Now is the Winter of our Disinterment 699

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The researchers had a hunch he was there. ATOS pass Richard III’s skeleton as fit to work.

Joking aside, the discovery of Richard III’s body is fascinating and wonderful. Aside from Shakespeare’s brilliant play (which is evidently not as physically inaccurate as we have been told for years), and the question of who killed the Princes in the Tower, there is a romance about lost dynasties which appeals to a deep human yearning for a golden age when things were somehow better, and for “lost futures”. What might have been, had those evil Stanleys not turned on Richard at Bosworth and put their miserable Welsh accountant on the throne?

Richard is described in today’s newspapers as the last English King. The Plantagenets were of course Angevin. The last English King – indeed the only English King of all England – was Harold Godwinson. Now there’s a lost dynasty for you.

We now know that Richard’s “Claim of Right” was almost certainly true and Edward IV a bastard, as his father was nowhere near his mother for months around the purported conception. But the so-called Royal line is, I am quite sure, sprinkled with bastards and no line at all. Not to mention that George I was 39th in line to the throne when given it 300 years ago, but the first Protestant.

Monarchy is bollocks, and something we should have outgrown a long time ago. Nice to see that today’s Prince Harry retains the tradition of remorseless homicide though.

Leicester University deserve congratulations on a genuine achievement. I hope Richard can now be reburied as soon as possible – as a Catholic, which is what he was. He was a human being. The degradation and display of his fresh corpse were horrible; but there is a danger of repeating it with a po face and feigned serious intent.

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699 thoughts on “Now is the Winter of our Disinterment”

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  • lwtc247

    My default position is that RIII’s bones are a charade.
    And I’m not the least bit interested to a single minutes research to find out either way – as if it makes the slightest bit of difference to anything that the teeth-drawingly repetitive volumes produced on the subject; Something that been droned on about this for eons, sexed up by history teachers believing the ‘princes’ will somehow magically make them personally interesting inspiring pupils thereafter to gain an interest in history, a “British(establishment) History” that is, which dares NOT put any focus on ANY of the numerous hideous crimes committed by the British.

  • lwtc247

    [Radio presenter] ‘Richard One hundred and eleven’ – LOL!
    More interesting than the reality actually.

  • nevermind

    Thanks Komodo, yes I know anode…..:-(

    Here is another troll seemingly needing that treatment, ‘the return of my Broth.’ said Ed of brother Dave…
    here he is trying to come back in Europe…

    http://www.spiegel.de/international/europe/david-miliband-interview-on-the-future-of-the-uk-in-the-eu-a-881974.html

    And here is the little co torturer and Straw lick spittle, a snooze on the tube, after a heavy lunch so it seems.

    How well behaved of the public for not thumping him.

    http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/politics/9855264/David-Miliband-snoozes-on-the-tube-at-3pm.html

  • Mary

    lwtc247 Have you ever read The Blood Never Dried? It has been reprinted and is available online.

    It should be handed out to every secondary school pupil.

    ‘Newsinger’s book is therefore urgent, essential reading. There is a current campaign in England being promoted around the place by various well meaning celebrities and politicians saying ‘History Matters – Pass It On’. Yet one look at the organisers of this campaign – the ‘National Trust, English Heritage, the National Heritage Memorial Fund and the Heritage Lottery Fund, the Council for British Archaeology, Heritage Link, Historic Houses Association and the Society for the Protection of Ancient Buildings’ – instantly reveal which sort of ‘History’ the organisers want people to ‘pass on’. It is not an internationalist history, one that can help us understand the current world crisis at all – rather it is an attempt to get us to visit more English stately homes and look up to the aristocrats who lived in them as if only the ruling class ‘matter’. As John Game has written, there is ‘an attempt to transform world history into an adjunct of the British heritage industry’ reflecting the ‘current crisis of national identity in this rather small country seeking to re-assert its relevence in the era of globalisation. One should take care with such parochial agenda’s as we have recently seen where such re-assertions might lead us in both Iraq and Afghanistan.’

    Newsingers book The Blood Never Dried is not a comprehensive history of the British Empire, just as his work on George Orwell, Orwell’s Politics, was not a comprehensive biography. Yet like his work on Orwell, it is valuable – indeed essential, just the same. There has always been a disgusting history of support for Empire from some ‘socialists’ in Britain, from the Fabians to the leaders of the British Labour Party, a tradition which has reached its nadir in Tony Blair. It is often said that the British Labour Party was influenced more by Methodism than by Marxism. This is very true, but it is also the case as the legendary Trinidadian and Pan-Africanist George Padmore once noted, the Labour Party was always influenced ‘more by Rudyard Kipling than Karl Marx’. With Blair’s talk of spreading ‘civilisation and democracy’ through waging what Kipling called ‘the savage wars of peace’, New Labour is truly taking up the ‘White Man’s burden’ with a vengeance. Newsinger shows that support for the war crimes of the British Empire has run throughout the history of the British Labour Party, both Old and New.’

    http://histomatist.blogspot.co.uk/2006/07/book-review-blood-never-dried-peoples.html

    PS That review comes from 2006.

  • Mary

    That Miliband snoozes…. has been taken down Nevermind.

    Sorry
    We cannot find the page you are looking for.
    The page may have been moved, updated or deleted.
    There might be a problem with the website.
    You may have typed the web address incorrectly. Please check the address and spelling.

    Not so long ago, he was speaking in the Atlee room on Holocaust Memorial Day.

    Hansard 21 Jan 2013 : Column 20
    Richard Harrington (Watford) (Con): I am sure that Ministers will be aware that Holocaust memorial day will take place this week and that the work of the Holocaust Education Trust has been commended by this and previous Governments. Are they also aware that the Lord Merlyn-Rees memorial lecture will take place this evening here in Parliament—in the Attlee suite—at which the former Foreign Secretary, the right hon. Member for South Shields (David Miliband), and Mr Danny Finkelstein of the Times will speak? I hope that Ministers will implore their constituents and colleagues to attend.

    Michael Gove: I look forward to listening to both the right hon. Member for South Shields (David Miliband) and Mr Finkelstein of The Times this evening. Let me place on record my gratitude to the last Government for instituting state support for the Holocaust Education Trust, and particularly to my predecessor as Secretary of State, the right hon. Member for Morley and Outwood (Ed Balls), for the courage and commitment that he showed to the fantastic work of the HET. I extend my congratulations also to its chief executive, Karen Pollock, who is an inspirational public figure and richly deserved her recent recognition in the honours list.

    ::::

  • Ben Franklin -Machine Gun Preacher (unleaded version)

    Komodo; Sorry. You can’t have your own Troll. They belong to the community. It’s the only way to be fair.

  • Mary

    Doug Scorgie drew attention above to the PFI hospital project in Peterborough which, as is usual with these PFI contracts, has gone shockingly wrong in financial terms.

    What a massive place. Anyone with sense could see that it was over the top. Ordered up in NuLabour’s time and completed in 2010. The contractors were an Australian multi national called Brookfield Multiplex.

    http://www.brookfieldmultiplex.com/projects/europe/uk_england/construction_and_development/health/completed/peterborough_city_hospital/

    The hospital is just one of 168 projects shown on their website.
    http://www.brookfieldmultiplex.com/projects/all_regions/any_subregion/any_division/any_sector/any_status/

  • Cryptonym

    Another trick is to foster the illusion that the upper (and ruling) classes are these bumbling buffoons, idiots, eccentrics obsessed with newts, muffins etc. -the sort of things Wodehouse wrote, very cleverly and funny, but with an underlying message that these few are in any way like the rest of us and possessed of some sort of morality, they’re certainly not harmless and while there a high number of congenital idiots, there is a hard core cadre of calculating tyrants, ever looking for new ways to butcher whole tribes, loot and despoil our environment, accumulate and wield life changing power over the many.

    This tube falling asleep on underground system seems very much a stunt, suggesting he’s human too, it seems more likely he’s missing the limelight, or the former FS has had a tiff with his security detail. At any time whilst beavering away in the background during the worst of Blair’s excesses, he had the choice to just walk away, tell all he’d seen and heard –he’s tainted, with all of that nulab set, for the rest of their short political lives.

    That this other Miliband is still shielded from public wrath suggests there’ll still be an attempt to foist him on the rotting corpse of the Labour Party and on a country close by.

  • nevermind

    @Mary
    Sorry, it was at that site when I copied the URL, don’t know, it might have been some double, or David complained, or his brother, who knows.

  • Mary

    The likely Tory candidate for Eastleigh. She stood at the last election and came second to Huhne.http://www.dailyecho.co.uk/news/politics/10212219.Maria_Hutchings_favourite_to_be_Tory_candidate/?ref=rss

    Them she said:”After years of campaigning, I realised that the Labour Government had not only let down the most vulnerable in society but the whole nation and so I wanted to do something about it.”

    http://www.dailyecho.co.uk/news/politics/elections/election_2010/eastleigh/candidates/7984303.Maria_Hutchings__Conservative__Eastleigh/

    What will she say now after nearly three years of Cameron’s and Clegg’s medicine?

  • doug scorgie

    Ecuador elections coming soon (17th Feb).

    Why the US hates Rafael Correa:

    (Craig Murray gets a mention)

    Known for his anti-neoliberal stand since his time as a youthful Minister of Economy in the cabinet of Alfredo Palacio – the vice president who became president after the departure of Gutiérrez – to attaining the presidency, Correa threw the World Bank out of Ecuador and broke with the conditions imposed on the country by the IMF.

    He confronted the transnationals which were plundering Ecuador, such as Oxy (the Occidental Corporation) which bore off approximately 100,000 barrels of crude oil from Amazonia and sold 40% of its shares to the Canadian company Encana without Quito’s authorization; he renegotiated and revoked contracts for oil extraction which previously left the largest profits with foreign companies and barely four dollars a barrel for the nation.

    He ended privatizations and restored to the state its leading role.

    Despite pressure from the United States, he fulfilled the majority demand of the people and, acting on his own convictions, refused to renegotiate the agreement allowing U.S. forces use of the Manta military base. This decision opened a small, but humiliating hole in the Pentagon’s national security doctrine, implanted in dozens of military bases for the control of Latin America.

    This consideration does not come from sectors of the left. Former diplomat CRAIG MURRAY, posted to Uzbekistan, was the first to disclose last October that the CIA intended to invest $87 million of Pentagon funds to destabilize Correa in the run-up to the elections.

    The money, he stated, would be used to bribe and coerce the media and state officials and that media scandals and spatterings of corruption against the government were to be expected.

    http://www.granma.cu/ingles/ouramerica-i/17ener-correa.html

  • doug scorgie

    MJ
    7 Feb, 2013 – 11:42 am

    “The Rockefeller Foundation bankrolled the Women’s Lib movement in the 60s and 70s. Turned out the reason was to increase the tax take by encouraging more women to work and also to weaken the mother-child bond so the state could assume greater control over children.”

    MJ can you back that up with some evidence and references ? Sounds a bit silly to me.

  • Habbabkuk

    David’s post of 23h47 yesterday on the eminent Oxford and Harvard historian Niall Ferguson was interesting….and surprising in a way.

    Davy’s post did no more than link to an article written for the Guardian’s “Shortcuts” blog by one Jon Henley on 21 August 2012.

    That article was essentially a “story” on a spat centered around an article called “Hit the road, Barack” written by Niall Ferguson which appeared in Newsweek on 19 August 2012. I call it a “story” (“feature” if you prefer) because it made no attempt at anaysis or evaluation but contented itself with saying that Niall Ferguson had written an article critical of President Obama’s record and with listing a number of criticisms of that article made by various people. The article also criticised Ferguson’s rebuttal of one of his critics (Paul Krugmann) by saying that the rebuttal was personal rather than factual. Any reader of Jon Henley’s blog article who wanted to know more about the spat in order to judge for himself would have had to follow other links in order to do such things as read Ferguson’s article, read the text of the criticisms levelled at him and read Ferguson’s rebuttal of Paul Krugman’s criticism. I could imagine that most readers would not have bothered but just accepted the general premise of Henley’s blog article, but I am of course sure that David did bother.

    What would the casual reader have learnt if he had followed up on all of those links and done a little further research? Here are just a couple of things :

    – this spat occurred around the 20th August, ie when the US Presidental election campaign was in full swing;

    – while Ferguson was calling in his article for the Republican candidate to be elected President, all of his critics quoted by Henley happen, quite by chance, to be (passive or active) Democrat supporters;

    – Ferguson’s criticisms of President Obama – essentially, that he had carried out few if any of his pre-election promises – appear to be shared by people on the opposite side of the politicial spectrum to Ferguson, as evidenced for example almost daily on websites such as http://www.counterpoint.org;

    – the star witness for the prosecution, Paul Krugman, has himself attracted the following comment (source: a reader posts in to the Guardian Blog to comment on Henley’s blog article):

    “To quote a recent article on Krugman’s validity : “Robert Barro, the
    distinguished Harvard economist, noted that Krugman ‘just says whatever
    is convenient for his political argument. He doesn’t behave like an
    economist.’ The New York Times Ombudsman Daniel Okrent observed that
    Paul Krugman has ‘the disturbing habit of shaping, slicing and selectively
    citing numbers in a fashion that pleases his acolytes but leaves him open
    to substantive assaults.’. James Taranto at the Wall Street Journal, after
    listing the falsities in Krugman’s latest piece on climate change, hazarded
    that perhaps ‘Krugman lakes himself ridiculous merely to make our job easy.'”.

    Those criticisms of Krugman don’t sound so different from the criticisms of Ferguson, do they? Which shows that it’s easy to hand it out….

    – Ferguson’s rebuttal of Krugman is anything but ad hominem; it is backed up by facts and reasoned argument and addresses Krugman’s criticisms squarely.

    *******

    Now, having given a few pointers to the article so lovingly brought to our attention by Davy, let us look at something rather puzzling.

    Davy is one of the Eminences on Craig’s blog and as such, part of his creed is that the United States (and, therefore, its President) is the repository of most of the evil in the world and can do nothing right.

    Surely, then, Davy should be welcoming (even if a mere 5 months and a bit after it was writeen) an article by the eminent historian Niall Ferguson pointing out that President Obama has kept few if any of his pre-election promises?

    Curiously, though, he doesn’t. On the contrary, he goes out of his way to post, with some satisfaction, a link to a blog article attacking Ferguson’s article.

    How can we explain this seemingly inexplicable action and attitude on Davy’s part?

  • Mary

    A review of their 2012 acrivities from the Conservative Friends of Israel.

    http://www2.cfoi.co.uk/Events/PastEvents/

    Some good photos. One of Hague looking very odd alongside Taub, Boris Johnson in NW London wearing a strange hat and aeveral mentions of the Minister for the Middle East and North Africa, Mr Alistair Burt, and many quotes from Cameron’s speech to their annual dinner.

  • Mary

    What will remain of the High Street and what happens to the Post Office service if and when the stores close up?

    One in five major Post Offices to be run from counters in high street shops
    The Post Office is planning to close one in five of its major high street branches and open them as counters in local shops instead, it emerged today.

    Critics warned that services for its millions of customers could suffer, as the Government-owned network said it wants 70 out of its 373 Crown post offices to re-open in private stores.

    The Post Office said it needed to close the branches and re-open them in stores such as WH Smith, Co-op and Budgens because it is losing around £40 million per year.

    But a spokesman promised that a full range of services, which range from dealing with passport applications to handing out pension payments, would still be on offer. She said none of the branches would disappear from their current locations, even if no new operators can be found.

    However, Billy Hayes, general secretary of the Communications Workers union, described the move as a “partial destruction” of the Crown post office network.

    “This move will have a huge impact on the high streets of small towns earmarked to lose their Crown post office,” he said. “These offices provide a dedicated specialist service to communities which will not be replicated by a window or two in a bigger shop.

    /..
    http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/9855633/One-in-five-major-Post-Offices-to-be-run-from-counters-in-high-street-shops.html

  • MJ

    “MJ can you back that up with some evidence and references?”

    Film producer Aaron Russo, interviewed shortly before his death from cancer, reminiscing about his relationship with a member of the Rockefeller clan.

    http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gtHKI93W_eg

    Not conclusive but not to be dismissed lightly either under the circs.

  • David

    “The Age of Niallism: Ferguson and the Post-Fact World”

    “Bluster cannot make untruths true.”

    http://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2012/08/the-age-of-niallism-ferguson-and-the-post-fact-world/261395/

    “The real issue isn’t the substance of Ferguson’s argument, though, which is shallow and basically exploded by this point in time. It isn’t even the question of how such garbage managed to be written and published. It is, rather, why did Ferguson write it? The answer is simple but has profound implications for American intellectual life generally: public speaking.”

    http://www.esquire.com/blogs/culture/niall-ferguson-newsweek-cover-11914269

    “Ferguson’s own Newsweek colleague Andrew Sullivan calls his “old and good friend” out for his “glaring omissions” and “sleight of hand.””

    http://nymag.com/daily/intelligencer/2012/08/niall-ferguson-smacked-down-over-obama-newsweek-cover.html

    “”It’s been a long time since I’ve seen a cover story so comprehensively demolished as Newsweek’s disengenuous anti-Obama piece by Harvard’s Niall Ferguson, who puts together a greatest-hits compilation of the right’s economic smears of the past three-plus years.”

    http://www.cjr.org/the_audit/newsweeks_niall_ferguson_debac.php?page=all

    OK. Time to put this habby hero to bed. Night, night, wee nially.

  • doug scorgie

    Ho dear!

    “Jemima Khan, once a strong ally of Julian Assange, has lashed out at the whistleblower, comparing him to the father of Scientology L. Ron Hubbard after he criticized a film about WikiLeaks that she produced.

    “On Wednesday, Khan, who is an associate editor of the New Statesman, wrote a several-page article about her relations with Assange, accusing him of becoming a cult and warning the whistleblower he might end up “tolerating only disciples and unwavering devotion, more like an Australian L Ron Hubbard.”

    “I don’t regret putting up bail money for Assange, but I did it so that he would be released while awaiting trial, not so that he could avoid answering to the allegations,” Khan noted.”

  • Fred

    Here’s one for those who like a mystery.

    25th August 1942 HRH the Duke of Kent, the Queen’s uncle, died when the Sunderland flying boat he was in crashed into a mountain in the north of Scotland. It was not reported at the time. Officially they say the plane was en-rout to Iceland on a diplomatic mission and turned early due to navigational error.

    However word on the street in a town close to where the plane crashed is that in residence at Braemore Lodge at the time was one Rudolph Hess. There is a loch near to the lodge a flying plane could easily land on.

    It may be just coincidence that a high ranking member of the Royal Family crashed within a mile or so of the place Rudolph Hess was being kept.

    But then again it may not.

  • thatcrab

    So many interesting things going on in this thread!

    The Post office is shrinking because it is losing 40 million a year?
    The BBC lost 3.6 billion last year (license fees).
    Who doesn’t like a Post office!

    All the bust banks should have been converted to Post offices, and bust banks personal accounts converted to modernised post office accounts. Small business and personal loans to people, straight from the National Coffers. High street and small business banking without the bastard rich flogging it to ruins.

    Cryptonym, I hart your assurances of Salmond, maybe sway with the breeze a bit. Maybe you shouldnt blame some people too much for seeing him as just another player.

    Anyway, lots of intresting and nutritious comments recently from the familiars and pop ins too.
    Thankyou real people.

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