Parliament of Fowls

Can't really believe it but...just for the records.

Not a fan - in fact I was really cut up when Jarvis Cocker got arrested for mooning him onstage at the Brit Awards in 1996, about Jarvis that is not about the so-called King of Pop - but it's trickling out although as of now the BBC still has him "gravely ill in hospital", on its static html site at least rather than on the live stream, which is reporting his actual death.

No cards, no nothing, not a real issue but...just unbelieveable.

(as Sally Smedley of Drop the Dead Donkey notoriety said to Sir Peter over duck a l'orange...)

But did you see the Ten O'Clock News?! The only thing less palatable about the way they suggested the Conservative Party's modernisation project had stalled...talk about understated bias and contempt.

Personally I'd rather they stuck to criticising Foxy directly and stopped messing with the necessary modernisation (however superficial it appears to have been) but at least they made the point that the expenses scandal is not over yet. And that's official.

A card perhaps. Again, a single card from Gatherer.

Ambiguity - Blue - Enchantment

Couldn't have put it better myself. The twisted rule text on this card is because it was from the Unhinged spoof set published in mid-2004, but it is referring to the subtle and rather difficult way of checking the political barometer here - it is all in the nuances of the report rather than the direct, hard-hitting, "David Cameron today resigned in favour of the Vodalian Mage because he just couldn't hack it any more". Oh well. On we go.

Leaving nasty party politics for a moment, John Rentoul claims the government is overestimating the death toll in Iraq.

Yes, you heard it right. A major liberal newspaper's main political correspondent and blogger is actually saying that fewer people than the government thinks have died since the Coalition forces went in to Iraq in 2003. Which is counter-intuitive and thus perhaps an example of rather selfless regard for the truth. It would be further in Rentoul's own interests to claim that there was a massive bloodbath in Iraq and up to a million people have been killed - but no, apparently Miliband is wrong to claim that "many hundreds of thousands" have died, and the true figure is more like 100-200,000 dead since hostilities began in February 2003. (Let's say ~150,000.)

I've left a comment as "Owlqueen" on the post suggesting that a fuller truth may come out when the Iraq War finally gets its own enquiry this coming year. Hopefully there is going to be not only an inquiry but the usual mountain of press reports on how Iraq has fared and is faring since the invasion. Magic had a word for it - Coalition Victory. This is not a random pull - but a card which came out before 9/11 (I believe) - from a set called Invasion - which suggests to me that life does often imitate art with . If it had come out after the 2003 invasion, I would have said there was some kind of conscious or unconscious satire element. But before? Interesting. There is, according to Owlie, a whole other dimension to the human collective subconscious which anticipates major global events in pop culture before they happen, leading to life appearing to imitate art. According to Owlie, it is more a case of our minds foreshadowing great events ahead and planning for them subconsciously, so the shock is lessened when they arrive. Divination is a way of exploring this consciously and deliberately; however we seem to do a lot of it in literature, particularly in literature such as mass-market swords-and-sorcery where the mind deliberately imagines alien situations and alien landscapes. We end up with previously unimaginable events - such as 9/11 and the fallout from that - being predicted and then sadly coming true.

Back to Rentoul: Owlperson and Deep Throat both concur that this may be our Sigiled Paladin standing up for the truth, so there is no need to pull a card for it. I hoped I might pick a diamond out of the rough to find our Pal for today. Of course David Miliband still comes in for a bit of flak, but at least someone seems to be acting contrary to expected interests and expected intentions. Maybe there really is hope.

More later on.

David Cameron is making himself and others pay back £250,000 in excessive expense claims. He claims not to be interested in a witch-hunt - which is a shame because I think the public want one from his Shadow Cabinet, just as Brown has had his miscreants summarily removed. Divisions have erupted because the central party has been looking privately for more scapegoats to be sacrificed from among the backbenches, evidently seen as an excuse to impose "foxy" candidates on seats. Whether this is right - as sitting MPs are the ones causing the problems - or wrong - because of the obvious lack of resignations from within the party putting off normally loyal commentators such as Peter Oborne - is still to be seen, but it might not be seen to be enough, particularly when the leader himself is implicated with his own mortgage claims and has only so far paid back a tiny fraction of what he reasonably owes the taxpayer.

A card, you say? How about... (from the Random Card on the Gatherer database)

Spitfire Handler - Red - Goblin

"Wait till Toggo sees this!"

Goblins are not renowned for their sensitive handling of things, and tend to spit fire - and have it back-fire. While this is not perhaps the biggest danger in the situation the volatility of the situation's handling suggests to me a lot more will have to be done later to shore up the party if the leadership continues to mess with the constituency chairmen and long-serving MPs; though I hold no sympathy for MPs that would be facing deselection under these moves, anything that begins to rock the boat for the Tories as much as they assume this will damage Labour is - personally speaking - to be welcomed. Owlie can't take a view on it himself, but he notes that part of the problem Michael Howard faced at the end of his leadership term was that he tried to fiddle with party procedures and unnecessarily centralise decision-making within the party for short-term political ends.

And Cameron is still not really to be punished properly over his own misclaims. Payback is the very least of what he should do, but even Hazel Blears wrote that cheque and was not spared the axe, at least from the Cabinet. With an ornery group on Facebook dedicated to getting rid of John Redwood from his Wokingham seat, I'm not sure whether the public will relax just because £250,000 has been repaid. It should never have been claimed in the first place, and the only reason why Cameron and his cronies are saying that the rules were flawed are because they got caught. Sorry is no longer good enough.

----

I will be doing a card a day for another while, just to see whether things are hotting up or cooling down. This will still be a random Magic card, again from the Gatherer Database. I'm enjoying using them as an oracle for something that is clearly visible to me, and they seem to work reasonably well and reasonably consistently. Onward.

For today, 25 June 2009, we have:

Sigiled Paladin - White - Human Knight

Each sigil marks the recognition of a great deed and signifies a duty owed to the one who granted it.

There is an honour about today that hasn't been seen in a while - someone, somewhere, steps forward and does the right thing without asking. The nobility of the card goes beyond petty party politics, and involves some sort of gesture that is recognised as more than just that. It is a bit like Justice in the tarot - that karma begins to work for the good of the situation and the good of all rather than in narrow partisan interests. It's not going to be spectacular, nor is it going to be something negative like a resignation or someone being found out and sacked, nor does it relate to the above story about the Tories' payback day. But it stands outside the fray and makes the whole situation inside the Parliament of Manure seem even worse.

By the way, we are now into Sun in Cancer, which means things should get a lot more fluid and we will begin to make a bit more headway before Leo appears to start the wildfires later on. Don't expect much from this sign - it normally governs the winding down towards the long summer recess - but the intensity of this spring's events suggests to me that after airy and the less coherent aspects of Gemini things begin to coalesce again into something more viscous and definable. The trend is still downward, but after the elections things begin to settle into recognisable patterns.