It's always a surprise to realise the difference between the generic 'party, policy and local candidate' basis of British parliamentary elections and the dissection of personality that marks the run-up to American presidential elections. Even Congressional and Senate elections are reported as clashes between individual candidates.
For instance take this list of reading by prospective democratic candidates. From the scary yet predictable (Lieberman's po-faced and Bushian reply of 'the Bible) to the admirable (Carol Mosely Braun's choice of the excellent Foucault's pendulum) to the shamelessly populist (Stephen Ambrose? John Kerry, Please...) to the sublime (Howard Dean reading Ken Kesey's national critique follow-up to One Flew Over the Cuckoo's nest). I know these lists are nothing more than another strand of holistic political campaigning but it's still interesting to see the image that candidates and stylists like to put across.

War fatigue has prevented me from posting anything for a while. It seems superfluous to reprint opinions that are expressed so much more eloquently elsewhere. It's the stuff that get's lost down the back of the news sofa that gets me, like this that really gets me. A preserved medieval vessel - the first of its kind found off mainland Britain - and the shabby, formica and ill-fitting suit council, a group of despicably under-qualified, under-achieving party appointee bureaucrats responsible for the sickeningly condescending statement, "Newport council insisted that advice from engineering experts was that retrieving the stern section was impossible on safety grounds, and added that it realised the disappointment this
had caused to the campaigners for the ship."

It's this kind of disregard for the past, infecting Western democracy at all levels - from the pathetic micro-organism of the 'eighth largest' unitary authority in Wales to Bush and his ilk - that makes me despair. For a species that relies wholly on building on and learning from the past, I find the cavalier way with which we discard the past in the name of progress profoundly disheartening.

Well, it's been some time since I said anything here. Suffice to say I've been busy with my job, pissed off after a break-up and [huge cop-out] there's a war on. So, war. Well, it's wrong for a whole slew of reasons - a war to maintain domestic support, to bring westernised democracy to another region BY FORCE and to balst a whole load of other news off the headlines.
Anything else I say on Iraq is superfluous. Balls to it, the whole world's gone to pot.