I would like to wish a very peaceful Christmas and a prosperous New Year to all the readers of this blog and their families.
xD.

EastEnders is one of the most profoundly dangerous programmes on television and probably does more to promote the Daily Express nightmare vision of a violent, broken society than that newspaper itself. My objection isn’t to soap operas per se – to a large extent, I agree with Jeremy Bentham about pushpin being as valid an [...]

“We no longer know how to be brief. For instance: the Lord’s Prayer consists of 56 words; the Ten Commandments 297 words; the United States Declaration of Independence 300 words; and the EU Convention on the Importation of Caramel – 26,911 words.”
Greville Janner, Janner’s Complete Speechmaker, 6th ed., 1999. The anecdotes and one-liners at the [...]

The BBC World Service turned seventy-five yesterday. It started broadcasting on 19th December, 1932, as the Empire Service. Since then, the world has changed greatly, but the World Service continues broadcasting; part of its Imperial legacy remains with the periodic declarations in RP that ‘This Is London’ so you’d better pay attention.
I started listening to [...]

The main reason I write, from time to time, about Paul Staines, who posts as Guido Fawkes at order-order.com, is that he has achieved some publicity as a blogger, but the manner in which he blogs is bad for blogging, bad for journalism and bad for democracy. He is the Daily Express of blogging – [...]

Whether or not you approve of the Government’s recent actions on asylum seekers, I would contend if that we can approve right to remain for nineteen thousand, there can be no justification at the UK end for not allowing Iraqis employed by the UK in Iraq a chance of not being hunted down and killed [...]

So is Boris a racist?
New Nation carried a report on Boris Johnson being a racist; you can read it for free by clicking on the ‘demo’ section of its website.
Racism is a word, much like ‘nationalism’, ‘left’ or ‘right’ that has so many meanings attached to it that it has no generally accepted meaning at [...]

Well, there’s an interesting title for a blog posting.
The BBC World Service had a fantastic edition of its ‘One World‘ programme last Wednesday evening, focussing on the domination of the world by… the Friesian Holstein cow. The argument raised was fairly simple. The Friesian – the black-and-white cow that schoolchildren would probably draw – is, [...]

I hear from Ewan that Canadians, who are now heading south to the States to buy cheap goods after years of Americans heading north, are referring to the United States dollar as the ‘American peso’. I only mention it because a random search for the phrase ‘American peso’ brings up a particularly prescient article from [...]

Matt Wardman links to a particularly good cartoon blog, ASBO Jesus. It’s worth taking a look. I really like this one:

For me, it’s about God being an artifice, while, looking at the other cartoons, I suspect that the artist is thinking more about people ignoring God (which I think the artist believes to exist) [...]