TLRP

Keith met Hector and Nelson for the first time at eleven this morning, in a field in Denbighshire, and the three animals who have carried this account for a year stood in the same grass and did not know they had done anything. It happened because the parish council in Devon asked Dave to have Keith somewhere else for Bonfire Night, having found him on top of the bonfire a fortnight ago, and a farmer in Denbighshire who reads the account rang Dave and offered a spare paddock. The two men had never spoken. The biggest crossover in the history of this account was arranged in one phone call, by a man who wanted his village to light a fire in peace and a man who was curious. I drove over with a question. The account passed 200,000 followers this week, and the allegation is that these three are the reason. I left the notebook in the car. Dave backed the trailer up to the gate. Inside the field, a seventeen-hand Cavalry Black and a small grey donkey stood side by side at the far hedge and watched the ramp come down with the expression of two animals who have seen a trailer before and have not yet been impressed by one. Keith came down it without being asked and stopped at the bottom. For the first time in his life there was a horse the size of a shed in front of him and a donkey a third his own size beside it, and he looked at both for about four seconds, with those rectangular eyes, the way he looks at a latch he has not solved yet. Then he walked straight past them, and past the farmers, and past me, and put his nose on the field gate. Me: Keith. The allegation is that you built this. Your tracker. Your neighbour's file. Your Reverend. The goat from two fields over you open gates for. Keith: [lifted the latch] The gate swung in, and Nelson was standing in it. He had crossed the whole field to get there, and nobody saw him do it, which is how Nelson crosses fields. He put himself in the gateway with his chest across the gap, because in four years nothing has passed that gate without a donkey's say-so, and a goat from Devon was not going to be the first. Me: Nelson. There is a woman in Harrogate whose husband says your name at parking tickets. A man who gets to his gate at seven for the first time since his operation. People write to tell me you taught them to stand still. Nelson: [stood still] Keith put his head down and pushed, gently, the way he tests a post, and the donkey set his feet and leaned into it and gave nothing. A goat who has opened every gate in Devon, nose to nose in a three-foot gap with a donkey who has held every gateway in Wales. Neither raised his voice, because neither has one to raise. They stood there and were what they are, and waited to find out which of the two the world would turn out to be. Hector arrived above the pair of them, at the pace of a very large animal pretending it had meant to come anyway, and put his head down between them to see what the fuss was. Me: Hector. You stood for a nation while it wept. People tell me they watch you lie down in the sun and something in their own shoulders comes down with you. Do you accept responsibility? Hector: [breathed on the goat] The gate moved an inch in the wind. Hector went four feet sideways with his tail over his back, came back, and put his head over the donkey's spine to look at the goat from there, which is where he has looked at everything since the day a stranger produced a donkey from behind a trailer and the war horse found the one thing in Wales he would follow. Me: Any of you. Does it reach you at all, what you have done for people? Keith stepped back from the donkey, looked at the open gate and the lane beyond it, which he could have been through in two seconds, and then turned round, walked to the field shelter, went up the wall and onto the roof, and stood on the ridge looking at Wales. Nelson walked out of the gateway and back to the hay. Hector looked at the open gate, then at the donkey eating, and put his head down and grazed. The Denbighshire farmer, who had said nothing for ten minutes, went and shut it. Me, to the farmer: "I built a whole universe on these three." Farmer: "Aye. They've not read it. That's why it works." That was the only answer I got all day, and it is the right one. For a year the country has been told it is finished and its countryside is a crime, and 200,000 people have answered by leaning on a gate in Wales to watch a goat who cannot be governed, a donkey who cannot be hurried, and a horse who gave everything to strangers and is finally allowed to lie down, kept by men who were up at five and will be up at five tomorrow. None of it was put on for anybody. It is simply still there, in a field, this afternoon, which is the most reassuring thing I know about Britain and the whole reason I keep driving to gates. Dave goes home tonight. Keith stays till Saturday. He has not come down. Nelson has not looked up. Hector has looked up at the goat on the roof eleven times by the farmer's count and has not yet decided whether it is a threat, which is the longest he has ever taken to decide anything, and the first time in four years he has had something to think about that was not the donkey.

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NEW: On Friday, dockworkers at 111 ports in 22 countries and regions on five continents will stop work in a coordinated strike against war, according to the most recent information from the organizing unions. More than 25 dockworkers’ unions have now signed on, from Marseille to Mumbai, Hamburg to Montevideo, Melbourne to Oakland. Days ago the count stood at about 100 ports in 17 countries, and that figure doesn’t include the dozens of unions in other sectors that have pledged support. Their demand is simple: no weapons and no military cargo through their ports. Nearly everything the world ships passes through the docks, and without the workers who load and unload it, nothing moves. In France, the main dockers’ union says the country’s ports will be 95% shut. Italy, India, Greece and Turkey face 24-hour strikes, and Morocco and Cyprus will see stoppages of up to two hours, with rallies planned in port cities around the world. In Greece, metalworkers, ship-repair workers and young people are joining the dockers, and in the US, ILWU Local 10 is striking in Oakland and San Francisco. The unions are working from the Istanbul Declaration, signed in May, with each one deciding for itself how to take part. They are also fighting for their own jobs, against cuts from automation and for contracts, raises, shorter hours and safety. The unions point to escalating wars in Ukraine and the Middle East and the danger of a generalized war. They condemn Israel’s new crimes in Hebron, carried out with the backing of the US, NATO and the EU. Israel’s lockdown of the city is now in its sixth day, with more than 3,000 Palestinians displaced, according to the UN. Palestinian unions have endorsed Friday’s action. In Italy, the fight has spilled beyond the docks. The union USB has called for a nationwide general strike. Last night, the Italian government ordered transport workers back on the job last night. USB said it would defy the order and accept the steep penalties. The unions are calling on workers and young people everywhere to stand with the dockworkers, saying “Ports for peace and the peoples, not launching pads for war.” I’m reporting from Calabria, Italy, and I will be in Genoa tomorrow ahead of the strike to report on the ground during the mobilzation.

I am the Deputy Director for Continuity of Enrichment at the Atomic Energy Organization of the Islamic Republic of Iran, and I would like to thank the United States Air Force and the Israeli Air Force for performing our annual asset verification. Last June they dropped bunker-busters on Fordow, Natanz, and Isfahan and announced that the Islamic Republic’s key enrichment facilities had been completely and totally obliterated. I opened the shared drive the next morning. The folder still existed. Someone had renamed it “Temporary Entrance Maintenance—Peaceful Purposes.” The material we had moved the week before was listed under “Off-Site Professional Development.” I approved the rename. It auto-saved. The Supreme Leader’s fatwa against nuclear weapons was already in the folder. It has been in the folder since 2003. It has never been closed. The fatwa is excellent documentation. It is oral. It is cited. It is never quite published as a classic ruling that would require us to stop. We present it to the IAEA. We present it to visiting ambassadors. We present it to the people who ask why the centrifuges keep turning. The fatwa covers use. The continuity plan covers everything else. Both documents are correct. One of them is temporary. The temporary one is still running. The Atomic Energy Organization handles the public face: electricity, radiopharmaceuticals, sovereignty, service to humanity. The Organization of Defensive Innovation and Research handles the other face. The IRGC built the tunnels at Fordow because the IRGC builds tunnels. We do not discuss which face is which in the same meeting. We do not need to. The shared drive does not care which letterhead is on the folder. In February they came back. The first wave hit the compound while the Supreme Leader was still above ground. We marked him “Out of Office—Permanent” and kept the continuity call going. The IRGC commander, the Defense Minister, and several others were marked the same way. The call continued. The new strikes were logged as incomplete because the knowledge had already been restructured around the material that survived the previous incomplete strikes. The restructuring was finished before the second round started. The second round is still listed as “In Progress.” It has been in progress for eight months. The Islamic Republic remains in the header. Now the Space Force watches everything. They can read a name badge from orbit. We issued guidance that no one is to wear a name badge. The guidance is followed. Last week a technician arrived in a jacket that still had the old badge sewn into the lining. The satellite noted the stitching. We have opened a ticket. The ticket is currently assigned to Facilities. Facilities was struck in June. Facilities has not responded. The jacket is still in the system. The latest American statement says there isn’t much activity at the remaining sites. Our latest report says the same thing. The two reports match. Matching reports are what we track. Activity is defined as anything that produces a useful image on the next pass. We have reduced useful images. We have not reduced the ability to produce them later. The fatwa is still in the folder. The material is still in the folder. The people who remember how the machines go together are still employed by the Islamic Republic. I am sometimes asked if the program continues. The program continues in the form it has always continued under the Islamic Republic: residual material that was not destroyed, machines that can still be assembled, and a shared drive that survived two rounds of bunker-busters because no one thought to bomb the shared drive. None of these items require a new hall. All of them require that no one stand still long enough for the next satellite to finish spelling the name on the jacket. My pension vests in 2029. The spring assessment is already drafted. It will state that the program has been degraded. It will also state that the degradation is measurable, temporary, and already accounted for in the continuity plan of the Islamic Republic. Both sentences will be true. Both sentences will be filed. The file will be renamed something anodyne. The Americans will announce another obliteration. I will open the drive the next morning. The folder will still be there. The fatwa will still be in it. Someone has to keep the folder.

Together with the National University of Distance Education, we are launching a pioneering programme to enable #RomaEU to access university gitanos.org/newsroom/togethe…

I am a member of the Norwegian Nobel Committee. There are five of us. Five people, appointed by a parliament most of the planet could not find on a map, who decide, once a year, which human being the world has agreed to call good. I know. I know. I think about it on the tram. We meet in a building on Henrik Ibsens gate, a street named after a man who wrote almost exclusively about people discovering they are frauds, which nobody on the committee finds funny except me. There is a room with a long table and the portraits of the dead laureates looking down, Mandela, the Dalai Lama, a great many earnest men in spectacles, and one portrait we do not discuss, which is Kissinger, 1973, awarded while the bombs were still falling, after which two of our predecessors resigned and the satirist Tom Lehrer said political satire was now obsolete. We keep him on the wall. A reminder. Every family has the uncle. It is October in Oslo, which means the sun gives up around four in the afternoon like a civil servant, and it rains the particular Norwegian rain that isn’t quite falling, just hanging there, judging you. I arrive with wet shoes. I always arrive with wet shoes. There is coffee, because this is Norway and there is always coffee, we drink more of it per person than almost anyone alive, and someone’s wife has sent kanelboller, the cinnamon buns, and we sit, five Norwegians, damp, caffeinated, sugared, and we decide the moral standing of the entire species. Let me tell you how it actually works, because the world imagines a cathedral and it is, I promise you, a book club with a mandate. 287 nominations this year. 208 people, 79 organizations. Anyone can nominate, that’s the secret nobody understands: a professor, a parliamentarian, a former laureate, so the “nominee” list is meaningless, it’s a suggestion box, and every autumn some congressman nominates his own golden retriever and the press writes “SHORTLISTED.” Nobody is shortlisted. There is no short list the public ever sees. There is us, and the coffee, and the rain, and the portraits, and a Norwegian stubbornness that is older than the prize itself. We read reports. The institute’s advisers write them, thick dull documents, and we argue. Our chairman told the BBC once that in the final meeting “there is a high temperature.” High temperature, for a Norwegian, means someone slightly raised an eyebrow and then apologized for it. We don’t do high temperature. We do a long silence, and then Kristin says “well,” and everyone knows exactly what “well” meant, and it’s settled. That’s our shouting. “Well.” You’d have to be raised here to hear the violence in it. Now. This year. I will not say the name, because we never say the name, but you know the name. A certain head of state wanted this prize the way a child wants a thing in a shop window, which is to say loudly, and in public, and with the full belief that wanting it was itself the argument. He said he deserved it. He said he’d ended eight wars, a number that grew most times he said it, like a fish. He had other heads of state phone us. Israel’s prime minister posted it on the internet, “Give him the Nobel.” The leaders of Cambodia and Pakistan announced they’d nominated him, as though announcing it were part of it, as though we tally mentions. A man flew around the globe collecting endorsements for a Norwegian committee the way you’d collect signatures for a petition to the council about a noisy dog. And here, uff da, is the detail I treasure, the one that makes me smile into my coffee. The nomination deadline is the 31st of January. He took office on the 20th. So for all the phone calls, all the posts, all the gilded lobbying, the only nominations that could possibly count for this year’s prize were filed in the first eleven days of his term, before he had, by his own arithmetic, ended a single one of the eight wars. He campaigned all year for a prize whose window had shut while he was still hanging up his coat. We didn’t have to reject him. The calendar did. We just watched. Norwegians are very good at watching. We have long winters. People think we sit there weighing his deeds. We don’t. That’s the thing I can’t make the world understand. We’re not grading his homework. We don’t owe anyone the prize for a ceasefire, however real, however loud the announcement. “He made peace” is not a sentence that ends in a medal, the way he believes it does, the way he believes every good thing ends in his name on it. The will of a dead Swede says the prize goes to whoever did the most for fraternity between nations. A dead Swede, I should add, who made his entire fortune inventing dynamite and selling arms, and spent his last years horrified at his own obituary, which called him a merchant of death, and so bought his way to immortality as a man of peace. The whole prize is one guilty arms dealer’s attempt to launder his name. We are, all of us, administering a dead man’s public relations. I find this clarifying. It keeps me humble. It should keep everyone humble, and it keeps, by my count, no one humble at all. So who did we give it to? An eighty-five-year-old woman. A judge. Born in Durban, under apartheid, granddaughter of a Tamil man who came to South Africa as indentured labor, a bus driver’s daughter from the poor Indian quarter, who became the first non-white woman to run a law practice in her province, who defended Mandela’s people when defending them was dangerous, who sat on the Rwanda tribunal and the court at the Hague, and who, at eighty-five, is right now a judge weighing whether a genocide is a genocide. When we told the world, our chairman said the rule of law “underpins the system we have set up to ensure peace,” and that “peace requires justice.” She wasn’t even in Oslo. She was in Nuremberg. In courtroom 600. The actual room where they tried the Nazis. You cannot stage that. God staged that, and God, it turns out, is a better satirist than any of us. She did not phone us. She did not post. No prime minister demanded it for her on the internet. She had, as far as our deliberations are concerned, the one qualification the loud man could never manufacture, which is that she wanted the work and not the medal. The medal finds those people. It flees the ones who chase it. This is not a rule we wrote. It’s just the only pattern the hundred-odd years of our mistakes has ever shown. The reaction from across the ocean was immediate. His spokesman posted that we “place politics over peace.” Ja. Perhaps. We’re five damp pensioners in a rainy city; of course it’s political, it was always political, it was political when we gave it to a sitting American president nine months into his first term for the promise of things he had not yet done, and we have been quietly embarrassed about that one for fifteen years, so believe me, we had a particular reason this year to prefer a woman with fifty years of verdicts behind her over a man with eight wars in front of him and a deadline already behind him. Here is what he will never understand, the thing I’d tell him on the tram if he ever took one. We are the one prize he cannot buy, cannot post his way to, cannot have a friendly dictator phone in for him. Not because we’re incorruptible, nei, we’re as vain and wrong and human as the portraits on our wall. But because the entire point of the thing, the only power a small cold country’s book club has ever held, is that it goes to the person not performing the wanting. The moment you demand it, you’ve proven you don’t understand what it’s for, and proving that is itself the disqualification. He ran the most expensive campaign in the history of the prize and the campaign was the reason. He was never losing to Navi Pillay. He was losing to the concept. It’s dark now. Four o’clock dark. The buns are gone. Kristin said “well” an hour ago and we all went home. I’m on the tram with my wet shoes, and somewhere across the water a very powerful man is explaining to a camera that the prize is rigged, that we’re corrupt, that he’ll win it next year, and he genuinely might, we’re only five idiots and we’ve been wrong before, Kissinger is still on the wall. But not this year. This year an old woman in Nuremberg, in the room where the law once stared down the exact kind of man who thinks wanting a thing loudly enough should make it his, got a phone call she didn’t ask for. That’s the job. We don’t reward the man who ends the war and announces it. We reward the woman who spent fifty years deciding what a war was. He’ll never see the difference. That’s rather the whole point of him. Takk for i dag. I have to change trams.

What a surprise! @UKLabour Is stuffed with ZIONISTS and funded by ZIONISTS! theguardian.com/politics/202…

Good to hear @jeremycorbyn standing in solidarity with @ZackPolanski and the Green Party 💚

@CarolineLucas is a disgrace 😡