On his heritage, Clive Soley MP says
Despard apparently married a Caribbean woman while in the amy there. I also have some Scottish connections and I have often thought that if I wasn't a British athiest I would quite like to be a Scottish Rastafarian! If you believe things hard enough they come true - especially if I retire to the Caribbean!
Interesting article on the effect of internal US politics on internal EU politics.
In any sober analysis, the chances of the world's two largest assemblages of the rich and free being able to work together to confront the coming great global challenges will be better with a President Kerry. And only if America and Europe work together can we unfold, for the rest of the world, the transforming power of liberty.
Ultranormal says, "There are a couple stretches in the list, but 90% of it is right on, and pretty hard to argue with."
The conventional wisdom has it that President Bush’s first term in office has been truly bad for Europe. Whether it is the rift over Iraq or almost any other major policy issue, we are told that they have been to the detriment of Europe. But as Richard Phillips argues, the Bush Administration has not only helped bring Germany and France closer together — it has also unwittingly elevated Europe’s prestige throughout the world.
Pro-hunt protesters storm Commons in the latest high-profile UK security balls up. After the Tabloid reporter 'butler' saga, PM's Flour 'bomb' and the Batman episode, this adds up to incompetence.
Via Demos, The Political Brain
As The Times reported not long ago, a team of U.C.L.A. researchers analyzed the neural activity of Republicans and Democrats as they viewed a series of images from campaign ads. And the early data suggested that the most salient predictor of a ''Democrat brain'' was amygdala activity responding to certain images of violence: either the Bush ads that featured shots of a smoldering ground zero or the famous ''Daisy'' ad from Lyndon B. Johnson's 1964 campaign that ends with a mushroom cloud. Such brain activity indicates a kind of gut response, operating below the level of conscious control.
(Via JoiIto & MegNut) ChangeThis Manifestos launch:
We don’t believe humans evolved to be so bad at making decisions, so poor at changing our minds, so violent in arguing our point of view. We’re well aware of how split our country and our world have become, but we don’t think the current state of affairs is built into our very nature.The problem lies in the media.
In the old days, we had the time and inclination to consider the implications of a decision. Everyone wasn’t in quite so much of a hurry. At the same time, most conversations (and most arguments) were local ones, conducted between people who knew each other.
Today, it’s very different. Television demands a sound bite. A one hundred word letter to the editor is a long one. Radio has become a jingoistic wasteland, a series of thoughtless mantras, repeated over and over and designed to fit into a typical commute.
(Via Pejmanesque), a proposal at Tech Central Station to put a 1 Billion dollar bounty on ObL's capture.