Recommended Reading
An eclectic mix of comment, opinion, information and invective from around the web.
CREATIVE COMMONS: Attribute, non commercial, no derivs.
KEYWORDS: news, opinion, comment, climate change, environment, energy, education, economy, food, humanities, money, politics, science, tecnology
If Creativity Can Lead To Madness Why Do We Offer Art Therapy?
I was recently at a fundraising dinner for Mind, the leading mental health charity in the UK. One of the big themes for the evening (other than Stephen Fry’s investiture as president), was the idea of art as therapy. My only qualifications to write about therapy and mental illness are a rather lame 2:1 in ...
Obama looks stupid as he lectures Germany on financial management
Germany’s finance minister Wolfang Schauble has launched a stinging rebuke to the Obama administration after Washington pushed for the European Union to boost its EFSF bail out fund. After Obama declared that the European financial crisis is “scaring the world”, Schauble shot back at the US president by warning: “It’s always …
LHC and the search for the Higgs Boson
The Large Hadron Collider’s search for the Higgs boson – the theoretical particle that is believed to give all matter in the universe mass – is, according to physicists, entering its last phase. At some point in the next few months, perhaps as soon as December, we will know: either it exists in the form that ...
The Shallow Anti Americanism Of US Liberals
There are few subjects that provoke as much smug condescension and shallow anti-Americanism as the death penalty in the United States. And the “debate” over the execution in Georgia last Wednesday of Troy Davis, 42, convicted of the 1989 murder of Mark MacPhail, an off-duty police officer, marked a new low. The sheer emotionalism and partisanship…
The Really Really Fast Show
A 450-mile journey lasting less than 2.4 thousandths of a second has, we are told, disproved Einstein's theory of special relativity. Tom Peck seeks expert guidance in an attempt to understand what this actually means ...
Watermelons vs Shale Gas
God knows we could all do with some good news right now. And as it happens, from Oop North near Blackpool this week, we had good news in spades. Sure, it was known Britain was sitting on some pretty sizeable shale gas deposits. What hadn’t been announced before though, was just how sizeable.
Quantitative Easing Failed - Why Are Economists Demanging More?
The IMF’s figures are pitilessly clear. The countries which decreed the biggest bailouts and stimulus package, the countries which printed the most money, are suffering the slowest growth. The Bank of England’s ‘quantitative easing’ was, in proportionate terms, bigger even than the Fed’s. Result? Our inflation rate is higher than our competitors’, our economy commensurately…
Science Fiction Is Not Just Fantasy
Britain doesn’t have enough young people becoming scientists and engineers. It’s a familiar refrain heard from politicans on both sides of the aisle, not to mention eminent scientists and most recently, Eric Schmidt, Google’s chairman. There’s plenty of blame to go around for this apparent decline, whether it’s the glittering lure of the financial sector ...
Socialists May Be Clever But They're Not Humble
Guido Fawkes reported recently that Polly Toynbee told the Edinburgh Book Show that left-wing people were both more intelligent and generally better people than others. I am happy to admit immediately that it is likely that left-wing people are more intelligent than liberals and conservatives – though the causality is in the other direction. In his final book ...
Dedicated To Lucifer An appraisal of the work of Saul Alinsky the American seditionist and black supremacist.
Young River
A nature poem describing the delicate balance of any environment.
Obama's "Jobs" Bill gives shitloads of money to black seditionists
ACORN and other radical left-wing groups would be eligible for up to $15 billion in federal funding if President Obama’s new economic stimulus package becomes law. Now that public polling shows Americans are realizing that economic stimulus programs don’t work, the Obama administration is calling ...
Is the EDL the new voice of the white working class?
By Damian Thompson - Daily Telegraph
From Saturday’s Daily Telegraph There’s a YouTube video doing the rounds which “anti-fascist” campaigners against the English Defence League don’t want you to see. It features a couple of young middle-class supporters of Unite Against Fascism sniggering as one of them describes a “horrible tattooed woman” at a demo being punched in the face “before…
American Liberals Selective Anti Semitism
I was horrified by reports that a powerful congressman, Henry Waxman, had said that Jews in New York’s ninth congressional district voted against President Barack Obama “to protect their wealth.” Could the obsession with backing Obama have led a leading Jewish politician to make such a stereotypical antisemitic remark? ...
Jenkins' delivers right hook to Federasts - Raewawld
If you want three minutes of genuine pleasure this morning, read through Simon Jenkins' denunciation of European Federalism in the Guardian. In a piece that must leave many Guardianistas choking on their nut Muesli today, Jenkins says ...
Health Scare Story Du Jour - Mark Wadsworrh
Drinking alcohol can increase your risk of cancer because ethanol is itself a carcinogen on certain parts of the body, scientists have found. Researchers said they found that when ethanol is ...
Who Is This Idiot (clue: it's not the guy from It's A Knockout - Tim Worstall
Having looked him up, apparently he’s something like the Emeritus Professor of Sociology at the Open University. And entirely ignorant to boot: [ ... ] As an analysis of neoliberalism that’s a pretty good coq au vin recipe. That is, it has entirely fuck all to do with the subject under discussion.
Spongebob Squarepants is a health risk? - Divck Puddlecote
The Sun carried an article today on the dangers of Spongebob Squarepants. Yes, you read that correctly, the dangers of ... Spongebob Squarepants. I suspect the currant bun just wanted to raise a few hackles amongst its readers - and perhaps a derisory expletive or two - at the expense of people who would suggest such a thing. They are lagging behind the
Cibvilisation: Progress Or Decline
From the very first mankind has held the belief that it is superior to the animal kingdom. Mankind learned from nature how to hunt, how to survive and lived within the rules of nature. Mankind utilised his mind making many discoveries about the world he lives in ...
Why Are Trans Fats Still Legal?
The trans fats in junk food are responsible for the deaths of around 7,000 people a year in the UK – and teenagers are most at risk. Elsewhere, these toxic substances are banned. So why are they still legal in this country?
Not The Missing Link Again Daily Telegraph top boring fucker science writer Tom Chivers reports on a newly discoverd fossil that may be from the earliest ancestor of humans but appeals to sciece wriyters to stop using the phrase "mssing link." In the comment thread (better than the post) readers appeal to scientists like Tom to stop wasting time and money on the irrelevant. Once therewere monkeys, now there are humans (and a sub human species called science tits) How we go from monkeys to humans, (if indeed we did) does not matter.
Our Labour Market Paradox
The UK labour market is deeply dysfunctional. Today, the Telegraph reported that there are three major cities where around a third of the homes contain adults that have never had a job. That is not an unemployment rate. No, it is something much worse. It is an unemployable rate. It is a number that tells us ...
Let's not be suckered into following Obama's lead
By Jeremy Warner - Daily Telegraph
Obama says reflate, and Osborne up yours – we are sticking to Plan A. That broadly summarises the juxtaposition of Barack Obama’s new $447bn plan for growth and what the UK Chancellor, George Osborne, said at Chatham House this morning. Christine Lagarde, the new managing director of the IMF, was speaking at Chatham House too,…
Google Is Bad For The Environment
Google's carbon footprint is larger than those of 61 states and islands, it has been revealed after the company released its environmental figures for the first time yesterday.
Are machines Living Things
In NetFuture #132 I wrote about recent experiments with rats. ... round of our ongoing dialogue. For the previous installment, see NetFuture #130. SLT ... Of course no human knows what a rat thinks or feels, but with implants we actually ... Every organism strives to express its own wholeness; its health entails being more or ...
HMRC Loonytons economics - Nothing To Declare
HMRC sell seized vehicles for an average of 66 pence each! HMRC have got it wrong ... surely? l mean, they must have ... right?
Look at this FOI request ...
It's September, It Must Be The Euro - Raewald
Back on 17th June, in the halcyon days of our glorious Summer, I wrote: Our masters in Brussels would rather see the entire European economy stagnate and economic activity shrink to a dribble before they'll surrender, but the truth apparent to all is that no nation will be able ...
When Did Free Speech Die
Why has this country become so intolerant of civilised, grown-up debate? Voltaire’s classic dictum that you may disagree with what someone says but defend to the death his right to say it has withered and died. When David Starkey uttered provocative remarks about young black men in the wake of last month’s riots, his critics ...
Why Are Poor White Boys Doing Badly At School?
When social scientists try to explain something, they look at all kinds of factors they can measure. Take education. You could try to explain variations in pupils’ results by looking at their parents class or wealth or education. Or we might look at school performance, teacher quality, class sizes and so on. Social researchers don’t like saying…
It's Depressing That The Right To Die Has Become A Cause Celibre
These days, the only time you hear the word “autonomy” said with any vigour, with heartfelt oomph, is in relation to assisted suicide. In every other area of life, the idea of moral autonomy has taken a beating in recent years. Parental autonomy is continually blitzed by know-it-all politicos and supernannies who want to subject…
Climate Scepticism Is The New Racism
Climate scepticism is the new racism, Al Gore has told an interviewer. And do you know what? He’s absolutely right. Just as “racist” has been honed over the decades by liberal-lefties for casual use as a deadly weapon against anyone who disagrees them, so “climate denier” has become the new leftist shorthand for “evil, wrong, uncaring,…
Climate scepticism is the new racism, Al Gore has told an interviewer. And do you know what? He’s absolutely right. Just as “racist” has been honed over the decades by liberal-lefties for casual use as a deadly weapon against anyone who disagrees them, so “climate denier” has become the new leftist shorthand for “evil, wrong, uncaring,…
What Next For Libya
Human rights abuses, cronyism, massive amounts of taxpayer money gone in dubious circumstances, "difficult" people assassinated, law book thrown out when it suits the leader, excessive force used by power-crazed cops, bizarre political decisions, countrywide surveillance of its citizens, strange associations with foreign governments, people gaoled on a whim, and massive corruption. But enough about the UK. This is about New Libya ...
How Statism Has Come To Dominate The Churchby Ed West, Daily Telegraph
On Saturday my colleague Damian Thompson noted that it has been another fantastic academic year for my alma mater, the highly successful Cardinal Vaughan Memorial School in west Kensington. The Vaughan is that rare thing – a London state school that has managed to maintain the ethos and culture of the pre-Anthony Crosland era, with teachers…
Barack Obama Is Powrless He Might As Well Stay On The Beach
The first I knew of President Obama’s decision to holiday on Martha’s Vineyard for a third successive year was when the car rental folk told me that all they had for August were SUVs at a thousand dollars a week, his entourage having bagged the rest. We’ve been coming here, off and on, since American friends introduced us to the island during a sabbatical year at next-door Harvard. I imagine that Obama comes, like Bill Clinton before him, because it seems ...
Evil As A Common Goal
Fifty years ago, in August 1961, social psychologist Stanley Milgram conducted an experiment that changed our understanding of the human propensity for evil for ever. Participants were invited into his laboratory at Yale, supposedly for a study looking at the effects of ...
Why we need a moral panic over last week's riots by Ed West, Daily Telegraph
The Economist’s Bagehot suggests that we shouldn’t get our knickers in a twist about the riots, quoting previous examples of moral panic about social disorder, crime and youth culture to show that last week’s events are nothing new. He cites articles about “young delinquents” in 1913, 1956 headlines about “rock’n’roll babies” and even reports from 1815,…
I'm Entitled # 2
Under the European Convention for Human Rights, these as written, are the fundamental ones you and I are entitled to. They mainly come from legislation that began in the United Kingdom. We invented Human Rights. However, our judiciary are hideously guilty of misinterpreting those rights. It really does ...
Starkey, Racism and The Underclass
Anyone who has met a white working-class lad or lass aged between 11 and 19 will know that David Starkey had a point when he said, rather crudely, that white chavs “have become black”. One of the curiosities of the gym that I go to in Lambeth in South London is that all the white…
Bisin Makes Burgers That Never Go Off
Let me introduce you to bisin. No, not a herd of cattle (spelling, guys!). This is a magic ingredient, that will, it is claimed keep food “fresh” for months, years even. Never heard of it? You’re not the only one. It’s a substance so new that it doesn’t even have a Wikipedia page. Bisin was discovered…
Obama The Most Unpopular President Ever?
Gallup’s latest numbers are a real eye-opener. The polling company now has Barack Obama’s approval rating at just 39 percent, the lowest level of his presidency, and down 13 percentage points since the start of June. Gallup finds that 54 percent of Americans now disapprove of the president’s job performance. And according to the RealClear…
Are PCs becoming obsolete
On the 30th anniversary of a key computer, the era of the PC is coming to an end, according to one of the IBM designers who worked on the first model
Cameron's Speech On Riots Focuses On Responsibility
With parliament recalled from recess, David Cameron stood at the despatch box to stamp out a crisis. Cameron's statement went on for almost three hours today but set the right tone of repugnance at recent events combined with a determiniation to tackle the decay in social values. To be fair Ed Milliband's response was equally sober and on target and free from any hint of the political points scoring we associate with politicians in opposition.
Riots: Left and Right look for simple answers
It’s the welfare state! It’s the cuts! It’s Labour subsidising single mothers! It’s Thatcher undermining society! It’s Left, it’s Right, it’s liberal intelligentsia, it’s conservative callousness, it’s Their Fault, it’s Their Fault, it’s Their Fault. Humanity is a tribal species, and it’s entirely natural that we lump ourselves into groups. Our brains are evolved organs, and…
The Intellectual Bankruptcy Of The Progressive Left
Last night’s high-octane encounter between Harriet Harman and Michael Gove is well worth watching. Not just as a piece of political theatre, but because of what it says about the “progressive” Left. Harriet is someone clearly able to handle a high level of cognitive dissonance. Someone who who says “the government must insist on…
Green Sprouts On Drought
Climate: WG2 Duncan Green is head of research at Oxfam GB and has written an article exploring the question of whether the drought in the Horn of Africa is caused by climate change. The article is here and an edited version appears at the Guardian. I'm sure that comment will be ...
[
World Water Problem]
Eurogeddon Postponed Again
Euroggedon is postponed again. Jean-Claude Trichet has saved civilization. There will not be a spiralling bond crisis in Italy and Spain in early August after all. An imminent disintegration of Europe’s financial system has been averted. On balance, this is good, though not optimal. (Lancing the boil immediately by organising an orderly German exit from EMU would be better: it would halt the ...
[
Eurogeddon]
The heart miracle scam revisited Velvet glove, Iron fist blog
One of the more blatant scientific scams of recent years has been the heart miracle phenomenon, in which tobacco control campaigners create studies showing a dramatic fall in heart attacks after smoking bans. It began when Stanton Glantz of Americans for Nonsmokers' Right announced the 'Helena miracle' in 2003, claiming a 60% drop in heart attacks after the ...
The dawning of a new age - Raewald
There are two cogent opinion pieces, both in the Telegraph, this morning that usefully summarise where we are. Peter Oborne catalogues the reasons for our dilemma and the failure of an adequate political response whilst Janet Daley reasons that State (or Super State) engineered redistribution of wealth has virtually killed ...
Keep Repeating The Lie And It Will Become The Truth
Shortly after the inauguration in 2009, Rham Emmanuel uttered what has come to be regarded as one of the signature lines of the Obama administration: “You never want to let a good crisis go to waste, because you have a chance to make things the way that you want them to be.” Spoken like a good, solid Democratic Socialist. Castro would’ve been proud.
Well, we certainly have a legitimate crisis in front of us ...
Can A Biomass Boiler Keep Your Home Warm
Julian Morrison is a developer with a powerful interest in energy conservation. His restored and extended house, the Ginny Ring, on the Llangollen Canal at St Martin’s Moor near Oswestry in Shropshire, is a kind of love affair with wood. “It is made largely of oak, and the extension is timber frame made of oak,” he says. Windows, doors, curtain poles and stairs were all handmade by a local craftsman. But the pièce de résistance is the biomass gasification boiler, kept like a hungry beast in an ...
Who Is More Obsessed With Satanic Sex, The Church Or The Politically Correct Left?
A subtle rewriting of history is taking place on the back of the Amanda Knox acquittal. Reading feminist commentary on the case, you could be forgiven for thinking that the Catholic Church and its weird obsession with Satanic cults are ultimately to blame for Knox’s sorrows. Apparently, the Church, being stuck in the fifteenth century,…
If Creativity Can Lead To Madness Why Do We Offer Art Therapy?
I was recently at a fundraising dinner for Mind, the leading mental health charity in the UK. One of the big themes for the evening (other than Stephen Fry’s investiture as president), was the idea of art as therapy. My only qualifications to write about therapy and mental illness are a rather lame 2:1 in ...
Obama looks stupid as he lectures Germany on financial management
Germany’s finance minister Wolfang Schauble has launched a stinging rebuke to the Obama administration after Washington pushed for the European Union to boost its EFSF bail out fund. After Obama declared that the European financial crisis is “scaring the world”, Schauble shot back at the US president by warning: “It’s always …
LHC and the search for the Higgs Boson
The Large Hadron Collider’s search for the Higgs boson – the theoretical particle that is believed to give all matter in the universe mass – is, according to physicists, entering its last phase. At some point in the next few months, perhaps as soon as December, we will know: either it exists in the form that ...
The Shallow Anti Americanism Of US Liberals
There are few subjects that provoke as much smug condescension and shallow anti-Americanism as the death penalty in the United States. And the “debate” over the execution in Georgia last Wednesday of Troy Davis, 42, convicted of the 1989 murder of Mark MacPhail, an off-duty police officer, marked a new low. The sheer emotionalism and partisanship…
The Really Really Fast Show
A 450-mile journey lasting less than 2.4 thousandths of a second has, we are told, disproved Einstein's theory of special relativity. Tom Peck seeks expert guidance in an attempt to understand what this actually means ...
Watermelons vs Shale Gas
God knows we could all do with some good news right now. And as it happens, from Oop North near Blackpool this week, we had good news in spades. Sure, it was known Britain was sitting on some pretty sizeable shale gas deposits. What hadn’t been announced before though, was just how sizeable.
Quantitative Easing Failed - Why Are Economists Demanging More?
The IMF’s figures are pitilessly clear. The countries which decreed the biggest bailouts and stimulus package, the countries which printed the most money, are suffering the slowest growth. The Bank of England’s ‘quantitative easing’ was, in proportionate terms, bigger even than the Fed’s. Result? Our inflation rate is higher than our competitors’, our economy commensurately…
Science Fiction Is Not Just Fantasy
Britain doesn’t have enough young people becoming scientists and engineers. It’s a familiar refrain heard from politicans on both sides of the aisle, not to mention eminent scientists and most recently, Eric Schmidt, Google’s chairman. There’s plenty of blame to go around for this apparent decline, whether it’s the glittering lure of the financial sector ...
Socialists May Be Clever But They're Not Humble
Guido Fawkes reported recently that Polly Toynbee told the Edinburgh Book Show that left-wing people were both more intelligent and generally better people than others. I am happy to admit immediately that it is likely that left-wing people are more intelligent than liberals and conservatives – though the causality is in the other direction. In his final book ...
Dedicated To Lucifer An appraisal of the work of Saul Alinsky the American seditionist and black supremacist.
Young River
A nature poem describing the delicate balance of any environment.
Obama's "Jobs" Bill gives shitloads of money to black seditionists
ACORN and other radical left-wing groups would be eligible for up to $15 billion in federal funding if President Obama’s new economic stimulus package becomes law. Now that public polling shows Americans are realizing that economic stimulus programs don’t work, the Obama administration is calling ...
Is the EDL the new voice of the white working class?
By Damian Thompson - Daily Telegraph
From Saturday’s Daily Telegraph There’s a YouTube video doing the rounds which “anti-fascist” campaigners against the English Defence League don’t want you to see. It features a couple of young middle-class supporters of Unite Against Fascism sniggering as one of them describes a “horrible tattooed woman” at a demo being punched in the face “before…
American Liberals Selective Anti Semitism
I was horrified by reports that a powerful congressman, Henry Waxman, had said that Jews in New York’s ninth congressional district voted against President Barack Obama “to protect their wealth.” Could the obsession with backing Obama have led a leading Jewish politician to make such a stereotypical antisemitic remark? ...
Jenkins' delivers right hook to Federasts - Raewawld
If you want three minutes of genuine pleasure this morning, read through Simon Jenkins' denunciation of European Federalism in the Guardian. In a piece that must leave many Guardianistas choking on their nut Muesli today, Jenkins says ...
Health Scare Story Du Jour - Mark Wadsworrh
Drinking alcohol can increase your risk of cancer because ethanol is itself a carcinogen on certain parts of the body, scientists have found. Researchers said they found that when ethanol is ...
Who Is This Idiot (clue: it's not the guy from It's A Knockout - Tim Worstall
Having looked him up, apparently he’s something like the Emeritus Professor of Sociology at the Open University. And entirely ignorant to boot: [ ... ] As an analysis of neoliberalism that’s a pretty good coq au vin recipe. That is, it has entirely fuck all to do with the subject under discussion.
Spongebob Squarepants is a health risk? - Divck Puddlecote
The Sun carried an article today on the dangers of Spongebob Squarepants. Yes, you read that correctly, the dangers of ... Spongebob Squarepants. I suspect the currant bun just wanted to raise a few hackles amongst its readers - and perhaps a derisory expletive or two - at the expense of people who would suggest such a thing. They are lagging behind the
Cibvilisation: Progress Or Decline
From the very first mankind has held the belief that it is superior to the animal kingdom. Mankind learned from nature how to hunt, how to survive and lived within the rules of nature. Mankind utilised his mind making many discoveries about the world he lives in ...
Why Are Trans Fats Still Legal?
The trans fats in junk food are responsible for the deaths of around 7,000 people a year in the UK – and teenagers are most at risk. Elsewhere, these toxic substances are banned. So why are they still legal in this country?
Not The Missing Link Again Daily Telegraph top boring fucker science writer Tom Chivers reports on a newly discoverd fossil that may be from the earliest ancestor of humans but appeals to sciece wriyters to stop using the phrase "mssing link." In the comment thread (better than the post) readers appeal to scientists like Tom to stop wasting time and money on the irrelevant. Once therewere monkeys, now there are humans (and a sub human species called science tits) How we go from monkeys to humans, (if indeed we did) does not matter.
Our Labour Market Paradox
The UK labour market is deeply dysfunctional. Today, the Telegraph reported that there are three major cities where around a third of the homes contain adults that have never had a job. That is not an unemployment rate. No, it is something much worse. It is an unemployable rate. It is a number that tells us ...
Let's not be suckered into following Obama's lead
By Jeremy Warner - Daily Telegraph
Obama says reflate, and Osborne up yours – we are sticking to Plan A. That broadly summarises the juxtaposition of Barack Obama’s new $447bn plan for growth and what the UK Chancellor, George Osborne, said at Chatham House this morning. Christine Lagarde, the new managing director of the IMF, was speaking at Chatham House too,…
Google Is Bad For The Environment
Google's carbon footprint is larger than those of 61 states and islands, it has been revealed after the company released its environmental figures for the first time yesterday.
Are machines Living Things
In NetFuture #132 I wrote about recent experiments with rats. ... round of our ongoing dialogue. For the previous installment, see NetFuture #130. SLT ... Of course no human knows what a rat thinks or feels, but with implants we actually ... Every organism strives to express its own wholeness; its health entails being more or ...
HMRC Loonytons economics - Nothing To Declare
HMRC sell seized vehicles for an average of 66 pence each! HMRC have got it wrong ... surely? l mean, they must have ... right?
Look at this FOI request ...
It's September, It Must Be The Euro - Raewald
Back on 17th June, in the halcyon days of our glorious Summer, I wrote: Our masters in Brussels would rather see the entire European economy stagnate and economic activity shrink to a dribble before they'll surrender, but the truth apparent to all is that no nation will be able ...
When Did Free Speech Die
Why has this country become so intolerant of civilised, grown-up debate? Voltaire’s classic dictum that you may disagree with what someone says but defend to the death his right to say it has withered and died. When David Starkey uttered provocative remarks about young black men in the wake of last month’s riots, his critics ...
Why Are Poor White Boys Doing Badly At School?
When social scientists try to explain something, they look at all kinds of factors they can measure. Take education. You could try to explain variations in pupils’ results by looking at their parents class or wealth or education. Or we might look at school performance, teacher quality, class sizes and so on. Social researchers don’t like saying…
It's Depressing That The Right To Die Has Become A Cause Celibre
These days, the only time you hear the word “autonomy” said with any vigour, with heartfelt oomph, is in relation to assisted suicide. In every other area of life, the idea of moral autonomy has taken a beating in recent years. Parental autonomy is continually blitzed by know-it-all politicos and supernannies who want to subject…
Climate Scepticism Is The New Racism
Climate scepticism is the new racism, Al Gore has told an interviewer. And do you know what? He’s absolutely right. Just as “racist” has been honed over the decades by liberal-lefties for casual use as a deadly weapon against anyone who disagrees them, so “climate denier” has become the new leftist shorthand for “evil, wrong, uncaring,…
Climate scepticism is the new racism, Al Gore has told an interviewer. And do you know what? He’s absolutely right. Just as “racist” has been honed over the decades by liberal-lefties for casual use as a deadly weapon against anyone who disagrees them, so “climate denier” has become the new leftist shorthand for “evil, wrong, uncaring,…
What Next For Libya
Human rights abuses, cronyism, massive amounts of taxpayer money gone in dubious circumstances, "difficult" people assassinated, law book thrown out when it suits the leader, excessive force used by power-crazed cops, bizarre political decisions, countrywide surveillance of its citizens, strange associations with foreign governments, people gaoled on a whim, and massive corruption. But enough about the UK. This is about New Libya ...
How Statism Has Come To Dominate The Churchby Ed West, Daily Telegraph
On Saturday my colleague Damian Thompson noted that it has been another fantastic academic year for my alma mater, the highly successful Cardinal Vaughan Memorial School in west Kensington. The Vaughan is that rare thing – a London state school that has managed to maintain the ethos and culture of the pre-Anthony Crosland era, with teachers…
Barack Obama Is Powrless He Might As Well Stay On The Beach
The first I knew of President Obama’s decision to holiday on Martha’s Vineyard for a third successive year was when the car rental folk told me that all they had for August were SUVs at a thousand dollars a week, his entourage having bagged the rest. We’ve been coming here, off and on, since American friends introduced us to the island during a sabbatical year at next-door Harvard. I imagine that Obama comes, like Bill Clinton before him, because it seems ...
Evil As A Common Goal
Fifty years ago, in August 1961, social psychologist Stanley Milgram conducted an experiment that changed our understanding of the human propensity for evil for ever. Participants were invited into his laboratory at Yale, supposedly for a study looking at the effects of ...
Why we need a moral panic over last week's riots by Ed West, Daily Telegraph
The Economist’s Bagehot suggests that we shouldn’t get our knickers in a twist about the riots, quoting previous examples of moral panic about social disorder, crime and youth culture to show that last week’s events are nothing new. He cites articles about “young delinquents” in 1913, 1956 headlines about “rock’n’roll babies” and even reports from 1815,…
I'm Entitled # 2
Under the European Convention for Human Rights, these as written, are the fundamental ones you and I are entitled to. They mainly come from legislation that began in the United Kingdom. We invented Human Rights. However, our judiciary are hideously guilty of misinterpreting those rights. It really does ...
Starkey, Racism and The Underclass
Anyone who has met a white working-class lad or lass aged between 11 and 19 will know that David Starkey had a point when he said, rather crudely, that white chavs “have become black”. One of the curiosities of the gym that I go to in Lambeth in South London is that all the white…
Bisin Makes Burgers That Never Go Off
Let me introduce you to bisin. No, not a herd of cattle (spelling, guys!). This is a magic ingredient, that will, it is claimed keep food “fresh” for months, years even. Never heard of it? You’re not the only one. It’s a substance so new that it doesn’t even have a Wikipedia page. Bisin was discovered…
Obama The Most Unpopular President Ever?
Gallup’s latest numbers are a real eye-opener. The polling company now has Barack Obama’s approval rating at just 39 percent, the lowest level of his presidency, and down 13 percentage points since the start of June. Gallup finds that 54 percent of Americans now disapprove of the president’s job performance. And according to the RealClear…
Cameron's Speech On Riots Focuses On Responsibility
With parliament recalled from recess, David Cameron stood at the despatch box to stamp out a crisis. Cameron's statement went on for almost three hours today but set the right tone of repugnance at recent events combined with a determiniation to tackle the decay in social values. To be fair Ed Milliband's response was equally sober and on target and free from any hint of the political points scoring we associate with politicians in opposition.
See also: ... [
Bread and circuses] ... [
Nanny State menu ]
Riots: Left and Right look for simple answers
It’s the welfare state! It’s the cuts! It’s Labour subsidising single mothers! It’s Thatcher undermining society! It’s Left, it’s Right, it’s liberal intelligentsia, it’s conservative callousness, it’s Their Fault, it’s Their Fault, it’s Their Fault. Humanity is a tribal species, and it’s entirely natural that we lump ourselves into groups. Our brains are evolved organs, and…
See also: [ Anarchy in the UK - and elsewhere ] ... [
Green Sprouts On Drought
Climate: WG2 Duncan Green is head of research at Oxfam GB and has written an article exploring the question of whether the drought in the Horn of Africa is caused by climate change. The article is here and an edited version appears at the Guardian. I'm sure that comment will be ...
See also: [
World Water Problem] ... [
Climate crisis menu ]
Eurogeddon Postponed Again
Euroggedon is postponed again. Jean-Claude Trichet has saved civilization. There will not be a spiralling bond crisis in Italy and Spain in early August after all. An imminent disintegration of Europe’s financial system has been averted. On balance, this is good, though not optimal. (Lancing the boil immediately by organising an orderly German exit from EMU would be better: it would halt the ...
See also: [
Eurogeddon] ... [
Central Banks Print Money But Fail To End Crisis ]
Keep Repeating The Lie And It Will Become The Truth
Shortly after the inauguration in 2009, Rham Emmanuel uttered what has come to be regarded as one of the signature lines of the Obama administration: “You never want to let a good crisis go to waste, because you have a chance to make things the way that you want them to be.” Spoken like a good, solid Democratic Socialist. Castro would’ve been proud.
Well, we certainly have a legitimate crisis in front of See also: [
Obama's econimic headache ] ... [
Obama Credibility ]
