Jubilee Arch

I've been reading, I think I said, "Enemy Combatant" by Moazzam Begg. He's far too Muslim for me, but then so is Ed Husain who wrote "The Islamist". He says something very interesting, though. According to him the Taleban first started to gain power when they forced a warlord to release his harem of child sex slaves. (The Taleban and al-Qaeda are very different organisations, at one point ObL had to smuggle his cameramen over the mountains to get them past Taleban checkpoints because the Taleban consider photography to be sinful.) Nice to see our armed forces helping out the child slavers, though, isn't it? Like attracts like, I suppose. I'm not normally one to heroise the Taleban, but The Man from Uncle does things they were acting to stop, and I know whose side I'm on. Not just a brotherhood of drug dealers that called the CIA and their false flag operatives to the aid of their brothers in arms and fellow pederasts drug dealers in Afghanistan. Still, I don't think what Begg thinks, that Afghanistan was a perfect Muslim state which is why the Americans were so long targeting it and conspiring against it. It was only the drop in opium production that prodded the Americans into action.

Something else, just as interesting, Begg mentions. The Americans, he says, were running a training camp in Hungary before the invasion of Iraq, training up insurgents, supposedly to fight Saddam. I wonder whatever happened to them.

Speaking of Ed Husain's "The Islamist", I think he'd quite right about perverts and the hijab. The hijab doesn't enforce modesty (for women) and a lack of sexual thoughts (for men). Quite the opposite. It turns people into perverts and sexual agressors (I once read a study about overcrowded rats showing that overcrowding and stress cause homosexuality, sexual violence and other distasteful things (the rats hang around in gangs and act agressively and that)). The women just show off by having different coloured burqas and hijabs and whatever else (and the girl I mentioned before who insisted on wearing a burqa instead of a shalwar kameez so she could use her clothing as a medium to brag about her modesty). Good book, that.

They Ford was a good employer. I've been reading "No Logo". He was sued by Dodge, I believe, for his supposedly generous practices (thieving from the heavily laden pockets of his business partner by offering employees discounts and so on). Perhaps the union would have supported him, but I don't think they have those in America. Except, perhaps, ones run by the Mafia. I hear that Ford believed it would be good for the economy for workers to be well-paid, a manifestly sensible opinion which is under-believed today. It's mentioned by someone or other in EP Thompson's "Making of the English Working Class". Carnegie was meant to be a nice guy too, with his free libraries and so on. Of course, when his workers tried to unionise he hired mercenaries and had them killed. Not my type of ragged trousered philanthropist.

There is power in a factory, power in the land
Power in the hands of a worker
But it all amounts to nothing if together we don't stand
There is power in a Union

Now the lessons of the past were all learned with workers' blood
The mistakes of the bosses we must pay for
From the cities and the farmlands to trenches full of mud
War has always been the bosses' way, sir

The Union forever defending our rights
Down with the blackleg, all workers unite
With our brothers and out sisters from many far off lands
There is power in a Union

-- Billy Bragg

A video came into the charity shop today, we get alot because people are abandoning VHS for DVDs, it was a Graham Hancock video of a programme called "The Quest". Him searching for an ancient civilisation or some such. I don't like him. I read "Underworld" and "The Sign and the Seal" (always been interested in Abyssiania, land of Prester John, oldest Christian land, land of Sheba and the Templars, and so on), but on the whole I'm not impressed. Those books were alright, but no match for something like "Exploration Fawcett" or "Mysteries of Ancient South America). He's too mealy mouthed, that one.