When I first heard Obama’s “uniter, not a divider” schtick from the 2004 Democratic convention, I thought he was just an idiot, warming up the crowds with a bit of feel-good, content-free nonsense. But I don’t think so anymore. Obama’s nonsense is an extremely calculated, supremely mendacious work of rhetoric. Look at how he chose to “honor” Martin Luther King yesterday: Read more↴
… this article is incredibly stupid. So stupid, in fact, that it makes the article next to it, Martin Kettle’s condemnation of the lack of “consensus” in US politics, look almost coherent. But not quite, obviously.
“…We’ll nationalize your fucking banks.”
So goes the social-democratic version of the famous anarchist slogan. Of course, the third-way version is more about:
A period of state ownership in which the government would seek to stabilise Northern Rock and find a buyer, while protecting taxpayers’ money
“Protecting” taxpayer’s money, eh? What an incredibly, stupidly, minimal vision of what a political system might acomplish.
I wonder what the chances are that Girls Aloud will release “Control of the Knife” accompanied by a video featuring them all in braces and two-tone trousers? Probably not, really, all that high. It’s just as well I’m busy writing a paper on the welfare state, otherwise I might have accompanied this post with a photoshopped picture of Girls Aloud as Bad Manners. Instead, I’ll have to leave you with this YouTube clip:
That’s from 2006; Buster Bloodvessel’s lost a hell of a lot of weight, no?
At GCSE, the sheer volume of poetry, with the focus on technical analysis, coupled with “overly didactic teaching methods”, is putting pupils off.
I wish I’d been taught technical analysis of poetry when I was doing GCSEs; indeed, a bit of excess didacticism would have made a nice change from the strange “not actually teaching” method adopted by my teachers. Read more↴
Damn, the new Girls Aloud record is out, and I still have a post to write about Britney’s album. With “What You Crying For” and “I’m Falling,” Tangled Up gives Blackout some unexpected competition for “Best early-90s hardcore record of 2007.” Well, I suppose it’s not totally unexpected from Girls Aloud, but I wasn’t anticipating the bassline from Britney’s “Freakshow” (well, it’s more a bass noise than a base line), or “Get Back,” ignominously relegated to being a bonus track.
These are both Danja tracks, of course, and, great though they are, I wonder if it wasn’t maybe a mistake for Britney to use Danja so heavily on the album. It invites comparison with FutureSex/LoveSounds, which I’m not sure does Britney any favors. Read more↴