From The Times:

"The spots I painted are sh*te," Damien Hirst once said. Luckily for his customers, most of his spot paintings - a series of around 300 produced over the 1990s - were never touched by Mr Hirst himself. Instead they were produced on a production line: many by artist Rachel Howard, who he referred to as "The best person who ever painted spots for me...The best spot painting you can have by me is one painted by Rachel." As with Warhol's Campbell's Soup prints, created using a mechanised process, the idea that Hirst paintings valued in the hundreds of thousands could be produced by other people caused disquiet. What is art? The idea, or the process?

Sh*te can be art, just as art can be sh*te. The authentic art experience triangulates between art and sh*te..

Rachel Campbell-Johnson, art critic of The Times, departs from her usual broad-minded approach:

Damien Hirst once sued British Airways, claiming a breach of copywright over the coloured spots that it used in an advert for its low cost airline, Go. I am surprised that Nestlé didn't, in turn, sue him for nicking the design from its Smarties packet. Because that is what his spot paintings look like.

Here is some more art. Art, not with a capital F, but with a capital CH:

The Art of the Chart

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u68VhvHj554&feature=related

A dispatch from Nigeria: 

I seem to remember that the Beslan murderers had an interesting collection of pharmacuticals in their bloodstream when the post mortems were done. From The Mirror.
The Mumbai terrorists may have pumped themselves full of drugs to keep going during their murderous three-day rampage.
Indian police sources say tests on the bodies of dead Islamic fanatics revealed traces of stimulant drugs.
One said: “We found injections containing traces of cocaine and LSD left behind by the terrorists and later found drugs in their blood.
“There was also evidence of steroids, which isn’t uncommon in terrorists. These men were all toned, suggesting they had been doing some heavy training for the attacks.
“This explains why they managed to battle the commandos for over 50 hours with no food or sleep.”
The source said one gunman is thought to have injected himself with large doses of stimulant so he could keep on fighting after he was seriously wounded.
Indian newspapers yesterday carried a dramatic picture of the sole surviving terrorist hooked up to a life support machine.
Azam Amir Kasav, 21, is shown lying on his back with his eyes open, seemingly dazed.
Kasav is said to have told interrogators the attack was meticulously planned six months ago at a training camp in Pakistan. Yesterday the death toll was given as 172 killed, with 239 people wounded.
But it emerged the toll would have been much greater had three bombs placed by the fanatics not been made safe.
The devices, timed to go off a few hours after the terrorists struck, were placed around the Taj Mahal and Oberoi hotels. They were dealt with by an Indian bomb disposal team.
The terrorists, said to be 10 young men aged from their late teens to mid-20s, were all allegedly from Lashkar-e-Tayyaba, a Pakistan-based group.

Today is the 70th anniversary of the arrival at London's Liverpool Street station of the first train of Jewish children evacuated from Europe, via Prague, away from Nazi persecution. From 2 December 1938 until war began around 9000 children were taken by train across Europe and fostered with British families; later they settled in the US, Canada, Israel and elsewhere. Most of them never saw their families again.
Mary and Rebecca have both written about Sir Nicholas Winton, the English organiser of what became known as the Kindertransport. Follow the links to their posts to learn more. Less well known are the people who organised things the Prague end. Bill Barazetti is now dead (obituary here) but his wife Anna is still alive. There were also Trevor Chadwick, Martin Blake, Dorothy Warriner, Beatrice Wellington and Dorothy Pike as this letter to the Association of Jewish Refugees attests.
There is a play being performed today at Liverpool Street station to recreate that first arrival. It is called Suitcase. I wanted to go but my inability to be in two places at once prevented my attending any performance.
Imagine how terrifying it must have been to arrive without your parents, in a cold smoky London, among strange people and lonely. And these were the lucky ones.

From MEMRI:

Pakistani Leader: "If India Attacks, Several Pakistans Will Be Created Within India"

Expressing a growing concern in Pakistan about a likely Indian response to the Mumbai terror attacks, Sheikh Rasheed Ahmed, who until early this year served as Pakistan's federal minister for information and broadcasting, warned that if India attacks Pakistan, several Pakistans will be created within India.

Urging the Pakistani government to give a suitable reply to Indian accusations that the 11/26 Mumbai attacks were planned by Pakistani nationals, Ahmed added that the U.S., Israel and India are working to dismantle Pakistan's Inter-Services Intelligence and the country's nuclear program.

Ahmed, who early this year formed his own political party called the Awami Muslim League, also asked the government of Pakistani Prime Minister Yousuf Raza Gilani to stop the supply lines through Pakistan to the U.S. and NATO troops in Afghanistan. He added: "If Pakistan stops the supply lines, NATO cannot fight the Afghan war even for two days."

When my mother arrived in England as a refugee from Nazi Germany, shortly before the outbreak of World War II, she found the people admirable, though not without the defects that corresponded to their virtues. By the time she died, two-thirds of a century later, she found them rude, dishonest, and charmless. They did not seem to her, moreover, to have any virtues to compensate for their unpleasant qualities. I occasionally asked her to think of some, but she couldn’t; and neither, frankly, could I.

It wasn’t simply that she had been robbed twice during her last five years, having never been the victim of a crime before—experiences that, at so advanced an age, would surely change anyone’s opinion of one’s fellow citizens. Few things are more despicable, after all, or more indicative of moral nihilism, than a willingness to prey upon the old and frail. No, even before she was robbed she had noticed that a transvaluation of all values seemed to have taken place in her adopted land. The human qualities that people valued and inculcated when she arrived had become mocked, despised, and repudiated by the time she died. The past really was a foreign country; and they did do things differently there.

Keep reading here.

Such, I suppose, would be the title of my favourite book - you know, the one about history by Thingy and Whojamaflip - if Don Tapscott, champion of the Google Generation, gets his way. It only seems a minute since Dawkins and co were claiming that we should ignore things that aren't true. Now we must ignore things that are. From The Times:

Memorising facts and figures is a waste of time for most schoolchildren because such information is readily available a mere mouse click away, a leading commentator has said.

The existence of Google, Wikipedia and online libraries means that there is no useful place in school for old-fashioned rote learning, according to Don Tapscott, author of the bestselling book Wikinomics and a champion of the “net generation”.

A far better approach would be to teach children to think creatively so that they could learn to interpret and apply the knowledge available online. “Teachers are no longer the fountain of knowledge; the internet is,” Tapscott said. “Kids should learn about history to understand the world and why things are the way they are. But they don’t need to know all the dates. It is enough that they know about the Battle of Hastings, without having to memorise that it was in 1066. They can look that up and position it in history with a click on Google,” he said.

What does "know about" mean, in the penultimate sentence of the last paragraph? Is it possible to "know about" something without cluttering up one's mind with any facts about it? If so, why stop at not knowing the only memorable date in history? Surely it should be possible to "know about" the Battle of Hastings without knowing what a battle is, or where Hastings is, and to "position it in history" without knowing the meaning of "history" or "position".

Tapscott believes that the model of education that prevails today in most classrooms was designed for the industrial age. “This might have been good for the mass production economy, but it doesn’t deliver for the challenges of the digital economy, or for the ‘net gen’ mind,” he said.

He suggests that the brains of young people today work differently from those of their parents. He argues that digital immersion, in which children may be texting while surfing the internet and listening to their MP3 player, can help them to develop critical thinking skills.

Just imagine - a critical thinking skillset with no nasty knowledge to get in the way. Commenting on this nonsense, Roger Boyes states the obvious, which unfortunately needs stating:

It matters that Napoleon was defeated in 1815, in June, at Waterloo, and it matters that these facts are somehow programmed in the grey cells. Why?

Because the battle would have been fought differently if it had been in December. And because it matters what preceded the battle, in 1814, and what came later, in 1816. Who was writing poetry in 1815? What scientific research was conducted that year? Understanding the world means grasping the principle of synchronicity, the flow of parallel events, the sudden relevance of the obscure and marginal.

Knowing the date of an historical event gives you context, allows you to make connections. Isn’t that what education is about? Teachers who tell you: “Go google!” are abdicating their prime responsibility. Was it a sweat to learn passages of Macbeth by heart? Yes – but it taught me the music of Shakespeare and it remains a pleasure to recite “Tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow” in the shaving mirror. It has also equipped my generation to dominate pub quizzes, the quintessential survival skill of Middle England. What is going to happen when the digital grown-ups are stripped of their BlackBerries and put to the test?

BlackBerrys, probably. But why does this, or anything else, matter? Only connect.

Slavoj Zizek – and I won’t bother putting the squiggly bits on his name – was born to live his life in Pseuds Corner, or this, its webpage equivalent. He it is who "puts on" his phallus, as some men put on the Ritz:

And one has to think of the phallus not as the organ that immediately expresses the vital force of my being, my virility, and so forth but, precisely, as such an insignia, as a mask that I put on in the same way a king or judge puts on his insignia - phallus is an ‘organ without a body’ that I put on, which gets attached to my body, without ever becoming an ‘organic part’ namely, forever sticking out as its incoherent, excessive supplement.

Once on, this sticky-outy thing must be appropriately employed. Here, from a book review by Adam Kirsch, is Zizek’s view of homosexuality and masturbation:

"first, in homosexuality, the other sex is excluded (one does it with another person of the same sex). Then, in a kind of mockingly Hegelian negation of negation, the very dimension of otherness is cancelled: one does it with oneself."

Does one? Of course, you wouldn’t expect a philosopher to come straight out, as it were, and say that he doesn’t hold with buggers or bashing the bishop. Nor would you expect him to confess to hating Jews. He must couch his Jew-hatred in terms of  anti-racist “discourse”. Adam Kirsch again:

in In Defense of Lost Causes, Zizek does make plain what he might call the "fantasmatic screen" through which he sees Jews. This occurs in his discussion of Man Is Wolf to Man, the Gulag memoir of a Polish Jew named Janusz Bardach. In his book, Zizek writes, Bardach relates that when he was freed from the Kolyma camp but still forced to remain in the region, he took a job in a hospital, where he worked with a doctor on "a desperate method of providing the sick and starving prisoners with some vitamins and nutritious foodstuffs. The camp hospital had too large a stock of human blood for transfusions which it was planning to discard; Bardach reprocessed it, enriched it with vitamins from local herbs, and sold it back to the hospital." Later, when the hospital objected to this technique, Bardach found a way to do the same thing with deer blood, "and soon developed a successful business." Here is Zizek's reaction to this story: "My immediate racist association was, of course: 'Typical Jews! Even in the worst gulag, the moment they are given a minimum of freedom and space for maneuver, they start trading--in human blood!'"

Now, Zizek is telling this story against himself, as an illustration of the way "racism works as a spontaneous disposition lurking beneath the surface" of all our minds. Still, there is something chilling about that "of course": his implication is that we all harbor the association of Jews with profiteering and blood-drinking, though we ought to try to suppress it.

[…]

"In all honesty I have to admit that every time I travel to Israel, I experience that strange thrill of entering a forbidden territory of illegitimate violence," he declares. "Does this mean I am (not so) secretly an anti-Semite?" (Note the disarming sincerity that expects absolution, and in Zizek's case usually receives it.) One manifestation of this illegitimate violence, he writes, is that "the Jews, the exemplary victims ... are now considering a radical 'ethnic cleansing' (the 'transfer'--a perfect Orwellian misnomer--of the Palestinians from the West Bank)." In fact, "the Jews" are not considering this at all; the only political party in Israel that did advocate such an obscenity, Meir Kahane's Kach, was banned from the Knesset for exactly that reason. But such merely empirical considerations cannot be allowed to stand in the way of Zizek's "dialectical" conclusion.

Zizek expects to be forgiven because we are all supposed to be in on the joke – the absurd proposition that he, a philosopher, could be “racist”. I knew Zizek was pretentious and absurd, but pretentious, absurd and anti-Semitic is a step too far. And it ain’t funny.  

For all those who ask, in any interview of any interviewee, "Where do you see yourself in five years?" 

For all those who busily insist on preparing a "Mission Statement" for this or that educational institution, and what's more, believe it necessary in composing the thing to solemnly weigh every word, instead of lightheartedly making a game of its composition, for such ludicrous made-I'm-afraid-in-America time-wasters deserve to be treated with comic contempt.

For all those employers who think they have a right, even a duty, to make their long-suffering employees fill out "Self-Evaluation Forms" as if that exercise could ever be anything other than farcical, both for those forced to fill them out, and those whose responsibility it is to read them.

For these offenses against intelligence and human decency: Death. No appeal. No reprieve. No delay. Death.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uKbz_Huq_Cs&feature=related