Video: Is Obama a feminist?
Henry Porter issues call to arms
In his article for the Observer today, Henry Porter issues a call to arms, asking people to join him at the Convention On Modern Liberty to take back the country. I like it. The new website has also now gone live.
Fairness we can’t believe in.
I’ve just got back from stewarding at the Fabian Society Conference, ‘Fairness doesn’t happen by chance’ – tickets fairly priced at £30, which is why I was stewarding. As soon as I saw the title of Secretary James Purnell’s keynote debate – ‘SOLIDARITY LOST? Reviving the will to re-distribute’ – I got an intense and heady craving for a sausage roll. A cigarette. A hard slap in the face. Anything, actually, to reassure me that the life I’m living has some connection to reality. The Welfare Reform Bill may be a hundred and nine pages’ worth of suspicious gibberish and the debate that followed was vaguer and more dubious still, but you always know where you are with a sausage roll.
After some initial platitudes – ‘What is solidarity? Well, I’d say it’s kindness transformed into political reality…’ – the Work and Pensions Secretary got down to the meat and bone of what he has in mind for the nation’s poor. Apparently, ‘passive redistribution’ – the worn, outdated notion of actually transferring money from one group of people to another – simply isn’t ‘modern’ any more. continue reading… »
Top Stories and Blog Review – 17th Jan
Nationwide
Sainsbury’s to ban battery eggs
Brown orders banks to come clean over loans
Heathrow backers got special BA privileges
UK press ‘biased towards Israel’
International
New evidence of Israeli phosphorus use emerges
At least 1,138 Palestinians dead in Gaza
MSF: Aid doctors can’t reach Gaza victims
White supremacists watched for Obama inauguration
Thailand denies whipping refugees on beaches
Americans, feeling the love overseas
DAILY BLOG REVIEW / by ….
It’s International Year of Astronomy
Ever late to the party, I’ve just discovered that 2009 is the International Year of Astronomy, organised by the UN Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organisation and the International Astronomical Union. Fellow blogger Kajivar has already started a sequence of really nice posts on the subject, complete with very pretty images, but I’d been distracted by the fact that this year is also being promoted as Darwin200
I’m an evolution geek, but I’m quite happy to share the year; let’s call it International Year of Science is Awesome. Or maybe International Year of True History; if human history is just a fiddly insignificant epilogue to palaeontologists, then the history of life is just a fiddly insignificant epilogue to astronomers, after all.
By True History, of course, I mean the record we have of things that happened long before humans started writing things down: before humans even existed in some cases.
continue reading… »
Gerald Kaufman MP: ‘they are treated like dirt by the Israelis’
On Thursday 15th January in the House of Commons, Gerald Kaufman MP (Manchester, Gorton, Labour), gave an impassioned speech on the conflict in Gaza. We reproduce it in full here. A video of the debate is at the end.
I was brought up as an orthodox Jew and a Zionist. On a shelf in our kitchen, there was a tin box for the Jewish National Fund, into which we put coins to help the pioneers building a Jewish presence in Palestine.
I first went to Israel in 1961 and I have been there since more times than I can count. I had family in Israel and have friends in Israel. One of them fought in the wars of 1956, 1967 and 1973 and was wounded in two of them. The tie clip that I am wearing is made from a campaign decoration awarded to him, which he presented to me.
continue reading… »
Christian refuses to drive ‘atheist bus’
A Christian bus driver said he was offended by a bus bearing the Atheist Bus slogan ‘There’s probably no God. Now stop worry and enjoy your life‘ – and refused to drive it. His employer, First Bus, said that was fine and made allowances.
Among some atheist circles this is probably a controversial statement, but I have no problem with this. I think every liberal / tolerant society should accept the willingness of employers to make certain allowances for their employees if it’s not too much trouble.
continue reading… »
Video: Channel 4 report – Israel broke ceasefire
Police state economy claims its first victim
You remember how just before Christmas, they put into force that incredibly scary law giving baliffs the power to use ‘reasonable force’ against debtors?
You know, the law whereby it’s okay to smash down old ladies’ doors if they have unpaid parking fines but not okay to use similar force on billionaire tax-dodgers on the Isle of Man?
Well, that law has just claimed its first life.
Andy Miller, 78, a retired pub landlord and father who had recently returned from hospital after a stroke, collapsed and died from a heart attack whilst being forced to a cashpoint by baliffs ‘under duress’. continue reading… »
It’s a leftwing conspiracy!
Congratulations to the local creative blog, Created in Birmingham, for winning Best UK Blog at the Weblogs, and soundly beating Mad Mel. Victory was sweeter, considering both the Spectator and Melanie Phillips went on overdrive to blame dirty lefties for vote-rigging before the polls closed. Typical, though amusing.
Whatever happened to the supposed right-wing dominance online?
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