February 2012
7 posts
5 tags
The Magical Properties of Marmite and Other... →
needlesslydefiantwithtea:
notcompletelyuseless:
Then you used the wrong word in your last post. Monkeys are making tools to help them with everyday objects. We were making tools before we could communicate properly, we found fire, and the fact that water would quench the fire with…
Will you kids be quiet?
Social and natural sciences are not mutually exclusive, nor is one...
5 tags
Two Point Oh Dear
The cause of the Syrian people continues to excite foreign policy commentators in the UK. One offering in the last few days was this article on the Huffington Post by Luke Bozier. Others have taken to twitter to denounce compliance with international law as an “excuse for idiocy” and ruminated extensively on the veto power of the permanent members of the Security Council (P-5). Mr...
5 tags
“This is truly a historic day in Washington state, and one where I couldn’t be...”
– Christine Gregoire, Governor of Washington; statement on the passage of legislation to allow equal marriage; a bill she will sign into law today
6 tags
5 tags
No Platform has No Leg
The No Platform policy of the NUS is guaranteed to generate its own little storm every time it comes up for renewal in student unions up and down the land. Students splutter angrily into their pints of lager at the temerity of their opponents in the matter to voice their opinions. Inevitably, the spirit of debate is a little pressed around this time - a cocktail of youthful assurance, intellectual...
6 tags
“All that Proposition 8 accomplished was to take away from same-sex couples the...”
– Justice Stephen R. Reinhardt, Majority Opinion in Perry V. Brown, 9th Circuit Court of Appeals
4 tags
All Hell
William Sherman, a man with a deep understanding of war, once remarked that it was “all hell”. We must have this thought foremost in our minds when we consider the situation at hand in Syria and the implications of tonight’s veto of the proposed Security Council resolution on the matter. There are those who are calling for the use of force by some states against Syria in an...
January 2012
7 posts
6 tags
A Liberal National Interest
“Therefore I say that it is a narrow policy to suppose that this country or that is to be marked out as the eternal ally or the perpetual enemy of England. We have no eternal allies, and we have no perpetual enemies. Our interests are eternal and perpetual, and those interests it is our duty to follow.” - Lord Palmerston, 1848
The United Kingdom has long been, is and should continue...
Spending Legalisation
Figuring out the financial benefits of legalising currently illegal substances is a rather fraught little exercise. There are many variables - how one chooses to estimate the number of illegal drug users in the country, which tax income to compare it too, whether legalisation will have an impact on consumption rates, what drugs you will legalise - which can impact on the final number generated....
December 2011
3 posts
Iraq: bellum iustum?
Today, at least some of the nightmare for Iraqis, Allied soldiers and taxpayers is over - the last US troops are leaving Iraq. They leave behind them a tangled legacy, a fragile democracy and too many questions to be satisfactorily answered today. It will take many years to fully understand the issues and answer the questions they beg. It is apparent that the Iraq War has been a seminal moment in...
Europe, Liberalism and Sovereignty
The Prime Minister’s decision to veto the latest move by the European Union to try and create a package of measures aimed at the solution of the Eurozone debt crisis has inspired many commentators - myself included - to new heights of hyperbole and ridiculousness in their responses. Now several days have passed and time has been had to catch a breath and think, we are left facing the future...
November 2011
2 posts
King James, Secretary Michael and Professor...
Furore has clattered into the public sphere of twitter over the announcement that, to commemorate the anniversary of the first publication of the King James Bible, the government is to despatch copies of the Bible to every single school in the UK. Michael Gove, Secretary of State for Education, is to write a foreword to the edition.
This initiative has immediately sailed into the middle of the...
This Liberal corner of a foreign field
Englishness is a concept often conflated with less than savoury individuals and acts in the public gaze in recent years. The rise of groups claiming to “defend” it against a variety of “threats” - claims that are but a wafer-thin cloak for thuggish intolerance and violence is but the latest threat to this identity to surface in contemporary British society. Englishness has...
October 2011
1 post
“In these difficult years, America has suffered from a fever of words; from...”
– Richard M. Nixon, First Inaugural Address
September 2011
4 posts
Weaving a Vision
What do the 50% tax band, the Pupil Premium and ending the detention of children in immigration detention centres have in common? The answer is, of course, that these are policies in which the Liberal Democrats have been active since the formation of the coalition last May. Problematically for the party, that seems to be about as far as we’ve been able to drag the link between these issues –...
Integration, Integration, Integration
Europe is a thorny issue at the best of times; but since the start of the Eurozone crisis, it has become positively toxic. Barely a week now goes by without a Eurosceptic commentator delighting in the idea that the Eurozone will soon collapse, leaving them justified in their opposition to the project and clearing the way for British withdrawal. Yet, there is a strange blindness in the particulars...
Either you are with us, or you're with the scary...
False bifurcation is a problem I have railed against before, in aid of the spectacular flop which was the ‘Rally Against Debt’. Whilst that particular cause has spluttered since then, the problem of people who do not recognise that there are more than two parties, more than two sides to every debate in this country, continues to boil away in politics and the media. Today, we saw the...
August 2011
5 posts
So small it fits into every bedroom
The Guardian is reporting this morning that the government has decided to change the regulations surrounding abortion, before a vote is held in the Commons on an amendment presented by Conservative MP Nadine Dorries and Labour MP Frank Field on this very subject. The changes will see abortion providers stripped of their role in counselling women seeking an abortion, instead requiring independent...
Liberty is not optional
The Home Secretary has announced that the upcoming English Defence League (EDL) march through Tower Hamlets is to be prohibited - indeed, all marches in Tower Hamlets and 4 neighboring boroughs for the next 30 days are to be banned. This measure is as odious as the organisation it seeks to inhibit through its draconian measures. Rather than addressing the problem, the government has chosen a...
Watchreddddddddd:
Truly extraordinary speech by fearless West Indian woman in face of Hackney rioters.
True words.
If it's not hurting, it's not working
I don’t enjoy the prospect of people being thrown out of work. I don’t relish the prospect of people being squeezed by higher taxes. There is no bliss for me in people having to work longer to draw a pension. I cannot find a crumb of merriment at abandoning alliances around the world. Yet all these things are now inevitable, in my eyes, if we are to get out of this mess in the West and...
Daily Mash: Survey Reveals Most British People... →
Conservative MP Philip Davies said: “Not wanting to kill child murderers is exactly the same as murdering a child. In fact there’s a study by the University of Staines which proves it’s actually worse. “The same study also proved that government-sponsored murder is a deterrent if you invent a completely different version of America to the one that actually exists.”
...
July 2011
15 posts
A Quick(ish) Note on Default
I had a conversation earlier with one of the tutors in my department on the possibility of a US default. He specialises in financial markets and financial crime, so it was refreshing to hear what someone with more experience had to say on this matter. A few things came out of this chat.
The first was that a US default is more than likely to be a considerable event - but we don’t precisely...
Room to Manoeuvre
The quarterly release of GDP data by the Office of National Statistics has become a great event in the political world since the start of the recession; the beginning of a round of visits to studios, columns in newspapers and much gnashing of teeth on social media about the direction of the economy. Today’s release of the preliminary Q2 2011 GDP data, which showed a 0.2% increase, was...
The audio recording of the Amazing British Pub...
WHEN I'M ANGRY I SEE SHAPES: The Amazing British... →
Which me and Tim invented after realising that pubs generally have quaint/ stupid names and also we like wordplay too. You can play as well.
For example
The Shuffling Idiot
The Stunted Whelk
The Festering Potrusion
The Inquisitive Cretin
The Racist Shrew
The Corpulant Pheasant
The Grey Banana
The Dejected Snail
The Faded Dream
The Grovelling Peasant
The Moronic Bream
The...
WHEN I'M ANGRY I SEE SHAPES: The Amazing British... →
Which me and Tim invented after realising that pubs generally have quaint/ stupid names and also we like wordplay too. You can play as well.
For example
The Shuffling Idiot
The Stunted Whelk
The Festering Potrusion
The Inquisitive Cretin
The Racist Shrew
The Corpulant Pheasant
The Grey Banana
The Dejected Snail
The Faded Dream
The Grovelling Peasant
The Moronic Bream
The...
WHEN I'M ANGRY I SEE SHAPES: The Amazing British... →
Which me and Tim invented after realising that pubs generally have quaint/ stupid names and also we like wordplay too. You can play as well.
For example
The Shuffling Idiot
The Stunted Whelk
The Festering Potrusion
The Inquisitive Cretin
The Racist Shrew
The Corpulant Pheasant
The Grey Banana
The Dejected Snail
The Faded Dream
The Grovelling Peasant
The Moronic Bream
The Insipid...
The Amazing British Pub Name Game
reddddddddd:
Which me and Tim invented after realising that pubs generally have quaint/ stupid names and also we like wordplay too. You can play as well.
For example
The Shuffling Idiot
The Stunted Whelk
The Festering Potrusion
The Inquisitive Cretin
The Racist Shrew
The Corpulant Pheasant
A break from regular programming for some word play on Britain’s weird pub names.
The Grey...
Somalia
There can be no doubt - what is unfolding in the Horn of Africa right now is a colossal human tragedy on a scale we in the West struggle to imagine. Outside of the community of individuals who have contributed to aid efforts overseas, only those with memories of the Second World War and the immediate period afterwards can begin to come close to the sheer industrial scale of suffering that is...
“Earth is the cradle of mind, but one cannot live in a cradle forever.”
– Konstantin Tsiolkovsky; Russian rocket pioneer
For Atlantis’ final landing today.
World Food Programme's "Purchase for Progress" →
I heard about this on today’s edition of the Food Programme on BBC Radio 4. The World Food Programme (WFP) is changing the way it sources the raw food it uses for its aid programme - gone are the days of shipping western agricultural surplus half way around the world to those in need. The WFP now try and source closer to the disaster area, to reduce costs and environmental impact.
Through...
My Future Trajectory
A few days ago, I received a piece of news I’d been waiting months to hear - my University (Hull) have awarded me a scholarship to cover tuition fees and living expenses while I read a PhD after I complete my MA at that institution. Needless to say, I was extremely happy and relieved to finally get this news; I must confess it perhaps hasn’t fully registered yet. I will start work on...
“Liberty does not simply consist in the absence of external impediment: it...”
– C. Russell, The Liberal Cause: The three-century long tradition of the Liberal Democrats, (Hebden Royd/Unservile State Group, Hebden Bridge, 1990)
Reblog if you want your followers to ask you...
Empowering People
The 2015 election may seem a mile away - between now and then we have rounds of council elections, the London mayoral election next year and the European Parliamentary elections in 2014. This is not to mention the years of policy making, coalition negotiations, legislation passing and general governing that comes with being a party of government - as well as constituency work, local authority...
June 2011
5 posts
Rolling back the Beeching
‘Richard Beeching’ is a curse among railway circles. The impact of his 1963 report on the British railway network was devastating; the network shrank by some 4,000 miles in the following decade, and shed some 3,000 stations in the process - this is to say nothing of the depot, goods yard, railway worshop, signal box and other subsidiary facilities that fell victim to the report. The...
The Your Paintings Website (Beta) →
The BBC, Public Catalogue Foundation and public bodies across the UK are working together to produce an online catalogue of all the oil paintings held in public collections across the UK - from museums and galleries through to hospitals and courts. This wide-ranging project opens up a whole world of art to people, often by bringing it from private display places within public bodies, or from...
Presumptions
Compared to some, I’ve been in the Liberal Democratic Party for all of five minutes. As I’ve already said, I’m yet to be blooded in the cut and thrust of campaigning, conference and the rest of the hard work and grind that goes into making the party - indeed, all parties - work. I have been impressed by the hard work put in by Liberal Democrat activists over the years, and I...
May 2011
8 posts
