Shisha ‘as harmful as cigarettes’
BBC NEWS | Health | Shisha ‘as harmful as cigarettes’ Why does anyone assume that shisha is less harmful than smoking cigarettes? Becuase it’s such a “cultural” experience, or because the smell of shisha...
Category: Politics
Cameron rebukes idiot MEP
BBC NEWS | Politics | NHS attack MEP rebuked by Cameron David Cameron is the leader of the Conservative Party in the UK, and much as I despise that institution and much as I...
Come on Steve, prove you’re one of us
Where Are the British Birthers? | TPM Calling on Stephen Hawking to provide his bona fides (hat tip: Ginny, via Twitter): Perhaps there will be some brave republican willing to spearhead an investigation of...
I’m a photographer, not a terrorist (or a ‘nonce’)
BBC Viewfinder: I'm a photographer… This is all about the problems some photographers have been having taking pictures in 'sensitive' locations, particularly in London; these places have also included shopping centres, many of them...
DNA casts doubt on Luke Mitchell’s guilt
Luke Mitchell is someone I didn't want to be guilty when I heard the case on the news at the time, but after the verdict and the sentence I had to concede. However, any...
“Birthers” can neither be ignored nor engaged
To engage the birther fantasists is futile; to dismiss them, reckless by Gary Younge in today’s Guardian They shouldn’t be engaged with, according to Gary Younge, because their claims are fantastic and have been...
Digital Niqabi on fitna and niqab
The sister known as Digital Nomad has posted two interesting entries recently, the most recent on this nonsense of condemning mobile phones as a cause of fitna and fornication. This is not just within...
BNP Islamophobia not just a PR stunt
Martin Sullivan at Islamophobia Watch on his ongoing debate with Edmund Standing, a contributor to Harry’s Place and author of a recent think tank report which plays up the BNP’s anti-Semitism and plays down...
Big Trev’s leadership pushes out equality staff
Perhaps to my discredit, I have not taken a great interest in the workings of the Equality and Human Rights Commission, the successor to several official equality commissions set up to monitor various anti-discrimination...
What future for the House of Windsor?
This week’s New Statesman has a lengthy feature on the monarchy, clearly coming out in favour of abolishing it and establishing a republic. Ted Vallance gives a long history of British public hostility and...
Gary McKinnon and the Daily Mail crusade
The Daily Mail has recently been running a campaign over several issues to stop the British computer hacker, Gary McKinnon, from being extradited to the USA to face charges over cracking American military and...
Review of “Does God Hate Women?”
Does God Hate Women? is a 178-page tirade by Ophelia Benson and Jeremy Stangroom, editors of the atheist website Butterflies and Wheels, co-authors of A Dictionary of Fashionable Nonsense and both senior editors on...
Planning decisions are never democratic
There is a letter in today’s Guardian in response to the long saga of the intervention by the Prince of Wales in the planning dispute in Chelsea. The letter is from Georgine Thorburn of...
What are the shibboleths of ignorance about Islam?
I've been getting a lot of tweets lately about talk of a ban on the so-called burqa in France, the latest chapter in the long saga of the French obsession with what Muslim women...
More UK police thuggery exposed
More video footage has turned up of British police using violence against political activists, this time two women protesting against the proposed Kingsnorth power station. As with some of those who were involved in...
Meet the Daily Mail’s new guest editor
Back in the 1990s, I was a big fan of the Liverpool-based TV soap Brookside (I got into it just as the body-under-the-patio story was hotting up and got out after the storylines got...
Fear, loathing and thuggery in Luton
Fear and Hatred on the Streets of Luton from the Sunday Times A very long and comprehensive article (you can also see it in four parts here: [1], [2], [3], [4]) on the unrest...
Gordon Brown and legitimacy
Does anyone get sick of hearing the claim that Gordon Brown’s position as prime minister is illegitimate because he wasn’t directly elected? The story goes that because he never contested an election as prime...
Religion and cruelty
Today’s Observer carried an opinion piece by the co-author of a book called Does God Hate Women?, to be published by Continuum this week, which gives a brief list of the worst things religious...
The two faces of the BNP
The rise of British racism may be horribly close — The Spectator Fraser Nelson goes “on the stump” (meaning, out knocking on doors) with BNP activists in Hertfordshire and discovers that people are no...