Here’s another reminder that Berlusconi is not the euroskeptic that is so often hoped for by conservatives on this side of the Atlantic:

“The Italian and German governments have agreed to seek a quick adoption of the European Constitution, with as few changes as possible.

The agreement to limit the number of amendments made by governments when they pour over the document later this year is being seen as an attempt by Rome to place relations between the two countries on a better footing.

Meeting with his Italian counterpart on Saturday in Verona the German Chancellor Gerhard Schröder spoke in favour of having the draft Constitution adopted without changes.

Pleased with the draft presented by the Convention on the Future of Europe Berlin is keen to see that the agreement is not watered down.

Whoever opens the packet, will not manage to seal it again, the German Chancellor warned.

It looks like he has now secured Italian support, which will be essential. “

Former East German skater Katarina Witt may be as easy on the eye as she is hard on the ice, but her new venture, hosting a TV show on the brighter side of the dictatorship under which she once flourished is in, to put it mildly, very poor taste. The London Independent picks up the story:

“During the four-part series, she will interview former East German personalities but avoid politics. "It is an entertainment show," Ms Witt said. "It is time to show we also had fun in the German Democratic Republic." To drive home the publicity message, the ice-queen sports a blue communist Free German Youth movement shirt.”

[As] Günter Nooke, an eastern German conservative Christian Democrat politician, said: "What would be the reaction in Germany if television produced similar programmes about the Third Reich?"

Quite.

Art Torres is Chairman of the California Democratic Party, and this is what he told the LA Times:

Schwarzenegger is "at the very least a misogynist I think women have to ask themselves, is this the kind of governor they want?"

Quite why Art Torres is in a position to tell women what they have to ask themselves escapes me.

What is it about state attorneys general? In an entertaining piece over at Reason Nick Gillespie discusses their latest foray into the absurd:

“In a stunning, courageous admission that they no longer have any serious work left to do, attorneys general in two dozen states recently sent a letter to the Motion Picture Association of America asking that Hollywood minimize smoking in movies so youngsters won't be gulled into lighting up. Taking a page from movie gangsters, who tend to threaten vaguely rather than make explicit demands, the attorneys general didn't insist on a specific remedy. Rather, according to a spokesman for one of the signatories, California Attorney General Bill Lockyer, they were merely expressing "concern for the health of our kids."

The whole article is well worth reading, but it’s interesting to see that Lockyer’s spokesman, one Tom Dresslar (a man who has apparently no problem about working for a rape fan), concedes, “We're not saying any law has been broken.” Despite that, these repulsive busybodies have decided to try their hands at a little intimidation, and, as usual on these occasions of bureaucratic overreach, they cite, sigh, ‘the kids,’ a justification more emetic than any cigarette could ever be.

In his piece Nick Gillespie points out some other lessons ‘the kids’ could learn from the movies including that “Car chases can solve problems,” and “Mutation is a viable path to self-improvement”, but if the attorneys general are really concerned about this issue, I have a modest proposal.

From the Daily Telegraph :

”A Shakespeare test that requires no knowledge of the playwright's texts is being reviewed after complaints from teachers, exam officials said yesterday.

Pupils could pass the key Stage Three paper, sat by 14-year-olds, without reading any Shakespeare as it asks questions relating to "themes" rather than demanding specific understanding of his plays.

One question on Henry V states that the king was regarded as a hero and asks candidates to write about "people you admire".

Another refers to the importance of appearance in Twelfth Night and asks pupils: "How important is what you wear? Write your views as if contributing to a piece in a teenage magazine."

I wonder what the Derb has to say about this.

There’s nothing new about the anti-globalization movement – it’s just another chance for a small self-selected elite to demonstrate its moral superiority over the rest of us, and as usual this latest generation of prigs, saints and busybodies is doing so by demonstrations of conspicuous non-consumption, the ascetic self-indulgence that has persisted through generations of the annoying, from hermits to Savanarola, to early Bolsheviks to the grotesques at the Center for ‘Science’ in the ‘Public Interest' and to far too many others. Unfortunately, these sorts of people are never just content to pose – they have programs to work out, plans to set and laws to impose – all so the rest of us can’t make decisions of which they disapprove. And if their actions involve theft, confiscation, compulsion or the destruction of private property, so much the better.

Here’s a prime example from France:

“The McDonalds franchise located in Paris at Strasbourg St. Denis has been shut down by striking workers for the better part of a year. Now the strikers are occupying the McDonalds and using it as a storefront to sell t-shirts to fund striking French artists and anything that José Bove [the ‘peasant’ totalitarian who destroyed another McDonalds] is up to at the moment. So here we have the confiscation of private property that has been turned into a squat, and illegal commerce, and nothing is done about it.”

Via the blogger at Merde in France (as its name would suggest, this blog contains, ahem, ‘indelicate’ language.

The tragedy of all those deaths in France during the recent heatwave is now well-known, but their underlying cause still remains unclear. Was the fraying of traditional bonds to blame or structural problems in the French healthcare sector? Perhaps, but this piece by Cato’s Patrick Michaels suggests that a more mechanical problem may be to blame : the lack of air-conditioning:

”The mathematics of this problem are terribly transparent. In order to meet their self-imposed targets from the Kyoto Protocol (search) on global warming, European nations already have taxed energy, but they have not done enough. Consequently, even more restrictions are being proposed, especially by the German government. Unaffordable air conditioning will become even more expensive, killing more and more Europeans the next time the temperature reaches what passes for a few degrees above what is normal in Dallas.

Europe has effectively imposed a continuous blackout on air conditioning, and now it is paying the price.

Some people will point to the hundreds of people who died in the infamous July 1995 Chicago heat wave and wonder how we could have ignored this obvious tragedy. We didn't.

Normally many more die on the poorer South Side of the city, but not in 1995. A power outage hit the affluent North Side early on and the air conditioning went out. As they say, Q.E.D.

And as for the heat-prostrated people of Europe, it's too bad that the Kyoto Protocol will do nothing measurable about the Earth's mean temperature for the forseeable future. But it will kill thousands and thousands more in France, Germany and England, where energy taxes are enormous, creating an invisible blackout of lifesaving air conditioning.”

Intriguing.

That Islamic militancy is a threat to the Enlightenment values of the West is, one would think, obvious, and it's something that needs a vigorous intellectual response as a supplement to the police work of the current anti-terrorist campaign. Despite this, hogtied by PC and the shibboleths of multiculturalism, this is an approach that politicians seem curiously unwilling to try. Still, in her address to a "conference of chairmen of Islamic centres and Imams in Europe," the Austrian foreign minister shows that she, at least, is beginning to take some tentative steps in this direction:

"Let me, from my viewpoint as Austrian foreign minister, briefly outline the nature of these expectations on the basis of a few issues, which I hope you will discuss in the course of your meeting and take into consideration in your "Graz Declaration":

Are human rights merely compatible with Islam, as is written in the agenda for this conference, or do the Islamic institutions in Europe have specific ways and means of defending and advocating human rights, both actively and by initiative…"

Blogger Bill in Austria has more.

Here’s a speech from thuggish Micheal Martin, Ireland’s Minister for Health and, inevitably, Children in which he attempts to justify his proposed ban on smoking in bars and restaurants. As usual, ‘passive smoking’ is used in an attempt to justify this legislation, but read Martin's speech carefully and see if you can find anything that tries to quantify this supposed risk.

Martin clearly has as much contempt for science as he does for the intelligence of his electors.

This grubbily conformist little website is an EU-funded (EU taxpayer-funded, in other words) effort to dissuade teens from smoking. They shouldn’t of course, but there’s something more than a little patronizing in the way that the EU’s bureaucrats think it’s any of their business. Still, Brussels clearly spared no expense when it came to their text of their message:

“The cigarette industry does more than merely advertise a deathly product. Sophisticated marketing and promotion measures, from tombola actions and the distribution of free packets, over the sponsoring of sport and music events, up to the employment of a wide range of promotional items rouse curiosity in adolescents and animate them to give it a try.

The annual expenses of the tobacco multis for promotion activities and special forms of advertising amount to more than 7.4 milliard US Dollars in the USA alone – by far the largest item in the marketing budget of cigarette producers. This way, campaign motifs and brand names become a part of whole generations’ daily lives. The familiarity with the brand swamps out the deadly effect of cigarettes in the consumer’s consciousness. “

This is, apparently, written in what the EU considers to be English.

Here’s an intriguing article from the Guardian on Scottish food, an often-underrated cuisine. The health brigade will be both upset and gratified by this extract:

”The abuse of fatty foods (as well as alcohol, cigarettes and heroin) can only, in the end, be put down to a particularly phlegmatic "Get tae f***!" Rab C Nesbitt/Braveheart side to the national character, which, it has to be said, has held us in pretty good stead over the years. That and, of course, the traditional Scottish hatred of waste.

"I would hate to die with a heart attack and waste a good liver, kidney and brains," said famous folksinger Hamish Imlach. "When I die, I want everything to be knackered." And he did of course, aged 56. “

Sorry to return to London’s Congestion Charge again, but seeing socialism in action does have a certain ‘scared straight’ value to it. Add to this the certainty that some American municipality will probably give this dumb idea a try, then publicizing Red Ken’s crusade against cars may have some value to an audience over here.

The indispensable Iain Murray has now weighed in on this controversy:

“Livingstone… told the Daily Telegraph newspaper that, "The aim of congestion charging was always to cut traffic and congestion, not to make money." It is clear, therefore, that Livingstone was not interested in a market mechanism and finding an appropriate equilibrium between revenue and congestion. Instead, the congestion fee is revealed as what a lot of us thought it was to begin with -- an environmental tax.

Yet it is not a traditional form of tax. Ken Livingstone has seen free to buy what he sees as environmental benefits by diverting large sums from Londoners' pocketbooks (the average person paying the charge will probably end up paying well over $1,500 a year) into the coffers of Capita. The economic term for Capita's role is "rent-seeker" -- a person or company that seeks to secure guaranteed income streams by using regulation to appropriate the income of other persons or companies (in recent American history, the most notable rent-seeker was Enron). It appears that Londoners are not happy about this. Over 100,000 people are currently refusing to pay penalty notices.”

Failure, incompetence and coercion: classic socialism imposed by a man who is, at heart, just another 1960s boomer who won’t go away.

Of course, there’s another topic here – why the left hate the auto so much – but that’s a discussion for another time.

London Bridge is falling down falling down falling down
Poi s'ascose nel foco che gli affina
Quando fiam uti chelidaon--O swallow swallow
Le Prince d'Aquitaine a la tour abolie
These fragments I have shored against my ruins
Why then Ile fit you. Hieronymo's mad againe.
Datta. Dayadhvam. Damyata.
Shantih shantih shantih.

An email:

Ramesh must have been having a bad day yesterday. The editorial page
article by Jost et. al. defending their research on political
conservatism is simply terrible. It is terrible not because of what it
says but rather how it distorts what they previously said in thier
research. They claim that they did this research as arm's length
unbiased academic research and their findings have been distorted by an
irresponsible press. As much as I hate to defend the press, they
interpreted what Jost et. al. was saying in their reprehensible articles
correctly. (Indeed, the cause of the press's interpretation was most
likely a Stanford university press release that described the research.
Having read the original articles, I do not believe that a journalist
would have the patience to read the things in the first place.) Anyway
several points need to be made.

1. The press did not create the pejorative terms to describe
conservative or conservative beliefs, the researchers did. The terms
dogmatism and intolerance of ambiguity to describe conservatives appear
throughout both articles (They wrote two articles. The original article
and then one responding to a criticism of that article. Both articles
appear in the May issue of Psychology Bulletin) but most prominantly in
the abstract of the original article. In the abstract of the reply
article, the following terms to describe conservatives also appear,
"lack of openess to experience; uncertainty avoidence; personal needs
for order, structure and closure; fear of death; and system threat."
They then repeat these claims in the first paragraph of the article
itself. Moreover, they repeat these claims throughout the article and
the follow-up Reply article. In short, despite the protests of the
authors, the pejorative description of conservatives is not due to any
misinterpretation of the article by the press but rather the content of
the article.

2. The most outrageous comparisons of conservatives like Ronald Reagan
and Rush Limbaugh to Hitler and Mussolini is based solely on their claim
that all preached a return to some idealized past. This is a claim that
remains unproven. I do not remember Reagan championing such a thing nor
have I heard Limbaugh champion such a notion. If one could link
political ideologies to Hitler and Mussolini by one possible similarity
then on the basis of their support for and creation of social security,
New Deal liberals could be placed in the same camp as these two.
Furthermore, German Greens could be linked to Hitler as they share
certain reverences for nature. In the Washington Post article, Jost et.
al. simply do not address why they rely so heavily on such a tenuous
link between Reagan and Hitler and Mussolini.

3. They selectively attribute motivations to conservatives (from their
Exceptions reply). "American conservatives may support a market-based
economy (which introduces uncertainty and risk) because it preserves the
status quo and results in inequality of outcomes even though it may
conflict with personal needs for stability and security." In other
words, if a policy has an impact that conflicts with their hypothesis,
they will search among other possible impacts until they find one that
is consistent with their hypothesis. In short, it is impossible to test
their hypothesis. This is not science.

4. Finally there is no control group. Suppose that everything else
these guys find is true, it does not prove that these are "conservative
traits." These may be human traits and by focusing only on research
examining conservative (and fascist) beliefs, they are attributing to
conservatives, personality traits that exist in people of all political
ideologies (and even among those who are completely apolitical). This
too means that Jost et. al.'s research is not science.

To understand how completely these guys are out of touch with reality
consider this statement in their Exceptions Reply, "(Reagan's) chief
accomplishment, in effect, was to roll back both the New Deal era and
the 1960's, which was also the goal of former Speaker of the House of
Represenatives Newt Gingrich and many other neo-conservatives often
regarded as advocates of change." In addition to being factually wrong,
there is a logical error. Why would rolling back the New Deal and 1960's
be a goal of Newt Gingrich and Neo-conservatives if that had already
accomplished by Reagan?

Another statement in the Exceptions Reply illustrates the contempt and
bias these researchers have for conservatives. "there seems to be no
shortage of ideological rigidity among right-wing emigres from Cuba
living in the United States, as demonstrated by the Elian Gonzales
case." It is simply unclear to me (and unexplained by them) how the
Elian Gonzales case illustrates any such thing except the author's
hostility to hispanics who do not follow the liberal party line.

I realize this email is long (and probably late given that Remesh's
original post was from yesterday and about yesterday's Washington Post
editorial page), but my main point is that we should not be decieved by
an academic's self-serving description of his own research. Consulting
that research to determine what it says and its purpose is much better.
We do this with regard to many other kinds of research, we should also
do it with psuedo-psychological research into the psychology of
conservatives, especially research by Dogmatic Liberal ideologues who
think it is reasonable to liken conservatives to fascists and Nazis.

LOS ANGELES (Reuters) - Sergei Prokofiev's musical fairy tale Peter and the Wolf is popular with children but not with wolf lovers, and two former world leaders -- Bill Clinton and Mikhail Gorbachev -- aim to put that right in a new recording.

They have teamed up in a new recording that couples the tale with a contemporary version featuring the same two protagonists but a very different ending.

Prokofiev's version ends with Peter capturing the wolf and leading a triumphant procession to the zoo, paining music-loving environmentalists with romantic visions of wolves in the wild.

In the new version, narrated by former U.S. president Clinton and called Wolf Tracks, Peter again captures the wolf, but this time repents of his act and releases the animal, who howls a grateful goodbye.

"Forgetting his triumph, Peter thought instead of fallen trees, parched meadows, choked streams, and of each and every wolf struggling for survival," Clinton narrates.

"The time has come to leave wolves in peace," he adds.

Mikaela Ziegler, 7, and her 4-year-old sister, Annika, were selling refreshments Wednesday afternoon near the State Fairgrounds when a woman approached them. But she wasn't there to buy.

"She said, 'You can't sell pop unless you have a license,' " Mikaela said.

That's how it came to be that an inspector with St. Paul's Office of License, Inspections and Environmental Protection shut down Mikaela and Annika's pop stand.

Their outraged father, Dr. Richard Ziegler, called City Hall for an explanation. He was told that St. Paul is cracking down on unauthorized merchants and that his daughters would be free to hawk their beverages once they obtained a $60 license.

As I'm sure you all already talked about, Cynthia McKinney's going to be a visiting professor at Cornell . Maybe she can get one of those mortarboard hat thingies made out of tinfoil.

I was delighted to read the Manichaean ramblings of Danel Paden, director of the Catholic Vegetarian Society ("Letters," June 2003). It confirmed my theory that fanaticism in Western society alternates between nudism and vegetarianism, both of which contradict the order of grace.

As an optimist, I happily trust that Paden confines his extreme commitments to vegetarianism.

Taste is one thing; it is another thing to condemn meat eating as "evil" and permissible only "in rare and unfortunate circumstances." Paden disagrees with no less an authority than God, Who forbids us to call any edible unworthy (Mark 7: 18-19), and Who enjoins St Peter to eat pork chops and lobster in one of my favorite revelations (Acts 10: 9-16). Does the Catholic Vegetarian Society think that our Lord was wrong to have served up fish to the 5,000, or should He have refrained from eating the Passover Lamb? When He rose from the dead and appeared in the Upper Room, He did not ask for a bowl of Cheerios, nor did He whip up a meatless omelette on the shore of Galilee.

Man was made to eat flesh (Genesis 1: 26-31; 9: 1-6), with the exception of human flesh. I stand on record against cannibalism, whether it be inflicted upon the Mbuti Pygmies by the Congolese Army or on larger people by a maniac in Milwaukee. But I am also grateful that the benevolent father in the parable did not welcome his prodigal son home with a bowl of radishes.

Vegetarians assume an unedifying posture of detachment from the sufferings of vegetables that are mashed, stewed, diced, and shredded. In expensive restaurants, cherries are publicly burned in brandy to the applause of diners. It is not uncommon for people to submerge olives in iced gin and twist the peels of lemons. Be indignant, vegetarian, but not so selectively indignant that the bleat of the lamb and the plaintive moo of the cow drown out the whine of our brother the bean and the quiet sigh of the cauliflower.

Vegetables have reactive impulses. Were we to confine our diet to creatures that lacked sense and do not even respond to light, we could only eat liturgists and liberal Democrats.

The Rev. George W. Rutler
New York City

At this writing, Senator Joe Lieberman is scheduled to appear at Yale to give a speech supporting the strikers. It will be called, "Why Politicians Running for President Support Your Strike." Jesse Jackson was already there. Say what you will about the wilting Jesse, he still has the power to bring listless partisans to their feet. What was his theme? You can get an idea from the name of the strikers' tax-deductible organization. It is called “Hungry for Justice,” and they have a tame bishop there to handle contributions. What would you say if you were dispatched to New Haven to side with the strikers?

You would not be able to use the language of Tobacco Road. No, something less than that. The 4,000 strikers, who provide for the maintenance of the university including clerical aid and library and dining-hall service are paid an average of $32,000 per year. But that's hardly all, Yale's administration stresses in full-page ads. The employees are getting, or are offered in the contract they rejected over the weekend, raises which, cumulatively, would yield a 44 percent salary increase in five years. The two striking locals get pension benefits which, by Yale's arithmetic, when combined with Social Security yield about 85 percent of their salary. Note: They kick in after 30 years' work. It is hard to remember when 30 years' work was on the order of a full career. Americans used to start work at 20 and quit at 65, which is 45 years later.

The employees and their families have free health care, to which they contribute no deduction from salary. They have a minimum of seven weeks of paid vacation. Yale will subsidize up to $46,460 worth of college bills of employees’ families, and help ($25,000) in getting mortgages in neighborhood housing.

An eye-catching point of contention is Harvard. The strikers say that employees of Harvard get more money. Yale responds: No, it's the same, if you take into account that the cost of living in Cambridge is a little higher than in New Haven, and the education, better.

Now, strikes at Yale are something of an institution. Just as Broadway plays used to open in New Haven, union demands are something of a tradition. Eight out of ten contracts with the university have resulted in strikes. One of them, in l977, lasted 13 weeks, another, in l984, ten weeks. Since universities are all about students who go there to live and learn, the obvious casualties are—the students. Some of them will find, according to Yale's postings, that their classes will take place in City Hall. They will eat wherever they can. Professors teaching Latin literature can make do in improvised quarters, not so physicists and engineers who require great blackboards and perhaps computer projections. So that classes are a problem.

Now add this complication. Some professors have announced that they will not teach if in order to do so it is required that they cross a picket line. That does put one in mind of New Deal rhetoric. Thou shalt not cross a picket line. That is a concept derived from the very idea of collective bargaining. Some sanctions used in the past by striking unions were illegalized by the Taft-Hartley Act (dubbed the “slave-labor act” by the labor movement), which forbade secondary boycotts (if your trucks bring food to Yale, we will strike all your trucks coast to coast). But the old pull of class antagonism is active still, and Jacksonian rhetoric is full-blown. Jesse Jackson several times stressed that Yale has an endowment of $11 billion, which makes it sound as though, with an endowment that large, why not double employee wages? The educational world learned several days ago that the headmaster of St. Paul's School is paid $524,000 annually, relieving that cleric (he is an Episcopal bishop) of any of the privations of the poverty associated with the Christian ministry. If St. Paul’s can swing it, why not Yale?

There is the other point, of course. It is that Yale walks a fiduciary fine line. The $11 billion was donated in the cause of education. The endowment and the students more or less share the burden of maintaining the place. The endowment, and student fees, aren't to be taken as an ATM machine for the two locals.

What is engrossing is the whole scene. Yale's political prejudices are exuberantly liberal (to unearth a professor in the social sciences who voted Republican would earn a Pulitzer for investigative reporting). But suddenly we have the officials of this liberal university acting like . . . hardhearted, union-busting capitalist exploiters of the working class.

Well, the students can take it as field work, but they are paying about $3,000 per month ($36,000 per year) for their education. Do students ever strike?

Here’s a creepy, crawling thing, an article by a Labour MP who first went to a cretin convention held in Havana a quarter of a century ago:

“For me, that visit was the start of a life-long love affair. There is no need to confuse that statement with uncritical acclaim for everything about the place. But criticism should never ignore the fact that Cuba's primary service to the world has been to provide living proof that it is possible to conquer poverty, disease and illiteracy in a country that was grossly over-familiar with all three. That is a pretty big service. The fact that it has been delivered in the face of sustained hostility from an obsessive neighbour makes it all the more stunning.

Fast forward 22 years, and I became trade minister in a Labour government. At my first meeting with the official in charge of trade with the Americas and Caribbean, he offered a summary of our commercial relations with just about every country. There was one conspicuous absentee. "What," I asked, "are we doing with Cuba?" The answer was very little, ostensibly because of a modest outstanding debt from the mid-1980s.

Within a month, we were on a plane to Havana, and commercial normality now exists in our relationship. During that first ministerial visit, I was guest of honour at a small dinner and retain a copy of the diplomatic telegram which recorded the occasion.

The opening summary reads: "Unscheduled invitation from Castro to Mr Wilson to dinner. Castro holds forth for five and a half hours. Unequivocal message from Cubans that they seek further improvement in bilateral relationships with particular emphasis on trade relations. Close rapport established between Castro and Mr Wilson." The dinner ended with him toasting "Tony Blair and the third way" while I responded by raising my glass to "peace and socialism".

I have now had half a dozen such sessions with Castro. He talks a lot but then he has a lot to talk about. He is a man with an unquenchable thirst for knowledge… “

If you have a strong stomach read the whole thing.

Mr. Derbyshire:
I have a copy of "The Top 500 Poems" by William Harmon (Columbia, 1992). The poems were selected by using Granger's Index to determine which poems have been anthologized most often.
Hopkins is represented by 12 poems. (Only Shakespeare, Donne, Blake, Dickinson, Yeats, and Wordsworth are represented by more.) Here they are, in order of their popularity as indicated by an index in Top 500:
5. Pied Beauty
30. The Windhover
36. God's Grandeur
44. Spring and Fall
125. Felix Randal
126. No Worst, There is None
191. Thou Art Indeed Just, Lord
260. Spring
286. Heaven-Haven
321. Inversnaid
490. Habit of Perfection
491. Carrion Comfort
Considering Hopkins' small poetic output, a dozen poems in the top 500 is quite remarkable, I think.
Thanks for promoting Hopkins at The Corner.

This is, I’m pretty sure, the first time that the Corner has linked to the Weekly Worker , but this story is too good not to repeat:

”A bizarre collection of organisations on the revolutionary left have been on the receiving end of a petty, but nonetheless politically quite sophisticated, fraud dating back to at least the late 1900s. Five young Ukrainian conspirators - seemingly with a background in the ‘official communist’ Komsomol and well able to pick up the vital factional nuances of left politics in the Anglo-Saxon world - managed to pass themselves off as ‘sections’ of anything up to 12 different organisations. A feat which might be explained by the claim that they first met each other in an “amateur acting troupe”.

Those stung include … [the] Committee for a Workers’ International, the Alliance for Workers’ Liberty, …[the] Workers Revolutionary Party and its ‘Fourth International’, the US-based League for a Revolutionary Party, the Committees of Correspondence (publishers of News and Letters), the International Bolshevik Tendency, the Socialist Party of Great Britain and Workers Power, along with its burlesque League for the Fifth International. Plans were also being hatched to establish links with colonel Gaddafi and his regime in Libya - that at least might have proved to be a real money-spinner.

Using a whole string of aliases [the tricksters] recreated in fictional microcosm the factional struggles and rivalries that plague the left in Britain and the US. Negotiations, polemics, splits and all. This doubtlessly pleased their ‘masters’ in London and New York no end.

In a spirit of internationalism, but presumably with an eye to outdoing their rivals on the left, various groups channelled money and material resources to aid those whom they believed to be their co-thinkers. For example, it seems that at least three organisations were supplying cash for the upkeep of an ‘office’ in Kiev. Besides that there were trips to Germany, Britain and elsewhere.

Now the whole scam has been exposed. Apparently the executive committee of the SPGB got the feeling that all was not well with their World Socialist Party Ukraine in July. Their minutes put the worries on record. The penny dropped for the IBT and Workers Power on August 14. A leading WP comrade was boastfully displaying a photograph of the organisation’s recent world congress to an IBT member. Standing on either side of the said WPer were two Ukrainian comrades - they were instantly recognisable. They were the IBT’s key comrades in their own Ukrainian section. Photos and information were quickly exchanged between factional centres - everyone had been conned. "

Ha ha ha

Via the blog at Harry’s Place.

Check out the inscription on the base of this Lenin statue (now resident in Texas).

Via blogger Radley Balko

Geoffrey Howe began his period of high ministerial office as one of the architects of the Thatcher revolution. He was her first Chancellor of the Exchequer. Later, he went to seed, EUphoria and the Foreign Office, crowning his moral and intellectual decline with the speech that precipitated the Iron Lady’s fall from power. For years now, he has sat in Britain’s House of Lords, the upper house ‘reformed’ by Tony Blair and which is now filled with establishment cronies and a few hereditary relics. After years of an increasingly overweening executive, it’s more than ever clear that Britain, like most democracies, needs an effective – elected – upper house.

The existing crowd, establishment placemen and career sycophants, needless to say, don’t agree.

And M’Lord Howe, supine, useless, complacent, but, sadly, still sort of relevant, writes in the London Spectator that that’s just fine:

“Unsurprisingly, perhaps, the Lords rejected the idea [of injecting a bit of democracy into their club] by a majority of four to one. They might, of course, have done so solely out of self-interest. But it could make more sense to acknowledge that they may, after all, be best placed to judge the likely impact of an elected element upon the almost universally well-regarded way in which they currently work.”

Chuck ‘em all out – starting with Howe – and bring in that vulgar, vulgar ‘elected element.’