"There is a crack in everything, that's how the light gets in"
(Leonard Cohen)
"Ignore all proffered rules and create your own, suitable for what you want to say"
(Michael Moorcock)
"Look for your own. Do not do what someone else could do as well as you. Do not say, do not write what someone else could say, could write as well as you. Care for nothing in yourself but what you feel exists nowhere else. And, out of yourself create, impatiently or patiently, the most irreplaceable of beings."
(Andre Gide)

"I want my place, my own place, my true place in the world, my proper sphere, my thing which Nature intended me to perform when she fashioned me thus awry, and which I have vainly sought all my life-time."
(Nathaniel Hawthorne)
“A book must be the axe for the frozen sea within us.”
(Franz Kafka)
"All mankind is of one author, and is one volume; when one man dies, one chapter is not torn out of the book, but translated into a better language; and every chapter must be so translated"
(John Donne)
“Never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity.”
(Robert J. Hanlon)
"Life is beautiful, but the world is hell"
(Harold Pinter)

Thursday, August 26, 2010

Expel the collaborators from the Labour Party!

Weekly Worker #830 (August 26 2010)

The post-Communist University 'Weekly Worker'! Expel the collaborators from the Labour Party; Tony Greenstein reviews Yitzhak Laor’s ‘The myths of liberal Zionism’; debates, disagreements, and comradeship at Communist University 2010; Gerry Downing on why ‘revolutionaries’ cannot back rank-and-file candidate in union elections; the transition to communism and the CPGB's Draft Programme; the English Defence League and the SWP; the welcome demise of Francesco Cossiga, president of Italy from 1985 to 1992, and letters as always.
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Tuesday, August 24, 2010

The Necromechs

In a metaphorical America, a young techno-obsessed geek named Danny O'Dare stumbles across a magic diadem which spurs him into conflict with murderous robots, with the help of a sarcastic female techno-geek and her closet full of assault rifles, culminating in authorial preaching through the mouths of the characters.

Friday, August 06, 2010

In Praise of Communism


"It's sensible, anyone can understand it.
It's easy.
You're not an exploiter, so you can grasp it.
It's a good thing for you,
find out more about it.
The stupid call it stupid and the squalid call it squalid.
It's against squalor and against stupidity.
The exploiters call it a crime but we know:
It is the end of crime
It is not madness, but the end of madness.
It is not the riddle but the solution
It is the simplest thing so hard to achieve."

(Bertolt Brecht, 1998-1956)

Retirement is for Losers

Report from Parallel World

The Aerophages

In a leather-clad America, a young farm boy named Danny O'Dare with dreams stumbles across a crazy old man which spurs him into conflict with supernatural monsters, with the help of a leather-clad female in shades and her discomfort in formal wear, culminating in a philosophical argument punctuated by violence.

Thursday, August 05, 2010

Holy Water Blesses David Cameron's Big Society

EXTRACT: "Archbishop Nichols may be an advocate of the big society, but not of free speech. As for gays and lesbians, there seems very little room - if any - for them in Nichols’s version. He has declared that when it comes to this matter he will take his “guide” from pope Benedict, who described homosexuality as a tendency towards an “intrinsic moral evil”. Homophobia pure and simple, in other words. Depending on who you are, the big society can look remarkably pinched and mean.
And, of course - whether we are talking about the Cameron or Nichols version - it is a deception: it offers up the illusion of democratic control from below, whilst in reality leaving power and influence in the hands of bourgeois politicians, businessmen, the rich and ... the churches - all of which are ultimately defenders of class rule. Needless to say, communists are the most militant or ‘fundamentalist’ defenders and upholders of the principles of secularism - which demands a strict separation of church and state, with the state giving no preferential treatment or privileges to any religion or faith. In other words, there should be absolute equality between all faiths and those who subscribe to none: freedom to practise religion, freedom not to practise religion. Principles which are under threat from the big society and those who think like archbishop Vincent Nichols."
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