Ian Williams

Can we put the Nobel Peace Prize Committee in charge of the EU, NATO and UN Security Council, since it seems to possess the last spine standing? Loved Navai Pillai's offer of the prize to Trump - courage and a sense of humour and a sense of justice!

It is sad news about Benon Sevan who died yesterday  after spending his last years in exile in his native Cyprus as a pillar of the local Armenian community. A life long UN staffer with extensive experience, he was impatient with bullshit and bureaucracy (do I repeat myself?). I butted heads with him a few times as President of the UN Correspondents Association but never doubted his sincere support for the UN nor his willingness to speak his mind. In Afghanistan he sheltered the former President Najibullah from murder by a US backed war lord.

To everything there is a season - but Nazi apologetics disguised as historical fact-checking never go out of fashion! The promiscuous canards from conservative apologists have an intellectual (if one might presume) lineage back to the thirties, when opposition to the New Deal combined with pro-Nazism, overt racism and antisemitism.  The Palestinians need all the help they can get in the face of attempted genocide, but our enemy's enemy is not always our friend , and some current expedient friends do indeed evoke  ghosts of yellow stars.

I also came across  Upton Sinclair's Millennium which I had not even heard of before. It is pertinent and amusing. Set in 2000 but conceived in 1907,  it posits a Pleasure Palace in Central Park,  100 plus stories high, with of course, an opulent Ball Room. There is a senescent  plus size President- out of condition - who is very rich and surrounded by a selfish crowd of manipulative Oligarchs. 

As the Pfizer building droops and buckles at the hands of the developers, it's an ironic memorial to their money-grubbing attempts to make the non-union edifice longer, straighter and stronger. Should they have tried mixing Viagra in the concrete? Or remembered "the Union makes us strong?"

My daughter Thea excavated this ancient report. Like Goldstone, Sheeran is not inherently evil, but it demonstrates the viciousness and cruelty of the Israel supporters who bully and demean otherwise good guys.

Ian

WHY DID RICHARD GOLDSTONE THROW THE GOLDSTONE REPORT UNDER THE BUS?What prompted Richard Goldstone's pseudo-retraction of the Goldstone Report?

By Ian Williams | April 5, 2011

Tony is "La Resistance" to the Hubbardistas in Scientology. Here he reveals the prominent Scientologist who gives huge sums to Trump's PAC's and the "Church" of Scientology - enough to rescue the Kennedy Center on whose Board Trump put her. However, apart from voting sedulously for all the Trumpist plots, her main contribution has been to festoon its walls with her gaudy gilded MAGA iconography. 

I was at a big cinema in New York when Starship Troopers came out. I had read the book, but my enjoyment of Heinlein does not extend to supporting his eccentric Libertarian-neoLiberal Politics. Musk to the Max but better thought out! :)

Into the cinema trooped serried ranks of West Point Cadets, whose uniforms did indeed foretell Verhoeven's "Future Space Force" couture. For them, irony was what they used to make in Pittsburgh so they whooped, hollered and cheered uncritically through all his fascistic parodies. In retrospect, I can see how trump happened! 

As often, Lucian Truscott calls it out. 

https://luciantruscott.substack.com/p/white-house-press-corps-misses-an?...