Webdiary - Founded and Inspired by Margo Kingston

So there are some questions that may be interesting to discuss. The longevity one, what next for Iran, and doubtless several more that others can raise. In the meantime, yesterday, as most Webdiarists will be aware, Iran’s Supreme leader Ayatollah Khamenei delivered an address at the University of Tehran’s Friday prayers. The following is a summary from the Guardian.

Fresh out of meetings at the Heartland Institute (earlier involved in tobacco promotion) supported by the American Enterprise Institute, which received $1,625,000 from Exxon-Mobil between and 1998 and 2005, Senator Fielding states, "So far I don't think there's been a real debate about the science," and "Let's actually explore that". Unfortunately, the climate is not waiting for Senator Fielding’s “exploration”.

While the economy boomed, it was easy for politicians to talk about reward for effort; and no one paid too much attention as they generously rewarded their own efforts. Their sanctimonious prattle about welfare cheats and mutual obligation also had plausibility – until they were revealed to be far more skilled in the art of the rort than any single mother or unemployed teenager. (Frank Bongiorno)

On a more serious note allow me to return to my childhood and share something that is now indelibly tattooed in my brain; something that had almost faded away. Nothing profound, nothing really important to me personally but it is, and was to millions of human beings, Geoff included. It’s a ghost, harmless to me personally but a ghost of the nasty kind that does mean something to many. One degree of separation.

The point is that the glass is not static. Six months ago it wasn’t empty – it had a negative quantity in it! One needs to look at the context and dynamics of the glass. Barak Obama went as far any US President could go and then some. And nothing illustrates that better than the issues of settlements.

But then came the economic crisis of 2008 and 2009, and it became clear that the new Western model was an illusion that benefited chiefly the very rich. Statistics show that the poor and the middle class saw little or no benefit from the economic growth of the past decades. The global crisis demonstrates that the leaders of major powers had missed the signals that called for a perestroika. The result is a crisis that is not just financial and economic. It is political, too. (Mikhail Gorbachev)

Let’s go back to the where the ghost tale began (for me); in that hotel room in old Shanghai. Pumpkin wanted to tell me a story, a special story about a Ghost known only to a few. As such, in the wee hours of a balmy Shanghai night Pumpkin told me the tale of the Magical Flying Dragon Ghost.

The commodification of tertiary education means something much worse than that subjects, disciplines, awards and faculties will sink or swim on the number of customers they attract. Commodification changes the very nature of what is exchanged. As Noble notes, when education is commodified, concern is shifted from the experience of the people involved in an educational process to the production of what he puts in scare quotes as ‘course materials’...

I decided to go and have it out with Mr M and waddled off in the general direction of the mausoleum. But all of a sudden I got a bloody great big chill down me back and my feathers stood on end. It was hard to be sure whether it is the poor dead dear lying in that somewhat solemn and stately design or the cop car just behind me.