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)
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 Such grants are outdated and patronising, he says, and encourage corruption.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 ...
Solar Panels Subsidy Was The Most Ridiculous Green Scheme Deramed Up
A plan to subsidise solar panels on homes was “one of the most ridiculous schemes ever dreamed up”, a Government minister has said.
Lord Marland, an Energy minister, hit out at the cost of so-called feed-in tariffs, which the Government has axed as part of the cuts programme. Last week Court of Appeal ruled that the sudden axing of the tariffs ...
Goodbye Great Britain
Recently, there have been two powerful challenges to the conventional wisdom about the United States. First, Robert Kagan published a lengthy essay in The New Republic, arguing that predictions of America's decline as a global power are woefully premature. .Is it possible, I found myself wondering, to do something similar for Britain? Robert Colvile has a go in this Daily Telegraph article ...
Our rising debt levels are becoming unsustainable – soon we may be talking about wealth confiscation (By Daniel Knowles, Daily Telegraph)
Debt, debt, debt; we’re drowning in it. This morning, the Office for National Statistics published the latest estimates of public sector borrowing. Though borrowing is falling faster than anticipated, thanks to the fact that spending cuts are finally beginning to kick in, the national debt has risen to 64.2 per cent of GDP. More significantly,…
The Obama administration knifes Britain in the back again over the Falklands - By Nile Gardiner World
In yet another display of disdain for the Anglo-American Special Relationship, the Obama administration has weighed in on the mounting tensions between Great Britain and Argentina over the Falkland Islands. Just two days after Prime Minister David Cameron issued a robust statement in the House of Commons vowing to defend the sovereignty of the Falklands,…
Drones In The Hands Of The Paparrazi - It's an ethical minefield
America's use of drones for targeted killings is serious enough. But commercial and law enforcement uses are on the horizon. Whether you view them as model aeroplanes for grown-ups or the handmaidens of the killer robot, unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs), commonly known as drones, are taking off in earnest. ...
The Observer uncritically regurgitates Trotskyist smears against Katharine Birbalsingh- By Toby Young, Daily Telegraph
There’s a disgraceful attempt to smear Katharine Birbalsingh in this morning’s Observer. Under the headline “Katharine Birbalsingh criticised over ‘wasteful’ free school project“, the paper’s policy editor Daniel Boffey tries to create the impression that there’s growing local opposition to the Michaela Community School – Birbalsingh’s free school – which is due to open in…
We’re being sent the bill for the euro crisis again – this time by the IMF - By Daniel Hannan
First it was individual banks; then whole industries; then entire countries; now it’s the world. Western leaders have reacted to the failure of each bailout by decreeing a bigger one. Unable to admit their mistake, slaves to the defunct economist whose thinking dominates our economics faculties and central banks, they act like so many Nick Leesons,…
The Three Parent Family More on the progressive left's war on the family and the scientific dictaorship's attempts to dehumanize us all. Babies with three biological parents could be born within three years. Scientists have come up with an IVF technique that uses the undamaged DNA of a third party when couples risk giving their children a genetic conditions such as muscular dystrophy or ataxia. The Wellcome Trust has funded the research (the figures vary between £4 million and six million …
As Obama Positions Himself For A War In Syria We Learn That Like Gadaffi, Assad Is Popular With His People
Most Syrians back President Assad, but you'd never know from western mediaAssad's popularity, Arab League observers, US military involvement: all distorted in the west's propaganda war. Suppose a respectable opinion poll found that most Syrians are in favour of Bashar al-Assad remaining as president, would that not be major news? Well one did and we never heard a word of it in the Obama felching western media ...
Bullshit Sherlock
While other blogs are full of how great the cliff - faller ending of Sherlock Holmes was I felt a bit let down. The fake suicide was telegraphed all through the show. And the coda assured us Sherlock had survived. We should not forget of course it was the habit of ...
Will bringing back grammar schools boost social mobility? by Toby Young Daily Telegraph
The possibility that England may shortly see its first new grammar school in over 50 years has, predictably enough, re-opened the debate about selective education. Yesterday, for instance, Allison Pearson came down firmly in favour, while Fiona Millar shot back with an instant rebuttal. I’ll get into that argument in a moment, but first let’s be…
So Why Read Books Anymore
There is great “truth and beauty” in Homer’s Iliad, but I would not try to make his sale on such platitudes. Gibbon’s The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire remains a classic. But I confess it can be hard to get through. Conrad’s Victory or Knut Hamsun’s Growth of the Soil, if authored by writer X this year, would be trashed on Amazon.So what are the reasons, in this age of ...
Eric Holder and the Chicago Way In America Obama's Brownshirts are getting hysterical as they try to make race the major issue in the election campaign.
Dystopian Prophecies Are Coming True - The Government Will Soon Choose Our Wives
Thinking of this entertaining new literary award – “the Hatchet Job of the Year” – it was natural to turn to Macaulay’s Essays, for few reviewers have ever been less reluctant to wound. I had in mind two long review-essays, one on Robert Montgomery’s Poems, the other on The State in its relations with ...