I love AA Gill. End of story.

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AA Gill reviews Aqua Nueva
The menu is a promise of fiddliness and front-teeth chewing. I started with an egg yolk in jelly; it was like a big wine gum of pus, only not that nice. It was cheek-puffingly foul. Roast foie gras with a mango confit, herb salad, melon and black-tea sauce was edible, but not pleasurable. The Iberico ham was good — it’s always good. It’s not always £18 a plate. Spanish ham sets a palatine bar that exposes the flat-footed pygmy grub of Iberia. These combined dishes had a weird taste of torture and fashion diets. It’s a style of rigidly unrelaxed, thoughtless modernism that has grabbed Spanish food by the cojones. The best thing we could do is not eat any of it for a couple of years, until they get over themselves. And it’s expensive, very expensive. You don’t need to know exactly how expensive, ’cos you’re not going. You can’t park. And the lavatories are gender-confusing.

David Milliband is a cunt

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Binyam Mohamed case: David Miliband steps up bid to hide proof of torture
Efforts will be stepped up tomorrow to suppress evidence of British involvement in the unlawful treatment of a UK resident, Binyam Mohamed, who says he was tortured in Pakistan, Morocco, and Afghanistan before being secretly rendered to Guantánamo Bay. The foreign secretary, David Miliband, is appealing against six high court judgments ruling that CIA information on Mohamed's treatment, and what MI5 and MI6 knew about it, must be disclosed.

All I Want For Christmas...

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Italy's PM Silvio Berlusconi gets punched in the face

He gets a couple of teeth knocked out. It couldn't have happened to a nicer guy. Oh, wait, I forgot Blair for a moment.
Italian Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi has been hit in the face and knocked to the ground after a political rally in the centre of Milan. Two of his teeth were broken and he received a minor nose fracture and cuts to his lip after being punched or hit with an object, initial reports say.

Payback?

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Demos, national service and the community ideal

"Citizenship itself is a reactionary ideal. It formulates a collective, equal relationship between people who are not equal in status or power, and for whom key interests are opposed. It elides the economic inequalities that are the key to the ’social fragmentation’ which the report seeks to challenge. It is also a reactionary manner in which to motivate people to address problems resultant from inadequate social spending in areas like education. To give an example, the report suggests civic service could include young people mentoring at primary schools or in lower school."
Via Though Cowards Flinch

Obama and the 7 deceptions

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Answering Obama's Afghanistan deceptions
Barack Obama's December 1 nationally televised address to announce a further escalation of 30,000 troops to Afghanistan cemented his role as a war president who bears responsibility for the U.S. war on that country. It also marked Obama's assumption of the task of providing the justifications, alibis and obfuscations needed to cloak U.S. military aims in an aura of legitimacy.

Eric Ruder goes through Obama's speech and counters seven of Barack Obama's worst half-truths and lies about Afghanistan.

Global warming is the future

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The great green land grab
The environment was outside the big tent. Now it’s inside and it makes absolutely no difference what opinion polls or referendums say. It matters nought that the Green party has singularly failed in every democracy. It doesn’t matter that they’re all as boring and righteous as goodness. It doesn’t matter that scientists fake messages and bury statistics, that they do everything in secret. None of this matters now. It doesn’t even matter if it’s actually going to happen. All that matters is that the people who matter think it matters.

Can't we just disown this cretin?

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 A dedicated foe of tyranny... until there's a £90k speaking fee up for grabs

I met Mr Blair before he was famous and concluded that he was an empty-headed soap actor, chosen by the Labour Party to be the plausible front-man for its slow-motion coup d’etat. Then I had to watch the ludicrous transformation of this man, who to my personal knowledge did not know in 1997 that they spoke Portuguese in Brazil, into a supposed World Statesman, the victor of Kosovo and the scourge of Saddam.These two wars, one dubious, the other indefensible, were conducted on the basis that Mr Blair is a dedicated foe of tyranny. Quite a lot of people still believe this piffle. But how can they now, after Mr Blair’s trip to Azerbaijan, there to open a formaldehyde factory?

The speech which he gave was such concentrated, congealed drivel that it probably had to be carried into and out of the room in a spittoon. That is not all. Far worse than this piece of prostitution (he is said to have been paid £90,000 for his appearance) is the fact that he consorted, while in this sinister little country, with its President, Ilham Aliyev. Like Mr Blair, I have been to Azerbaijan. Unlike him, I met opposition politicians and heard about its miserable history of censorship, repression and despotism.
Tony Blair told by Azerbaijan victims: 'Give your £90,000 speaker's fee to charity'

Tony Blair is under pressure to give to charity a fee of at least £90,000 he was paid for making a speech in Azerbaijan, which is notorious for its human rights abuses.


Your best friend is yourself

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It's a long piece but well worth the read if, like me, you are cynical about the whole online 'friendship' kick.

Faux Friendship
They call them social-networking sites for a reason. Networking once meant something specific: climbing the jungle gym of professional contacts in order to advance your career... Commercial society did not eliminate the self-interested aspects of making friends and influencing people, it just changed the way we went about it. Now, in the age of the entrepreneurial self, even our closest relationships are being pressed onto this template. A recent book on the sociology of modern science describes a networking event at a West Coast university: "There do not seem to be any singletons—disconsolately lurking at the margins—nor do dyads appear, except fleetingly." No solitude, no friendship, no space for refusal—the exact contemporary paradigm. At the same time, the author assures us, "face time" is valued in this "community" as a "high-bandwidth interaction," offering "unusual capacity for interruption, repair, feedback and learning." Actual human contact, rendered "unusual" and weighed by the values of a systems engineer. We have given our hearts to machines, and now we are turning into machines. The face of friendship in the new century.
Via John Brissenden