Something strange and slightly troubling begins to happen when you spend more than about two minutes watching Cheddarvision, the much-publicised website set up by the cheesemaker Tom Calver.

It broadcasts live footage of a single 44lb truckle of cheddar as it imperceptibly matures. First, unsurprisingly, you feel bored and irritable.

Then, after a while, and without really meaning to, you slip into a peaceful, meditative, quasi-hypnotic state.

You start to breathe more deeply. Peripheral distractions - traffic noise, ringing telephones - fall away. There is you, and there is the cheese. Nothing more.

If something should actually happen to the cheese while you're in this state of mind - every week, the cheese is turned over; on one occasion, the label fell off and had to be replaced - it has an impact utterly disproportionate to the event.   more »

Brilliantly and knowingly, the Bush Regime introduced full-strength surrealism into our public discourse, in the form of their amorphous and fraudulent "global war on terrorism."

They asked for our consent and the consent of the Congress to undertake it; thoroughly deceived, both the public and Congress acquiesced.

There was no way a trusting country could know the "war on terrorism" was a fantasy: what the Bush Regime launched in fact was an international crime of military aggression.

But, still denied the truth, we reaffirmed our consent by re-electing Bush in 2004.   more »

Shifts in the U.S. military role on the ground in Iraq, coupled with the Pentagon’s air war escalating largely out of media sight, could enable the war’s promoters to claim a notable reduction of “violence.”

And the American death toll could fall due to reconfiguration or reduction of U.S. troop levels inside Iraq.

Such a combination of developments would appeal to the fervent nationalism of U.S. news media. But the antiwar movement shouldn’t pander to jingo-narcissism.

If we argue that the war is bad mainly because of what it is doing to Americans, then what happens when the Pentagon finds ways to cut American losses -- while continuing to inflict massive destruction on Iraqi people?   more »

Iran's newspapers ended a fortnight's enforced silence on the 15 detained UK naval personnel yesterday by depicting the affair as a dark conspiracy hatched by London.

Much of the media denounced the British, saying the sailors and marines had been sent into Iranian waters to stoke a conflict aimed at isolating the country.

The usually moderate Etemade Melli accused the Blair government of devising a "pre-planned scenario" to protect the Labour party from an electoral backlash caused by British public opposition to the Iraq war.

"Britain was well aware that such an incursion by its military forces would provoke a reaction from Tehran," the paper wrote.

"The existence of hi-tech satellite navigation equipment eliminates the possibility of negligence or error on the part of the British.    more »

Our economic system is under stress, again. We can't seem to keep it afloat without massive production of military hardware. That could be one reason George Bush tries to keep us in a state of perpetual war.

Our military budget has reached $532 billion for 2007; with another half trillion for the cost of the Afghanistan and Iraq War. (Not to mention the human costs.)

Why? It isn't producing better schools or improving infrastructure or providing social services for the people who need it in this country.

The Bush Administration claims to be exporting democracy while killing it here.   more »