Moralistic tyranny bedevils our society – The Irish Times – Fri, Jul 03, 2009

I walked about trying to figure things out, and suddenly, paying attention to the faces all around me, realized that I was surrounded by extremely white-skinned people all glaring angrily at me.

The immediate, instinctive sense I had was that I had died and gone to Purgatory, and faced 30 billion years justifying myself to dead Liveline callers. I wasn’t far out. Quite quickly I realised that I had discovered the middle of the Aer Lingus queue.

If only he’d written ‘Quite quickly I realised I was John Waters’.

Fraudsters flew in to claim dole payments – National News, Frontpage – Independent.ie

The frequency of issue of mail shots to validate continued entitlement to child benefit has also increased to one every three months for all non-nationals, the department said.

Since child benefit is normally paid to the mother of the child, most of the mail shots are being sent to ‘non-national’ women. I wonder if such mail shots are being sent to Irish women whose partners are ‘non-nationals’ and therefore likely to leave the country, or if it is only foreign women that the department does not trust, on the assumption that Irish women never want to go too far from the Mammy.

Housing Minister: Spread of Arab population must be stopped – Haaretz – Israel News

Housing Minister Ariel Atias on Thursday warned against the spread of Arab population into various parts of Israel, saying that preventing this phenomenon was no less than a national responsibility.

“I see [it] as a national duty to prevent the spread of a population that, to say the least, does not love the state of Israel,” Atias told a conference of the Israel Bar Association, which focused on a reforming Israel’s Land Administration.

Israel continues to blaze a trail for liberal democracies everywhere. I remember once hearing Conor Lenihan say he planned to visit Israel in his capacity as Minister for Integration, to learn about how they promoted integration there.

Here.

Via the awesome BoRev.net, the best analysis I have seen on the U.S. current stance on Honduras.

Forget the two weirdo coup-supporting neocon creeps flanking the woman in the middle, and put your fingers in your ears in particular for the sound of Krauthammer’s saliva-chomping. What she says makes total sense. Now, I don’t know if she approves or not of the U.S. stance, but that is immaterial to the fact that she has hit the nail on the head.

I have no idea what he is really like, but there is a phallic streak to this profile of Colm McCarthy a mile in circumference, and I do not think too wild to propose that whoever wrote it has a fascination with castration by masculine figures. ‘Straight-shooter’=erect phallus. ‘More Edward Scissorhands than Mac the Knife’, ‘Slashing, truncating’ = consummate expert castrator. ‘Dazzling panache…gasps and yelps’= vicarious erotic enjoyment. Later, as if to certify his authentic sadistic indifference and jocular manliness, we are told that he ‘loves sport, a pint and a good joke’.

Of course, there is something of the theme of castration in the half-joking name ‘An Bord Snip Nua’. This ties in quite well with the image developed by John Ralston Saul in The Collapse of Globalism of the modern politician not as leader, but as castrato.

RebelReports – Iraq’s “National Sovereignty Day” is U.S.-Style Hallmark Hype

In a grotesquely symbolic move, the Iraqi government marked “National Sovereignty Day” by “open[ing] up some of its massive oil and gas fields to foreign firms,” according to the Wall Street Journal: “In a televised ceremony, international oil companies were invited to submit bids for six oil and two gas fields, a process that marked their return to the country over 30 years after Mr. Hussein nationalized the oil sector and expelled the foreign firms. The fields on offer hold about 43 billion of Iraq’s 115 billion barrels of crude reserves — among the largest in the world.” Among the companies bidding were the Western oil giants ExxonMobil and BP (which reportedly won a contract on Tuesday). As The New York Times reported, “A total of 8 of the world’s 10 top non-state oil companies are competing for licenses to help develop six oil fields and two natural gas fields.”

Michael Tomasky: The Honduran coup | Comment is free | guardian.co.uk

At any rate I don’t think this means we’re entering a new era of instability in Central America. If anything, the larger story here seems to be Chavezismo and how ruling classes should respond to it — like, by trying to do something through normal political means for these countries’ legions of poor people for a change.

Chavismo.

Why should one hope for the ruling classes to do anything at all -through normal political means or not- for poor people? The point about the ruling classes is that they rule. If they do something for poor people, they do it only to the extent that it conserves or entrenches their position as rulers. To act in any other way would be to relinquish their position of privilege.

The larger story here, contra The Guardian, is how the legions of poor people should overthrow the ruling classes and take control of their own destiny.

The names of shame | Stephen Bayley | Comment is free | guardian.co.uk

Right now, in Andalucia, they are selling a local whisky called “Dyck”. Anglophone larrikins enjoy entering bars and asking very loudly for “a big dick”.

In fact, the whiskey is called DYC, short for Destilerías y Crianza, and it’s not local to Andalucia. It’s very popular among people to whom the English word ‘dick’ means nothing. Personally I find it headshrinkingly disgusting, but it was never intended to be targeted at ‘anglophone larrikins’. I’m sure I’m guilty of the same sort of sniggering myself on other occasions, but as a general principle the fact that a word in one language sounds a lot like a rude word in another should never give cause for amusement (cf Aon Focal Eile by Richie Kavanagh). Still, it was funny the time a whole load of French kids started laughing at a guy I know called Shane because his name sounded a lot like ‘chien’.

Here, old books stink. The heat does something to whatever adhesive gets used in their binding. And the heat causes the sweat of your hands to mingle with the dried adhesive as you flick through them. Yesterday I spent the afternoon sorting through old books, trying to work out which ones were to go to the local library, which would in turn send them on to prisons and old people’s centres, and which ones were to be simply thrown in the skip because no-one was ever going to read them, and a third lesser category: the ones I would hang onto myself.

There were about 15 volumes of Freud, all in Spanish. Even though Freud in English is a translation from the German, I knew that if I hung onto them I would never read them, out of indolence. But I kept The Psychopathology of Everyday Life and Studies in Hysteria.

Then there was the Arturo Barea’s La Forja de Un Rebelde trilogy on the Spanish Civil War. I lifted that too.

Among the others: a couple of books by Camilo José Cela: La Colmena and Cafe de Artistas.

A great hardback copy of Rayuela by Julio Cortázar, with a photo of him on the front, smoking a fag.

An anthology of studies on Miguel Hernández.

An anthology of essays in homage to José Donoso.

a book on Octavio Paz: Cultura Literaria y Teoría Crítica.

Sin noticias de Gurb by Eduardo Mendoza.

Los que vivimos i.e. We The Living, by Ayn Rand (gulp.) Published in 1959.

Now all I need is long term hospitalisation in order to get the chance to read them. The last one, well, I’m not sure if life is long enough to bother, but I liked the very spartan cover.