The Thirteen Scariest People in America

Climate of change
Either we all get out, or nobody does

These are your favourite things
Defending Torchwood

You rarely come across a piece of evidence as damning for simple economism as this:
The nation’s Halloween spend has increased by a factor of 10 since 2001 and reached £120 million last year, according to Woolworths. It is anticipating a 30 per cent increase this year.
So, what’s going on here?

The worst is the best too
Ode to the shithole of Hackney

The Americans have been known to legally prohibit the burning of their own flag and there are some who would like this to be the case again. But the present legal situation rests on a sensible Supreme Court decision from 1989, which held that the burning of the American flag was a form of free [...]

In classical formal logic, every statement is either true or false: those which are false are precisely those which are not true. In the early 20th century however, constructivist mathematicians wanted to see how far they could get without this “law of the excluded middle” and began to develop new intuitionistic logics in which some [...]

When I’m feeling cheap, which has happened a lot lately, I shop at Asda. (I know, I know, but they’re all bad in their own ways.) The most pleasant way there, not that there is a great deal of choice in routes, is down Clive Lane, which is marked on maps, though it’s really a [...]

In today’s Britain, the ability to think logically appears to be under serious threat. This is most apparent when browsing sections of the blogoball* and when listening to our politicians.
Here’s a non-specific example of a particularly common error. Let’s say that A is a defined characteristic or experience and that X is a particular act. [...]

Thomas Paine once wrote:
Every age and generation must be free to act for itself, in all cases as the ages and generations which preceded it. The vanity and presumption of governing beyond the grave is the most ridiculous and insolent of all tyrannies. Man has no property in man; neither has any generation [...]

Philippe Legrain describes John Reid’s plans for the Bulgars shortly to be flooding our shores, doing our jobs, claiming our dole, taking our women and reducing the value of our properties thusly:

Bored of politics?
Have some soothing pictures of distilleries, then

In the tradition of the New Shorter Sharpener - snappy posts for a busy world - here is everything I want to say about the issue of labour mobility from Bulgaria and Romania in one equation.
Illiberal Home Secretary Pandering to Rabid Anti-Immigration Tabloid Gallery and Demonstrating Penchant to create New Criminal Offences + Romanian and [...]

It is not a fact which pleases me in any way, but: Yes, actually, we did “tell you so”.