Archive for the ‘ News & Current Affairs ’ Category

A society of elite control

Finally, it’s the build-up to election time – the calm before the storm, the Moment of Truth before the Day of Judgment, where not even the best-spun party policy can be hidden from the eagle-eyes of the voting public. And despite hugely conflicting analyses of what turnout will look like in this ‘milestone’ election, I [ READ MORE ]

Talking the Thatcherite talk

I have rarely hoped for a newspaper story to be true more than this one from the Telegraph: UK Conservative Party leader David Cameron has pledged to consider tightening the regulation on trade unions if they try to get in the way of public sector pay freezes designed to help reduce the £178m debt mountain [ READ MORE ]

A brief history of climate change

Just saw a gargantuan poster on a link at Devil’s Kitchen and felt the need to perform the blogging version of a retweet: so here it is. It traces in astounding detail the history of the climate change scare – which is undoubtedly a very recent phenomenon, since as late as the 1990s the ‘prevailing [ READ MORE ]

Education, education, education?

The Times has just released the most recent school league tables for A-level and GCSE results, and the verdict on Labour’s achievements in the field of education is truly damning: Of the top 50 schools with the highest scores at A level, all but three were in the independent sector. And those three? The three [ READ MORE ]

The wasteland of modern society

It’s not often that I see two news stories in succession that make me want to tear out my hair, but today was just one such rare occasion: Story #1: Mylene Klass was cautioned by police following an incident at her home in which some youths tried to break into her house until she scared [ READ MORE ]

Too much tax?

Well at least count yourself lucky that you’re not French. The government of President Nicolas Sarkozy are apparently mulling a ‘Google tax’, according to an article in the Telegraph (and here on the BBC too). Yes, that’s right, a tax that is levied on Google “every time a French internet user clicks on an advertising [ READ MORE ]

The race to succeed Berlusconi

The Telegraph has an interesting opinion piece on what I will call the imminent ‘succession crisis’ on the right of Italian politics. Up until the point at which Silvio Berlusconi was hit in the face with a replica of the Duomo in Milan on 13.xii., I would have predicted the slow and unpleasant demise of [ READ MORE ]

Noël, Noël…

Where I come from, Christmas is traditionally celebrated on 24.xii., Christmas Eve, rather than 25.xii., Christmas Day – and not really with the sort of gigantic meal that’s traditional here in the UK. While I’m personally rather partial to turkey, spuds, chipolatas and especially cranberry sauce, there’s a lot to be said for the continental [ READ MORE ]

Doesn’t work like that…

Courtesy of James Delingpole, it appears that the next battle in the war between those who lend credence to the climate change hypothesis and those who do not has just begun. The Russians have produced a paper (linked document is in Russian, for those of a pan-European persuasion) that essentially quantifies the way in which [ READ MORE ]

Magdalen goes Harry Potter

+++ Apologies for the lack of blogging this month: there are busy times, there are less busy times, and I’ve had the former for the last few weeks +++ Yes, that’s right, my Oxford college‘s JCR has finished off the 2009 committee session with a set of light-hearted motions in the final General Meeting of [ READ MORE ]

1902 slaps

Though the site has now been taken down, slapnickgriffin.co.uk, as featured on Guido Fawkes, provided an amazing amount of procrastination potential yesterday. I myself managed a modest 1902 slaps, one for each of the Polish servicemen killed fighting for the UK in WW2 – who under BNP specifications would have been roundly expelled from the [ READ MORE ]

Charity vs masochism

I’m all in favour of altruistic acts of charitable donation, but it appears that some wealthy Germans have gone a step further and requested that the German government impose a 5pc wealth tax on them for two years in order to raise revenue to bring the country out of recession. I am pretty much at [ READ MORE ]

A spot of libertarianism

Devil’s Kitchen has just concocted a post, referencing others posted by his other half Bella Gerens, and by the left-libertarian Unity, which altogether pretty much sum up what I like about libertarianism. The realisation that the only sphere over which anyone has, or should have, influence is the self; the belief that everyone has the [ READ MORE ]

In focus: the power of social media

You will probably have become aware of the recent incident on the Tube at Holborn station, where a London Underground worker wholly overreacted to a customer’s complaint at having gotten his arm trapped in a closing train door. The entrepreneur and blogger Jonathan Macdonald, who managed to catch the latter part of the exchange on [ READ MORE ]

Statwatch #25

I am no longer ill with swine flu. So I thought I’d celebrate by doing a Statwatch. Commodities have had a clean sweep of doing well, as have equities, with the Dow briefly nipping above 10000 points during the last week. The recovery in the interbank lending rates has been supported by some surges in [ READ MORE ]

Are the MSM caving in?

Well well! An article on the BBC that doesn’t wibble on about how we’re all going to die of nonexistent anthropogenic global warming. Turns out that solar energy may be responsible for everything in the atmosphere after all. But then the people who actually research the data behind the AGW scare rather than just parroting [ READ MORE ]

In focus: the Eigenharp

In lieu of proper political blogging, since I have university exams crowding out my life till tomorrow afternoon, here is an article I found in what should be called the ‘Weird and Wonderful‘ section of the BBC website: it concerns a recently-invented instrument, the Eigenharp, which looks like a cross between a space-age guitar-synthesiser and [ READ MORE ]

Statwatch #24

MASSIVE NEWS: 3-month Euribor and dollar Libor ROSE this week after over 3 months of consecutive week-on-week falls, possibly indicating that banks are starting to take to heart warnings by governmental bodies that not enough credit is being made available, probably as a result of the gradual return of aggressive bargaining to the markets for [ READ MORE ]

The Berlin-Paris Axis

It seems that Chancellor Merkel is moving fast after being given a definite right-wing mandate last Sunday. Details have emerged that she and President Sarkozy are planning a whole smorgasbord of Franco-German joint institutions, schemes and policies designed to kick-start the stalling ‘European project’. Whatever the result of the Irish vote yesterday, it looks like [ READ MORE ]

A word of advice

From Ben Macintyre at the Times, rather than from me. It concerns the recent trend (imported from the USA) of celebritising not merely elected politicians, but also their partners and spouses. Michelle Obama, Carla Bruni-Sarkozy and now Sarah Brown, whose ‘heartfelt’ introduction of the Prime Minister oozed more cheese and schmaltz than the whole West [ READ MORE ]

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