The gangsters on England's doorstep. At 3am outside the BP petrol station in Wisbech, Cambridgeshire, the January sky was still black, but the solitary garage attendant was already serving migrant workers.
By 4.15am, dark and silent figures crossing the town had become a steady flow towards the light of the pumps on Freedom Bridge roundabout. Pearson’s Quest to Cover the Planet in Company-Run Schools. No more hippies and explorers: a lament for the changed world of cycling. I came across an interesting film the other day.
It was linked from Sidetracked, a beautiful, outdoors lifestyle-y type magazine. Politicians don’t know the price of milk – but they do know how to set up a shell company. Perhaps we have all become too cynical.
Why should we be suspicious of people who hide money deep within multiple shell companies on a tax-haven island with the transparency of a lead-lined coffin? It’s like being suspicious of your husband just because he’s hidden a second mobile phone in a box of Maltesers in his gym bag, wrapped in an old dust sheet, in the car, in the space where the spare wheel should be. This scandal suggests some complex element in the British psyche that knows this kind of thing is happening but can’t bear to be confronted with the knowledge. Politicians don’t know the price of milk – but they do know how to set up a shell company. Caitlin Moran's Posthumous Advice for Her Daughter. By Caitlin Moran / brouhahadreamer.tumblr.com My daughter is about to turn 13 and I’ve been smoking a lot recently, and so – in the wee small hours, when my lungs feel like there’s a small mouse inside them, scratching to get out – I’ve thought about writing her one of those “Now I’m Dead, Here’s My Letter Of Advice For You To Consult As You Continue Your Now Motherless Life” letters.
Here’s the first draft. Might tweak it a bit later. 12 Things About Being A Woman That Women Won't Tell You. 2. 'The Man' So, when women talk about "The Man", we're not talking about you.
You're just a man. You're not The Man. 12 Things About Being A Woman That Women Won't Tell You. Ur-Fascism by Umberto Eco. In 1942, at the age of ten, I received the First Provincial Award of Ludi Juveniles (a voluntary, compulsory competition for young Italian Fascists—that is, for every young Italian).
I elaborated with rhetorical skill on the subject “Should we die for the glory of Mussolini and the immortal destiny of Italy?” My answer was positive. The “Clean for the Queen” campaign is Tory Britain at its worst. Forelocks at the ready, peasants.
It’s time to Clean for the Queen. In honour of Her Majesty’s birthday, Tory politicians and major retailers have come together to encourage all good citizens to clean up their neighborhoods next weekend. Around the country, purple billboards, formatted in the style of those cloyingly awful “Keep Calm and Carry On” posters, urge the underclass to “spruce up your streets! This Ludicrous New Instrument Makes Music with 2,000 Marbles. Swedish musician Martin Molin has long had experience with esoteric instruments like the glockenspiel, traktofon, or Theremin, but he may have topped his musical prowess with the invention of his own new instrument: the Wintergatan Marble Machine, a hand-cranked music box loaded with instruments including a circuit of 2,000 cascading steel marbles.
As the devices cycles it activates a vibraphone, bass, kick drum, cymbal and other instruments that play a score programmed into a 32 bar loop comprised of LEGO technic parts. The marbles are moved internally through the machine using funnels, pulleys, and tubes. Molin began work on the marble machine in August 2014 and hoped to spend about two months on the project. Its complexity soon spiraled out of control as all 3,000 internal parts had to be designed and fabricated by hand, a time-consuming process that eventually took 14 months. How to think about Islamic State. Violence has erupted across a broad swath of territory in recent months: wars in Ukraine and the Middle East, suicide bombings in Xinjiang, Nigeria and Turkey, insurgencies from Yemen to Thailand, massacres in Paris, Tunisia and the American south.
Future historians may well see such uncoordinated mayhem as commencing the third – and the longest and the strangest – of world wars. Certainly, forces larger and more complex than in the previous two wars are at work; they outrun our capacity to apprehend them, let alone adjust their direction to our benefit. The early post cold war consensus – that bourgeois democracy has solved the riddle of history, and a global capitalist economy will usher in worldwide prosperity and peace – lies in tatters.
But no plausible alternatives of political and economic organisation are in sight. A world organised for the play of individual self-interest looks more and more prone to manic tribalism. A Cambridge Diary – A Portrait Picture Every Day From Cambridge. The austerity delusion. As Oxford’s Simon Wren-Lewis noted, on the very same day that the Centre for Macroeconomics revealed that the great majority of British economists disagree with the proposition that austerity is good for growth, the Telegraph published on its front page a letter from 100 business leaders declaring the opposite.
Why does big business love austerity and hate Keynesian economics? After all, you might expect corporate leaders to want policies that produce strong sales and hence strong profits. I’ve already suggested one answer: scare talk about debt and deficits is often used as a cover for a very different agenda, namely an attempt to reduce the overall size of government and especially spending on social insurance. This has been transparently obvious in the United States, where many supposed deficit-reduction plans just happen to include sharp cuts in tax rates on corporations and the wealthy even as they take away healthcare and nutritional aid for the poor.
Sorry, we can't ban everything that offends you – video.