But Can't the Nannies Help?

Small-societal and backsliding persons at Barnardo's have compiled a series of reports about the hundred and twenty thousand troubled families for which Daveybloke has pledged to do something or other before the next election comes around. Barnardo's has discovered what it calls, with studious politeness, a "tension between the government's drive to reduce the fiscal deficit as quickly as possible and the benefits of supporting children and their families with early intervention", although Barnardo's also claims that whatever money is spent on early intervention is repaid a dozen-fold. In fact, of course, the Government is not interested in saving money, still less in planning for the future of a few thousand feral yobs in the making, and certainly not in reducing the deficit which is the only real excuse it has for purging the country of its public sector. Daveybloke has made noises about getting five hundred workless families into employment - which, since all natural families comprise pater and mater and the little ones, and since any teenagers will of course be in jail, presumably translates as one thousand people, at least until the laws against child labour can be repealed. Unfortunately, the chief executive of Barnardo's let slip that she does not "think it's either you help families into work or it's nothing." Clearly, she still has a great deal of catching up to do before receiving Daveybloke's complete and labour-flexible super-size-societal satori.

Not Just Another Death in Lebanon

Syrian intervention quite unlike some, say decent folk

Syrian forces have crossed into Lebanon and shot dead a Syrian man in an incident completely unlike recent Allied victories in the war on terror in Pakistan and points elsewhere.

The individual had a name, Ali al-Khatib, and was killed by flesh and blood assassins rather than detrimented by a remote control toy. Both factors have led some Western commentators to brand the shooting "indiscreet".

The United Nations says that 2900 people have been killed in the crackdown by Syrian president and Bad Man Bashar al-Assad, who intends to prevent as many Arabs as possible from living the Blairite dream.

"If Assad goes on restricting his murders to this sort of scale, his continuing place in the international community is far from assured," said commentator Bradley Ichneumon, author of Manufacturing Indignation: Martin Amis, the Taxpayers Alliance and the Moral Majority Market.

In order to qualify for genuine statesmanship status, the Syrian leader should at least demolish a town once in a while, Dr Ichneumon said.

Unlike Britain and its allies, the Syrian authorities have blamed foreign-backed groups for the violence, and have claimed they are trying to prevent unauthorised weapons from doing somebody a mischief.

Almost 4000 Syrians have taken refuge in Lebanon, according to the United Nations, whose figures are not open to dispute when dealing with miseries which have not been inflicted by the Righteous State.

In Touch

or, The Conference Season

Apolocolic humble stumble;
Difficultonic rumble bumble;
Economanic neurojangle;
Minimoronic gaffaclangle;
Sterilisuited vacuverbal;
Politicobblers masturburble.

Meron Eggiband

Just Napalm: Export USA

At night, these visions of helicopters and the Decent Muslim Zone
Love as mediated through the prism of humanitarian interventionism. Purity of motivation through strength of belief led him up the cerebellar stairway to the final chat show. His mind filled with the lonely heroes of World War III, he advised his students to give up on being loved.

fused in Tony's mind with the spectre
He had always believed that politics was always about belief. He believed that belief in his beliefs would bring an end to this temporary absence of self-belief in their belief in what he believed they believed he believed in, and that rediscovery of their belief in self-belief would resurrect their belief in his belief for the future of their beliefs.

of his children's faces. The lanterns of their eyes
Children as a factor in political economy. Emotional response to images of bombed and starved children exceeded response to images of healthy and educated children by a factor of between three and fourteen in normal adults, and between twelve and twenty-seven in tabloid readers.

winked from a million emblazoned mugs.
Politics as a branch of advertising. Respondents scored images of children consistently high for selling power. In the case of Roman Catholics, the degree of response to images of juveniles sometimes exceeded the response to images of sex and violence.

Worshipping him, they summoned from his sight all the legions of the bereaved.
Elements of an apocalypse: (1) Party membership card, somewhat soiled; (2) Copy of Principles of Ingsoc by "B.B."; (3) Reproduction of Francisco Goya's Disasters of War Plate LXI, "Perhaps they are of another breed"; (4) genital organs of a male poodle, packed in second-best Texan blueberry preserve.

By day Israeli jets crossed the damned causeways of the peace process,
The psychopath as hero. Grinning, he bends to show them the scars on his back. Lanes of proud flesh cross and recross the dorsal jaundice, marking new routes towards the holy bunkers.

unique ciphers of currency and sainthood.
As he tried to delay the orgasm building at the base of his urethra, one of his eyes began to twitch and glitter like a demented nuclear warning light somewhere in Albania. Without thinking, Cherie murmured, "Herbert Lom."

with apologies to J G Ballard

Me at Poetry-24
Party Colours

Non-Redeemable

Much to the comfort of its flock, the Greek Orthodox Church has taken a defiantly Christian stance over the austerity measures which the government has imposed. The Orthodox Church is as poor as a bank mouse: there is, according to a spokesbeing for the archbishop of Athens, "no comparison between the riches of the Greek church and those of its Italian or Spanish counterpart", the Greek church being merely the second-largest landowner in the country and under no particular constraint to publish its accounts if it doesn't feel like it. The church also holds a one and a half per cent share in the National Bank of Greece, with a seat on the board for the bishop of Ioannina. "We refuse to foot the bill for other people's mistakes," said the bishop of Ioannina; evidently the Orthodox church has no more interest than the Catholic or Anglican churches in imitating its putative founder. Doubtless entirely unrelated to this matter is the fact that three years ago the bishop of Ioannina received a beggarly twenty-four thousand euros in fees, which have presumably sufficed ever since to keep him at the level of asceticism to which the priests of national churches generally aspire.

A Hoody Less Huggable

Things look set to become more difficult even for those of our boys whose bravery Daveybloke does not intend rewarding with a redundancy notice. Some legalistic pedants at the high court, doubtless fatally influenced by the European Act of Human Rights or some such thing, have handed down a callously small-societal judgement to the effect that hooding prisoners for "transit and security purposes" is unlawful even when it's done by decent people. Their excuse was the risk posed to physical and mental health; evidently they took no thought for the risk to our boys who must now transport and secure facially rampant terror suspects.

Reporting on the matter, the Press Association makes a rather sneaky reference to "the war to overthrow Saddam Hussein", thus implying that the decent people's goal was régime change all along, rather than the actual and (when viewed in the appropriate frame of mind) very nearly legal goal of ridding the world of the threat from Saddam Hussein's weapons of mass ethereality. It is all quite shameful.

On Publishing

Because their noise was not to be escaped,
He sketched and let flame flicker near the beast;
Which reared and galloped as the children gaped -
It kept them quiet, for a while at least.

In twenty thousand years the critics came,
Dug splinters of the children's children's bones,
And argued that he'd sketched to draw the game
Toward the hunters and their sharpened stones.

Later a blogger wrote that we had done
With dead-tree books, with paper and with pen;
A brief magnetic belch escaped the sun,
And no-one saw a word of him again.

Knapper Brandbord

Private Criticism

Willem den Haag, the Minister of Wogs, Frogs and Huns in a government which gave a big rah-rah to the imposition of prison sentences for offences such as writing silly things on Facebook, has registered mild disapproval at the Bahraini monarchy's "disproportionate" sentencing of twenty medical personnel for treating injured protestors. The sentences were "worrying developments that could undermine the Bahraini government's moves towards dialogue and the reform needed for long-term stability", in contrast to the more unacceptable behaviour of régimes to which Britain does not sell weapons. The British ambassador to Bahrain, who arrived a few months after the application of a British-made urban sharpshooter programme to the situation, has paid tribute to the warmth of the Crown Prince's welcoming hand; while the prince has declared the relationship very special indeed: "a model for relations between allied countries". Naturally, such diplomatic niceties are merely a front to disguise the British government's private criticism and deep moral concern: sales of spares for armoured personnel carriers have been officially banned, and three British trainers were withdrawn at the end of February when it became clear their work was done, while any other sales of military equipment have to be laundered through the Bahraini air force. The fact that the Bahraini monarchy seems to have withstood the pressure so far is nothing less than a tribute to its indefatigability.