Well, that’s not what John Denham is actually saying. He doesn’t need to say it or even think it, as it’s the implicit New Labour model behind this bold policy initiative:

Unemployed people convicted of crimes should receive tougher sentences than those with full-time jobs or caring responsibilities, a leading Labour MP will say today.

John Denham, chair of the influential home affairs select committee, will call for an overhaul of community sentencing to enable courts to mete out tougher punishments for the jobless on the grounds that they have more time on their hands.

California is, politically, an odd place. It has a reputation as one of the “bluest” states (which, in America’s curious chromo-semantics means “left wing”); but it’s also a home of libertarianism, which coexists with the left in Silicon Valley and Los Angeles. This combination makes California an interesting testing-ground for neo-liberalism, a form of right-wing politics adapted to post-New Deal (or post-Fordist) politics. One of the first moves here was Proposition 13, which capped tax rates, with predictable disasterous consequences not just for particular public services in California, but for the ability of the state to function as a political agent at all. We now face a new neo-liberal experiment, Proposition 90, which, in the guise of a “progressive” reform of eminent domain, would require any administration within the state to compensate property owners if their property lost value as a result of legislative measures. This is a staggering attack on the very idea of politics: the community will now have to pay in order to enage in collective decision making. In this, it is neo-liberalism in its purest form.

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Well, one thing at least about the controversy that followed Jack Straws remarks about women wearing veils can be disposed of pretty quickly: the argument that veils impede communication is entirely spurious. Of course covering ones face removes some of the cues that are used in understanding, but so what? Human communication is massively redundant, precisely so that we can continue to communicate even when elements are screened out for whatever reason. Accents and dialects, tongue studs, brightly colored clothes, terrible haircuts - all these things impede communication, and all of them are accepted as a matter of course.

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Well, not really, obviously. Nuclear bombs anywhere are hardly good news, and I’m not going to endorse North Korea as an example of good government, socialism, or anything else. Still, I’m quite scared enough that the US has nuclear weapons, and I find it difficult to be any more worried that some other states might have them. The only possible response for those of us in nuclear powers to the apparent North Korean nuclear test is to increase our opposition to the nuclear weapons nearest at hand (and there’s more thinking to be done about how anti-nuclear activism fits in with the anti-Iraq-war movement). Our slogan should be, then, “No Nukes Anywhere: Unilateral US Disarmament Now!”

(The title of this post was an attempt to imitate the inimitable sloganeering of the Sparts. As befits the true revolutionary vanguard, they’re well ahead of me: “For the unconditional military defense of the remaining deformed workers states”)

I wish I read Spanish. Paulo Virno has just edited a book on Argentina. And it features a discussion of the “polemic between N. Chomsky and M. Foucault.”

Where next for Russian space station promoters?

Moves to get official backing to send Madonna into space have been blocked.

My own answer is, I suspect, rather predictable (picture from the always-wonderful Chinese Propaganda Poster Pages, via Dwayne M.)