Facebook ‘fakery’ and vaccine scares
The noughties are defined by fakery | Hadley Freeman | Comment is free | The Guardian Hadley Freeman, normally a fashion columnist for the Guardian and someone I normally agree with fairly readily, opines...
Monthly Archive: December 2009
More scaremongering over ISOCs and al-Qa’ida
Following the nonsense in the Daily Mail from Melanie Phillips (last entry) on Monday, there is a front-page story in the Times this morning claiming that the guy who tried to bomb the plane...
Mad Mel: ban Shari’ah to stop terrorism
MELANIE PHILLIPS: To our eternal shame, Britain is STILL a hub for Islamic terror | Mail Online Melanie Phillips, in response to the attempted aeroplane bombing on Christmas day, writes another of her rants...
Anwar al-Awlaki: trauma and extremism
Recently we heard that the Yemeni-American Muslim preacher, Anwar al-Awlaki, may have died in air strikes in Yemen, although other reports said he was miles away from where the strikes happened and was safe....
Friends
Yesterday I got a tweet from one of my Twitter friends that most of my “followers” (I hate that term) aren’t aware of saying that she had decided that someone she had been friends...
Kaney O’Neill: who’s an unfit parent then?
A while back, I read a heart-warming story about a woman who was paralysed in an accident during Hurricane Floyd in 1999 while she was serving with the US Navy who had a baby...
Borders turns off lifts for last week
The bookshop chain Borders UK is set to close next Tuesday, with all 45 remaining Borders and Books Etc stores closing (a few, and most of Books Etc, already have), and the place looks...
My reward for being a good customer
I’d forgotten that I’d been on Borders’ mailing list, which happened after I agreed to fill in some sort of survey after buying a book in the Kingston branch. I got various mailshots which...
Supreme Court bans JFS racial discrimination
Today, the British Supreme Court ruled that the policy of the Jews’ Free School (or JFS) of taking converts to Judaism only when they had been through one denomination’s conversion ritual rather than another...
Dumping the Droid
I’ve had my T-Mobile G2 (or HTC Hero, for anyone on any other network who might be offered one) since last Friday, and I’ve already had enough. There is a cooling-off period of seven...
Linux Format rant on Mono debate
The other day I bought the January 2010 edition of Linux Format, the UK’s best-known magazine for that platform. In the letters page, there is a letter from a guy called Nick Canupp, having...
Arrogant privilege rears its head again
A while back, before I got the hang of Twitter as a means of announcing blog posts and conducting cross-border conversations without having to log into a chat client (and well before getting my...
Lactose intolerance
A post on Deenport that struck a chord regarding the latest rant by Stephen Schwartz and Irfan Ahmad “al-Alawi” against Shaikh Hamza Yusuf: On the night of the mi’raj the Prophet(saw) was offered wine...
The Spectator: where arrogant privilege meets bigotry
Rod Liddle has managed to outdo himself this past week, with two shockingly bigoted and ignorant articles on the Spectator's website the same day. One of them is in support of the ban on...
Under pressure: the search for an Android
I am due a mobile phone upgrade next week, insha Allah. I have my heart set on an Android unit, the main manufacturer of which seems to be HTC; the Hero is the best...
Romanians bilked by self-employment scam
BBC News – Romanian workers reveal true cost of beauty This is a story about Romanian workers who were tricked into coming to the UK to sell cosmetics on a “commission-only”, “self-employed” basis. This...
Two sides of the facilitated communication debate
Doctors said my son's brain was damaged — but he was bright | Life and style | The Guardian This article is by Rahila Gupta whose son, who died in 2002, had cerebral palsy...
On Switzerland and boycotts
It seems that offence has been taken at my reference to two bloggers in my last entry who reacted to the vote against minarets in Switzerland last Sunday to the effect of “I won’t...