December 2010
1 post
http://www.norseprojects.com/product/category-aw_20... →
July 2010
1 post
March 2010
2 posts
“O, dear me, the world is ill-divided
Them that works the hardest are the least...”
– Mary Brooksbank, ‘The Jute Mill Song’
February 2010
13 posts
8 tags
Forever young: Nigerian football’s age-old problem
Nwankwo Kanu’s official age is 33 but his real age is 42. Obafemi Martins is not 25 but 32. Jay-Jay Okocha was 10 years older than his “official” age throughout his career. And Taribo West, whose playing career ended only two years ago, is in his late fifties. Who says so? A stream of bloggers on some of Nigeria’s...
4 tags
Nap ‘boosts’ brain learning power
A nap during the day doesn’t just beat tiredness, but actually improves the brain’s ability to absorb new information, claim US scientists.
Volunteers who slept for 90 minutes during the day did better at cognitive tests than those who were kept awake. […]
The latest study, from the University of California at Berkeley, suggests...
2 tags
2 tags
The Hitchens brothers: Anatomy of a row
On a book tour in Los Angeles, Christopher [Hitchens] agrees to read the review [of his work written by his brother] by email and then flatly rejects the idea that he is, as he put it, a “repressed seeker”. Prefacing his response to his brother’s review with faint praise - “a quite stirring and eloquent piece” - Christopher...
3 tags
Mike Marqusee: Why I became British
It’s been a curious exercise. I’ve spent a good deal of my nearly 40 years here as a leftwing activist. Though never allowed to vote, I’ve taken part in numerous election campaigns. First and last I’m an internationalist. I wrote a book called Anyone But England (its title was my answer to the question, “Who do you support in test...
3 tags
5 tags
3 tags
Unequal Britain: richest 10% are now 100 times better off than the poorest
A detailed and startling analysis of how unequal Britain has become offers a snapshot of an increasingly divided nation where the richest 10% of the population are more than 100 times as wealthy as the poorest 10% of society.
Gordon Brown described the paper, published today, as “sobering”, saying:...
4 tags
Cameron’s freebie to apartheid South Africa
David Cameron accepted an all-expenses paid trip to apartheid South Africa while Nelson Mandela was still in prison, an updated biography of the Tory leader reveals today.
The trip by Mr Cameron in 1989, when he was a rising star of the Conservative Research Department, was a chance for him to “see for himself” and was funded by a...
5 tags
China ‘overtakes’ Germany to become largest exporter
The growing economic might of China was laid bare yesterday by reports that it overtook Germany to become the world’s largest exporter last year.
The strong export data for December follows the news on Friday that China had leap-frogged the US as the world’s largest automotive market.
China is also forecast to...
7 tags
Brown has missed the chance for real electoral reform So, 13 years after Labour first promised a referendum on electoral reform, Gordon Brown has finally guaranteed to hold one. Reform is now on offer, but of the most limited kind possible.
Brown’s first mistake was to reject the bold option, favoured by Alan Johnson and others, of holding a referendum before or on the day of the general...
3 tags
Hung Parliaments of the Past
And if no party does win the next election outright, what is likely to happen? No-one is talking about coalition, and the Lib Dems shy away from revealing their hand.
The nearest they have got is leader Nick Clegg’s ambiguous statement that “the party with the clearest mandate would have the first right to seek to govern”… though he studiously...
4 tags
I too was once a benefits cheat …
On the minimum wage, you get the worst of both worlds – you have to get up and go to work every day, but you’re still in the maw of state bureaucracy, with its endless form-filling intrusion, because you don’t have enough money to live on. The “benefit trap” has a vice-like grip, and it exists because greedy scroungers come in lots...
January 2010
12 posts
7 tags
“Right-wing politics has become a vehicle for channelling this popular anger...”
– BBC News
4 tags
“The gap between rich and poor in the UK is wider now than 40 years ago, a...”
– BBC News
“[H]e is the best guard of a camp who is best able to steal a march upon the...”
– Plato, The Republic, trans. Benjamin Jowett.
“The Green Party is on course to make a historic electoral breakthrough by...”
– The Independent
4 tags
5 tags
“The US Secret Service says it is investigating after an effigy of Barack Obama...”
– BBC News: http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/americas/8438852.stm
4 tags
“Voters should want five more years of Gordon Brown because:
“He knows...”
– http://www.bbc.co.uk/blogs/nickrobinson/
4 tags
‘[P]olicymakers will also note signs that debt-laden consumers are putting their own finances in order after the latest figures showed the household savings ratio - the share of income put aside by families - rose to an 11-year high of 8.6% during the third quarter of 2009.’
‘Bank set to hold interest rates low’, Guardian, 3 January 2010
The average salary in the UK...
6 tags
“policymakers will also note signs that debt-laden consumers are putting their...”
– ‘Bank set to hold interest rates low’, Guardian, 3 January 2010
December 2009
6 posts
6 tags
6 tags
“The banks’ determination to reward themselves so handsomely at the taxpayers’...”
– http://www.wsws.org/articles/2009/dec2009/tax-d19.shtml
3 tags
For the loser now / Will be later to win (?)
Rosanna Greenstreet: Tell us a secret.
Slavoj Žižek: Communism will win.
7 tags
Come writers and critics Who prophesize with your pen And keep your eyes wide The chance won’t come again And don’t speak too soon For the wheel’s still in spin And there’s no tellin’ who That it’s namin’. For the loser now Will be later to win For the times they are a-changin’.
[…]
Come mothers and fathers Throughout the land ...
November 2009
3 posts
“Certainly,” said the stranger, “the whole of the story is not...”
– Olivia Schreiner, Story of an African Farm
7 tags
“If now we come to what may be called the more normal type of the Uranian man, we...”
– Edward Carpenter, The Intermediate Sex
October 2009
14 posts
1 tag
3 tags
o
Why is the internet full of 15 year old girls dying to fall in love?
Just chill out.
15 year old guys are presently too preoccupied with playing computer games, football, or just hanging out. Let them have their moment. They’re going to spend the rest of their lives fancying/being in love with girls who are neurotic and constantly craving love. They could do with a few care-free moments.
...
6 tags
2 tags
“It is hard to contend against one’s heart’s desire; for whatever it...”
– Heraclitus
