In this section we do not necessarily support the views expressed in linked articles but try to give a coss section of interesting and well written articles that we think are likely to stir things up a bit.
COMMENT:
(A random and ecletic mix of what we thought was worth reading recently)
Obama's Budget Hints At More Wars By Proxy
Obama has laid out his priorities clearly in his 2013 federal budget – and defence is now at the bottom of America’s list. Of all federal agencies the Defense Department takes the biggest hit, even while Obama creates new government social programs and spends more on special interest payouts. In November Obama’s Defence Secretary ...
Government and Liberty
I was talking to a friend in California yesterday about the Obama administration’s latest assault on religious liberty — the “interim final rule” issued by the Department of Health and Human Services requiring all health plans, including those at Catholic institutions, to cover prescription contraceptives, sterilization, and ...
Barack Obama’s shameless Falklands betrayal will overshadow David Cameron’s Washington visit by Nile Gardiner, Daily Telegraph
Does the Obama administration know the difference between Great Britain and Argentina? You wouldn’t think so, listening to the remarks of Roberta S. Jacobson, Acting Assistant Secretary of State for Western Hemisphere Affairs. On a visit to Latin America, Jacobson was asked to comment on the growing tensions between Britain and Argentina over the sovereignty…
The Fiscal Multiplier Effect: Another useless economic theory
Continuing my occasional series, another one which bugs me is the Multiplier Effect aka The Fiscal Multiplier or The Keynesian Multiplier. As the Wiki article says,: In general, the only thing that can be said with certainty is that "economists are in fact deeply divided about how well, or indeed whether, such stimulus ...
The High Tech Goldfish Bowl
We are living in a digital goldfish bowl and I can't quite bury my qualms says Deborah Orr. Ms Orr writes "I'd like to see a national, collective endeavour to protect individual privacy, because privacy confers a kind of freedom ..."
Arab Spring: Islamic Militants Fooling The West
Since we can’t get good coverage of the Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood in the Western media, it’s necessary to turn to the Islamists’ intended victims — Arab liberals — to get a better picture. NowLebanon explains it all to you in an article on what it calls the “media blitz” of the Muslim Brotherhood and its politicians in the Freedom and Justice Party (FJP): ...
One Decent Jobs Report Does Not Make A Recovery
There are two reasons why President Obama rushed to the microphone on Friday shortly after the government’s Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) released relatively good news (by recent standards) that the unemployment rate dropped to 8.3% in January, while the economy added 243,000 seasonally adjusted jobs. ...
Let's Learn From Libya Before We Get Involved In Syria
If we are not careful we are soon going to find ourselves getting into the same mess over Syria as we did in Libya. This time last year the clamour for a military intervention in Libya was gaining ground as forces loyal to Libyan dictator Muammar Gaddafi threatened to overrun the eastern city of Benghazi ...
India Disses UK Aid: 'More Importasnt To Donors Than Recipients'.
Congratulations to Rahul Bedi for putting into words what we all half-suspected: India neither needs nor wants UK aid. Such grants are outdated and patronising, he says, and encourage corruption. Indeed, Indians have ‘become so contemptuous of Britain’s contribution that they accept it merely to avoid causing the embarrassment’.
London Atheist And Secularist Societies Under Attack From Islamists
I know on occasions in the past I've asked you, dear readers and fellow bloggers to share something widely that needed wider exposure. Well this situation desperately requires that wider exposure and all the help we can provide, especially as the mass media are notably silent on the issue - very likely because of a self-censoring trend itself inspired by fear of what has befallen ...
Unemployment at 8.3% Still Leaves A Vast And Destructive Jobs Deficit Robert Reich, The Guardian
The most significant aspect of January's jobs report is political. The fact that America's labor market continues to improve is good news for the White House. But as a practical matter, the improvement is less significant for the American workforce.
President Obama's only chance for rebutting Republican claims that he's responsible for a bad economy is to point to a positive trend. Voters respond to economic trends as much as ...
Much Media Ado About Nothing
What connects seemingly disparate works such as The Silence of the Lambs, Cape Fear, Mad Men, and Seinfeld? It is the philosophy of nihilism, first popularized by Friedrich Nietzsche in the late 19th century. But in the last few decades, how did it become the dominant worldview of Hollywood?
Dawn Of The Ice Age Signals The End Of The Global Warming Scam
Back then, the media and activists trumpeted the arrival of a new ice age, with the specter of ice sheets and glaciers covering half the northern hemisphere, and brutal winters in the remaining ice-free zones. The fact that the media and popular culture and academia have veered from one panic-inducing disaster scenario to another one which completely contradicts the first one is funny enough in its own right. But reading The Weather Conspiracy: The Coming of the New Ice Age opened my eyes to an even more significant aspect ...
Hundreds of Independent Bookshops Face Closure
Hundreds of independent bookshops could be forced to close unless local authorities do more to support them, a leading retail group has warned. The Booksellers Association (BA), which represents 3,500 independent bookshops across the UK, has written to almost 400 council chiefs urging them to do more to support their local high streets or risk ...
