as it relates to the crime. Keep that in mind as you read my statement. Below is a copy of the victim impact statement I gave today at the Underwear Bomber sentencing hearing. When reading my statement, keep in mind that I am a practicing attorney in the State of Michigan. In addition, I regularly practice in the Court the hearings are taking place at and therefore, I am somewhat limited as to what I can say. We were limited to 5 minutes each.
I wish to thank the Court for allowing me these 5 minutes to make my statement. My references to the government in this statement refer to the Federal Government excluding this Court and the prosecution. On Christmas Day 2009, my wife and I were returning from an African safari and had a connecting flight through Amsterdam. As we waited for our flight, we sat on the floor next to the boarding gate. What I witnessed while sitting there and subsequent events have changed my life forever. While I sat there, I witnessed Umar dressed in jeans and a white t-shirt, being escorted around security by a man in a tan suit who spoke perfect American English and who aided Umar in boarding without a passport. The airline gate worker initially refused Umar boarding until the man in the tan suit intervened. The event meant nothing to me at the time. Little did I know that Umar would try to kill me a few hours later as our flight approached Detroit. The final 10 minutes of our flight after the attack were the worst minutes of my life. During those 10 minutes I sat paralyzed in fear. Unfortunately, what happened next has had an even greater impact on my life and has saddened me further.
When we landed, I was shocked that our plane taxied up to the gate. I was further shocked that we were forced to sit on the plane for 20 minutes with powder from the so called bomb all over the cabin. The officers that boarded the plane did nothing to ensure our safety and did not check for accomplices or other explosive devices. Several passengers trampled through parts of the bomb as they exited the plane. We were then taken into the terminal with our unchecked carry on bags. Again, there was no concern for our safety even though Umar told the officers that there was another bomb on board as he exited the plane. I wondered why nobody was concerned about our safety, accomplices or other bombs and the lack of concern worried me greatly. I immediately told the FBI my story in order to help catch the accomplice I had seen in Amsterdam. It soon became obvious that the FBI wasn’t interested in what I had to say, which upset me further. For one month the government refused to admit the existence of the man in the tan suit before changing course and admitting his existence in an ABC News article on January 22, 2010. That was the last time the government talked about this man. The video that would prove the truth of my account has never been released. I continue to be emotionally upset that the video has not been released. The Dutch police, meanwhile, in this article (show article), also confirmed that Umar did not show his passport in Amsterdam which also meant that he didn’t go through security as both are in the same line in Amsterdam. It upsets me that the government refuses to admit this fact.
I became further saddened from this case, when Patrick Kennedy of the State Department during Congressional hearings, admitted that Umar was a known terrorist, was being followed, and the U.S. allowed him into the U.S. so that it could catch Umar’s accomplices. I was once again shocked and saddened when Michael Leiter of the National Counter terrorism Center admitted during these same hearings that intentionally letting terrorists into the U.S. was a frequent practice of the U.S. Government. I cannot fully explain my sadness, disappointment and fear when I realized that my government allowed an attack on me intentionally.
During this time, I questioned if my country intentionally put a known terrorist onto my flight with a live bomb. I had many sleepless nights over this issue. My answer came shortly thereafter. In late 2010, the FBI admitted to giving out intentionally defective bombs to the Portland Christmas Tree Bomber,the Wrigley Field Bomber and several others. Further, Mr. Chambers was quoted in the Free Press on January 11, 2011 when he indicated that the government’s own explosives experts had indicated that Umar’s bomb was impossibly defective. I wondered how that could be. Certainly, I thought, Al Qaeda wouldn’t go through all of the trouble to plan such an attack only to provide the terrorist with an impossibly defective bomb.
I attended nearly all of the pretrial hearings. At the hearing on January 28, 2011, I was greatly disappointed by the prosecution’s request to block evidence from Mr. Chambers “as it could then be able to be obtained by third parties, who could use it in a civil suit against the government”. It really bothered me that the government apparently was admitting to wrongdoing of some kind as it admitted that it was concerned it would be sued. It further upset me to know that the government was putting its own interests ahead of those of the passengers.
When I attended the jury selection hearings, I questioned why versions of the same two questions kept coming up, those being:
1. Do you think you’ll be able to tell whether something is actually a bomb? and? 2. Do you realize that sometimes the media doesn’t always tell the truth?
I continued to be greatly saddened at this point as I felt the truth continued to be hidden.
When Umar listed me as his only witness, I was happy to testify, not on his behalf, but on behalf of the truth. I never expected to testify, as my eyewitness account would have been too damaging to the myth that the government and media are putting forward. A mere 5 days after I was announced as a witness, there was an inexplicable guilty plea which exasperated me as I no longer would be testifying.
In closing I will just say that regardless of how the media and government try to shape the public perception of this case, I am convinced that Umar was given an intentionally defective bomb by a U.S. Government agent and placed on our flight without showing a passport or going through security, to stage a false terrorist attack to be used to implement various government policies.
The effect this matter has had on my life has been astounding and due to this case, I will never trust the government in any matter, ever.
In regards to sentencing, nothing I’ve said excuses the fact that Umar tried to kill me. He has waived his valid claim to the entrapment defense. Umar, you are not a great Muslim martyr, you are merely a “Patsy”. I ask the court to impose the mandatory sentence.

What The Iliad can teach today's writers

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I confess I've never read the Iliad, but after reading this review of a new translation in the London Review of Books I will definitely do so. Towards the end of the review Edward Luttwak gives a summary of why Homer has provided us a master class in creative writing:

...had Homer existed (in spite of his deconstruction by Wolf, and in spite of his substitution by Parry/Lord), he would have been the star pupil of any creative writing course. They teach a variety of tricks and techniques for different kinds of writing, but Homer uses absolutely all of them:

the Iliad begins in media res (in the middle of the action) with the action underway, and instead of a tiresome summary of the first nine years of the war, necessary context is supplied by scattered flashbacks; it starts, moreover, with a quarrel on the Achaean side that is a fast way of introducing its two principal protagonists, Agamemnon and Achilles, each acting out at maximum volume to reveal his character immediately; the indispensable enlistment of emotions to make us care for the characters’ fates is fully accomplished, on both sides, most strongly perhaps for Hector as he parts from his infant son and desolate wife for a day of combat, but also for the teenage fighter who grasps Achilles’ leg in a futile plea for mercy in Book 22, and many others; the build-up of tension leading to a great climax is relentless, and achieved not once but twice, first in the long delayed return of Achilles to combat, preceded by dramatic renditions of the bloody losses his absence had caused, and then in the duel between Achilles and Hector, all the more dramatic because of the final loss of nerve of Priam’s most valiant son. On top of that, there are the production values, as Hollywood calls them: lots of special effects ranging from the habitual falling-star incandescence of the gods to the extraordinary revolt of the river god Scamander against Achilles, who had fouled the river with bleeding dead bodies (he would have drowned in a thunderous flood had not the gods intervened); the gorgeous Cecil B. DeMille battle scenes written as if seen from above, sex scenes all the more erotically charged because they are inserted between dramatic peaks and, throughout, the reciprocal balancing of the inevitable human tragedy of mortality with the tragicomedies of the cavorting gods.

It is those gods who supply an excellent reason for the millennial success of the Iliad: the fact that it offers a vision of uncompromised human dignity which was very rare indeed over much of human history. None of the characters is piously god-fearing, even if all fear the harm that the frivolous and often malevolent gods can and do inflict, usually to punish the merest slights. These are gods who have only power and no moral authority – when they have their own battle in Book 21 they are not awesome but ridiculous. Such gods can only evoke grudging compliance rather than sincere devotion – nobody would voluntarily renounce any pleasure for them, let alone die for them.

Undiminished by gods, human dignity is not diminished by secular authority either. Agamemnon commands many more troops than Achilles: he has a hundred ships in Book 2’s catalogue and his brother Menelaus has sixty more, as against fifty. Achilles is therefore forced to give up his prize captive, but he is not forced to be deferential, and roundly insults Agamemnon to his face. It wasn’t necessary to be the issue of Zeus and a great hero to be free from deference, or indeed to insult a king: Thersites, the nearest thing to a bolshie private in the Iliad, loudly insults Agamemnon as well, for which he is not executed for lèse majesté but merely beaten up by Odysseus in another of his ugly roles, as a bully boy.

That is the supremely enhancing vision that has always been offered by the Iliad: human dignity at its fullest, undiminished by piety or deference to gods or kings. In recent centuries, the Iliad could also offer another kind of freedom, from the collective obligations levied on individual freedom by patriotism, and from the more intense compulsions of nationalism, both all the more destructive of freedom when entirely voluntary. Achilles is angry and therefore refuses to fight, and nobody tells him that it is his duty to fight for the Achaean/ Danaan/Argive cause because he is Achaean/ Danaan/Argive, nobody calls him a deserter because there is no presumption of any obligation to serve.

Young Americans prefer socialism to capitalism

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Just saw this interesting debate on Al Jazeera on the gravity and nature of the current capitalist crisis. Loretta Napoleoni, author of Maonomics on China, makes very important historical points about the way capitalist development at a certain point leads to a migration of capital from production to finance. This happened a century ago before World War One, and later led to the 1929 crash. In recent years it led to the housing bubble and deindustrialisation.

By contrast, the Chinese state keeps a firm hand on the financial sector to stop in getting out of control. This is how it has avoided disastrous financial crises of the kind that hit Japan and East Asia in the 1990s. Al Jazeera is not afraid to air these kinds of discussions of big issues and, unlike the BBC, it welcomes non-orthodox voices on to its discussions. Guests with cogent critiques of capitalism are rare creatures on the BBC. When they are allowed on, like Ann Pettifor, they are generally outgunned. Our mainstream media generally sticks to an orthodox discussion of the problems, mainly dealing with its technocratic aspects and also the response of the politicians to the crisis. For example, how often is the Greek austerity drive imposed by the EU questioned or described as it should be - as a form of madness - on the BBC?

At the moment, the main focus of anger in society and the media is bankers and the financial system, rather than capitalism itself. That could change if the crisis is not resolved. What is probably most troubling for conservative politicians and big business, is they don't actually have a way of turning back the clock to before 2008. That means they have to come up with new answers to satisfy a population suffering from long-term economic stagnation and unemployment.

State intervention and redistribution are the traditional responses to capitalist slump, but the orthodoxy of the last few decades rules this out and offers only austerity (now that borrowing more is not possible), which seems to be making things worse.

Will this lead to a revival of socialism? Not so far - although a Pew poll in the US in December showed a striking generational divide with a surprise majority of young Americans now favouring socialism over capitalism. This could mean that as the Cold War generation is eclipsed by a new Global Crash generation, the negative view of socialism created by the old Soviet bloc is gradually being replaced by a new one more sympathetic to socialism and antipathetic to 21st century capitalism. Even a 31% positive view of socialism among all Americans is surprisingly high given the amount of anti-communist propaganda they have digested over many decades.

As Huffington Post reported

The poll found that while Americans overall tend to oppose socialism by a strong margin -- 60 percent say they have a negative view of it, versus just 31 percent who say they have a positive view -- socialism has more fans than opponents among the 18-29 crowd. Forty-nine percent of people in that age bracket say they have a positive view of socialism; only 43 percent say they have a negative view.

And while those numbers aren't very far apart, it's noteworthy that they were reversed just 20 months ago, when Pew conducted a similar poll. In that survey, published May 2010, 43 percent of people age 18-29 said they had a positive view of socialism, and 49 percent said their opinion was negative.

....Indeed, the Pew poll also found that just 46 percent of people age 18-29 have positive views of capitalism, and 47 percent have negative views -- making this the only age group where support for socialism outweighs support for capitalism.

Americans tend to think of countries where the state plays more than an adminstrative and military role as socialist. Hence they used to describe not just China and Russia but also Europe as 'socialist' because of the welfare state and state control of some industries. 'Emerging' countries like China, leftist Latin America and even the Gulf states are broadly state capitalist, and do not adhere to the 'free market'. Their rulers tend not to not simply do the bidding of corporations but look out for the interests of wider society. While they also have grave social problems, including vast inequality, their economies are growing and they at least appear to be tackling poverty, rather than creating more of it.

Bugsy Malone songs keep playing in my head

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I watched Bugsy Malone for the first time in years on Sunday with Tanushka and Amali - and enjoyed every minute. I still love that film, especially the songs. Since Sunday I can't get them out of my head - Bad Guys ("We coulda been anything that we wanted to be...with all the talent we had"), Tomorrow, the lament of the wold be dancer always sweeping the floor at Fat Sam's, Tallulah - how saucy are the lines delivered by 13 year old Jody Foster? ("No one but Tallulah will treat you finer, Tallulah got her training in North Carolina!")? The kid in me is still thrilled by the Splurge Gun used by Dandy Dan's gang, and of course the peddle cars! Poor old Knuckles blowing himself up with the home made splurge gun....
This time I noticed the homespun 'why don't we all just be good instead of being bad' philosophy which I guess works for a film aimed at kids. The film isn't supposed to be a treatise on Prohibition and the Depression. And those poor down and outs - why don't they just 'give it a try? - 'You don't have to sit around, depressed about the way that luck deceived you?' Oh yes, mass unemployment and poverty is caused by bad luck...but that's my grown-up head getting all analytical again, if only I could just stick with the nostalgia I feel for a movie I saw on its release when I was just 8.
That's probably why it affects me so much - it was the same impressionable age I saw the original Planet of the Apes. I mention Planet of the Apes because it was on straight after Bugsy on Film 4 on Sunday, creating a perfect double bill of films that helped form me in my early years.In total contrast to Bugsy, Planet is a very adult and strikingly original imagining of the consequences of human intolerance, leading ultimately to the destruction of human civilisation. I was deeply upset when I saw it with my father for the first time. I think he thought mistakenly that he was taking me to see a fun fantasy adventure, rather than a disturbing and violent science fiction classic.  Planet of the Apes became an obsession of mine - in the school playground I constantly re-enacted the scene in which the humans are hunted by apes on horseback, the first moment in the film where the astronauts led by Charlton Heston are confronted by the terrifying reality of the upside down world they have landed on. When I was eight, I was truly shocked that three of the four astronauts could be killed before the end of the first reel.
This film, with its obvious parallels to the politics of race in the United States, informed me right up until the writing of my first novel The Vanishing Shore, which imagines a world that departs from our own about 1600 and sees its protagonist, an English intelligence agent, enslaved by an Asiatic people who live in the lands we now know as the United States. I also love the soundtrack to Planet by Gerry Goldsmith - the way he uses the ape hunter's horn as the emblematic note, and the strange swishing sound of time and space upturning the world we think we know.

100 best opening lines of novels

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I've been considering the opening line of my novel lately, and reworking it because it became apparent how important this 'elevator pitch' is for the reader. I started reading some posts on the 100 best opening lines of novels. Some I had read, many not, and most deserve the accolade. It also makes a great game trying to guess them - and it's surprisingly hard. Then to choose your favourite...

Here are the ones chosen by Infoplease

1. Call me Ishmael. —Herman Melville, Moby-Dick (1851)
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2. It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a single man in possession of a good fortune, must be in want of a wife. —Jane Austen, Pride and Prejudice (1813)
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3. A screaming comes across the sky. —Thomas Pynchon, Gravity’s Rainbow (1973)
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4. Many years later, as he faced the firing squad, Colonel Aureliano Buendía was to remember that distant afternoon when his father took him to discover ice. —Gabriel García Márquez, One Hundred Years of Solitude (1967; trans. Gregory Rabassa)
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5. Lolita, light of my life, fire of my loins. —Vladimir Nabokov, Lolita (1955)
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6. Happy families are all alike; every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way. —Leo Tolstoy, Anna Karenina (1877; trans. Constance Garnett)
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7. riverrun, past Eve and Adam’s, from swerve of shore to bend of bay, brings us by a commodius vicus of recirculation back to Howth Castle and Environs. —James Joyce, Finnegans Wake (1939)
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8. It was a bright cold day in April, and the clocks were striking thirteen. —George Orwell, 1984 (1949)
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9. It was the best of times, it was the worst of times, it was the age of wisdom, it was the age of foolishness, it was the epoch of belief, it was the epoch of incredulity, it was the season of Light, it was the season of Darkness, it was the spring of hope, it was the winter of despair. —Charles Dickens, A Tale of Two Cities (1859)
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10. I am an invisible man. —Ralph Ellison, Invisible Man (1952)
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11. The Miss Lonelyhearts of the New York Post-Dispatch (Are you in trouble?—Do-you-need-advice?—Write-to-Miss-Lonelyhearts-and-she-will-help-you) sat at his desk and stared at a piece of white cardboard. —Nathanael West, Miss Lonelyhearts (1933)
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12. You don’t know about me without you have read a book by the name of The Adventures of Tom Sawyer; but that ain’t no matter. —Mark Twain, Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (1885)
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13. Someone must have slandered Josef K., for one morning, without having done anything truly wrong, he was arrested. —Franz Kafka, The Trial (1925; trans. Breon Mitchell)
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14. You are about to begin reading Italo Calvino’s new novel, If on a winter’s night a traveler. —Italo Calvino, If on a winter’s night a traveler (1979; trans. William Weaver)
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15. The sun shone, having no alternative, on the nothing new. —Samuel Beckett, Murphy (1938)
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16. If you really want to hear about it, the first thing you’ll probably want to know is where I was born, and what my lousy childhood was like, and how my parents were occupied and all before they had me, and all that David Copperfield kind of crap, but I don’t feel like going into it, if you want to know the truth. —J. D. Salinger, The Catcher in the Rye (1951)
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17. Once upon a time and a very good time it was there was a moocow coming down along the road and this moocow that was coming down along the road met a nicens little boy named baby tuckoo. —James Joyce, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (1916)
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18. This is the saddest story I have ever heard. —Ford Madox Ford, The Good Soldier (1915)
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19. I wish either my father or my mother, or indeed both of them, as they were in duty both equally bound to it, had minded what they were about when they begot me; had they duly considered how much depended upon what they were then doing;—that not only the production of a rational Being was concerned in it, but that possibly the happy formation and temperature of his body, perhaps his genius and the very cast of his mind;—and, for aught they knew to the contrary, even the fortunes of his whole house might take their turn from the humours and dispositions which were then uppermost:—Had they duly weighed and considered all this, and proceeded accordingly,—I am verily persuaded I should have made a quite different figure in the world, from that, in which the reader is likely to see me. —Laurence Sterne, Tristram Shandy (1759–1767)
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.20. Whether I shall turn out to be the hero of my own life, or whether that station will be held by anybody else, these pages must show. —Charles Dickens, David Copperfield (1850)

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21. Stately, plump Buck Mulligan came from the stairhead, bearing a bowl of lather on which a mirror and a razor lay crossed. —James Joyce, Ulysses (1922)

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22. It was a dark and stormy night; the rain fell in torrents, except at occasional intervals, when it was checked by a violent gust of wind which swept up the streets (for it is in London that our scene lies), rattling along the house-tops, and fiercely agitating the scanty flame of the lamps that struggled against the darkness. —Edward George Bulwer-Lytton, Paul Clifford (1830)

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23. One summer afternoon Mrs. Oedipa Maas came home from a Tupperware party whose hostess had put perhaps too much kirsch in the fondue to find that she, Oedipa, had been named executor, or she supposed executrix, of the estate of one Pierce Inverarity, a California real estate mogul who had once lost two million dollars in his spare time but still had assets numerous and tangled enough to make the job of sorting it all out more than honorary. —Thomas Pynchon, The Crying of Lot 49 (1966)

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24. It was a wrong number that started it, the telephone ringing three times in the dead of night, and the voice on the other end asking for someone he was not. —Paul Auster, City of Glass (1985)

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25. Through the fence, between the curling flower spaces, I could see them hitting. —William Faulkner, The Sound and the Fury (1929)

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26. 124 was spiteful. —Toni Morrison, Beloved (1987)

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27. Somewhere in la Mancha, in a place whose name I do not care to remember, a gentleman lived not long ago, one of those who has a lance and ancient shield on a shelf and keeps a skinny nag and a greyhound for racing. —Miguel de Cervantes, Don Quixote (1605; trans. Edith Grossman)

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28. Mother died today. —Albert Camus, The Stranger (1942; trans. Stuart Gilbert)

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29. Every summer Lin Kong returned to Goose Village to divorce his wife, Shuyu. —Ha Jin, Waiting (1999)

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30. The sky above the port was the color of television, tuned to a dead channel. —William Gibson, Neuromancer (1984)

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31. I am a sick man . . . I am a spiteful man. —Fyodor Dostoyevsky, Notes from Underground (1864; trans. Michael R. Katz)

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32. Where now? Who now? When now? —Samuel Beckett, The Unnamable (1953; trans. Patrick Bowles)

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33. Once an angry man dragged his father along the ground through his own orchard. “Stop!” cried the groaning old man at last, “Stop! I did not drag my father beyond this tree.” —Gertrude Stein, The Making of Americans (1925)

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34. In a sense, I am Jacob Horner. —John Barth, The End of the Road (1958)

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35. It was like so, but wasn’t. —Richard Powers, Galatea 2.2 (1995)

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36. —Money . . . in a voice that rustled. —William Gaddis, J R (1975)

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37. Mrs. Dalloway said she would buy the flowers herself. —Virginia Woolf, Mrs. Dalloway (1925)

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38. All this happened, more or less. —Kurt Vonnegut, Slaughterhouse-Five (1969)

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39. They shoot the white girl first. —Toni Morrison, Paradise (1998)

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40. For a long time, I went to bed early. —Marcel Proust, Swann’s Way (1913; trans. Lydia Davis)

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41. The moment one learns English, complications set in. —Felipe Alfau, Chromos (1990)

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42. Dr. Weiss, at forty, knew that her life had been ruined by literature. —Anita Brookner, The Debut (1981)

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43. I was the shadow of the waxwing slain / By the false azure in the windowpane; —Vladimir Nabokov, Pale Fire (1962)

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44. Ships at a distance have every man’s wish on board. —Zora Neale Hurston, Their Eyes Were Watching God (1937)

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45. I had the story, bit by bit, from various people, and, as generally happens in such cases, each time it was a different story. —Edith Wharton, Ethan Frome (1911)

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46. Ages ago, Alex, Allen and Alva arrived at Antibes, and Alva allowing all, allowing anyone, against Alex’s admonition, against Allen’s angry assertion: another African amusement . . . anyhow, as all argued, an awesome African army assembled and arduously advanced against an African anthill, assiduously annihilating ant after ant, and afterward, Alex astonishingly accuses Albert as also accepting Africa’s antipodal ant annexation.  —Walter Abish, Alphabetical Africa (1974)

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47. There was a boy called Eustace Clarence Scrubb, and he almost deserved it. —C. S. Lewis, The Voyage of the Dawn Treader (1952)

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48. He was an old man who fished alone in a skiff in the Gulf Stream and he had gone eighty-four days now without taking a fish. —Ernest Hemingway, The Old Man and the Sea (1952)

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49. It was the day my grandmother exploded. —Iain M. Banks, The Crow Road (1992)

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50. I was born twice: first, as a baby girl, on a remarkably smogless Detroit day in January of 1960; and then again, as a teenage boy, in an emergency room near Petoskey, Michigan, in August of 1974. —Jeffrey Eugenides, Middlesex (2002)

Alleged Iranian attacks on Israeli targets - real or false flag?

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The countdown to another war in the Middle East is accelerating with these new incidents in India, Georgia and Thailand. BBC News carried a propagandistic piece tonight from a US Navy vessel in the Persian Gulf that seemed to be preparing us for war.

Not being so widely reported is the fact that Iran has accused Israel of working with an Iranian terrorist group to assassinate the country's nuclear scientists. Experts say that a possible partnership between Israel and the MEK, also known as the People's Mujahideen, is not a surprising match, according to CNN.

Iran has been blamed for these latest attacks but Jane's analysts is not so sure:

Will Hartley, editor of IHS Jane's Terrorism & Insurgency Centre, said: "While Israel's claims that Iran and Hezbollah are behind the attacks in India and Georgia cannot be discounted, at this stage it's impossible to substantiate such allegations, and it is unclear why Iran would risk an attack on Israeli interests in India, when India has been broadly supportive of Iran during the recent nuclear sanctions debate, and is one of Iran's most important trade partners.
"The alleged perpetrator of today's attempted attack in Thailand reportedly possessed an Iranian passport, possibly lending credence to Israel's allegation that Iran is waging some kind of international campaign. However, the attacks in India, Georgia and now Thailand have all been highly amateurish, and lack the sophistication that would normally be expected from an operation executed by either Hezbollah or Iran's own external operations wing, the Quds Force."

Israel is the world's expert at faking passports so it cannot be assumed that an Iranian passport necessarily proves Iran is behind the Thai or the other attacks. 'False flag' operations are terrorist attacks that are blamed on other powers than those who actually committed them. Some of these have possibly taken place in Syria, perpetrated by the Syrian regime. But Syria is not the only country that may have done this kind of thing - see Israel's ties to MEK of Iran. Rudy Guiliani, the Mayor of New York on 9/11 who made a personal fortune from security consultancies arising from the 9/11 attacks, is one of many in the US security intelligence complex pushing to have MEK removed from the US terrorist list.

This is murky stuff - the very theme of my novel The Overwhelming.

News eerily follows the plot of my novel

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I'm not claiming special predictive powers but I have seen two stories today that strongly reflect the plot and themes of my novel The Overwhelming - now on Kindle and Lulu.com.



The first story is about a terror plot in London to blow up the Stock Exchange. The second is about the United States ratcheting up the claims about the alleged threat from Iran to the West. Both these themes - of domestic terrorism and western nations' plans for a new Middle East War - are central to The Overwhelming. The headline of the second piece reads

Iranian attack on America and allies increasingly likely - intelligence chief

but it should really have been 'American attack on Iran increasingly likely'

The following statement from the US intelligence chief is the clearest signal yet that the US military and political establishment is preparing for war with Iran.

Presenting his annual "worldwide threat assessment" to Congress, Clapper said an alleged plot to blow up the Saudi ambassador in Washington last year, which the US blamed on the Iran's Revolutionary Guard, "shows that some Iranian officials – probably including the supreme leader Ali Khamenei – have changed their calculus and are now more willing to conduct an attack in the United States in response to real or perceived US actions that threaten the regime."

Iran is the paramount threat to US and Israeli interests in the Middle East. A potential war n the dying days of the Bush adminstration - to top off the War on Terror conflicts of the last decade - was averted because the US was over committed in Iraq and Afghanistan. But America is now - mostly - out of Afghanistan and its forces are available for a new war.

We have been here before in the build up to war with Iraq ten years ago. Again we have an unlovable dictatorship sitting on top of huge deposits of oil / gas. Both regimes were implacable enemies of Israel. A casus belli was needed to justify a war against Iraq. 9/11 created the atmosphere to convince western publics that war was justified, even though the evidence of threat from Iraq was tenuous. The same is the case with Iran. Any nuclear threat is still years off. Iran has not attacked any of its neighbours for centuries - in fact, it has been attacked many times. So plots such as the unlikely one in America last year against the Saudi ambassador appear to be cooked up to justify a pre-emptive strike. This is what is now being planned.

People must be ready to resist this war drive. It is real and we know that America, Britain and Israel are all capable of going to war on false pretences. Is this really going to happen again? I fear it is.