I am a conservative. A true conservative. These are the things I want to conserve: – Social Security payments, so that the elderly are guaranteed financial help when they stop working. – Medicaid, so that poor people will not die for want of medical help. – Medicare, so that older people are cared for in …
The following is a post written by carmengrayson: Peter Baker’s recent disingenuous article in Sunday’s New York Times, “The Final Insult in the Bush-Cheney Marriage,” masquerades as investigative reporting. In fact, it’s little more than strung-together quotations from participants involved to varying degrees in the decade’s destructive foreign policies. The result is a reductionist essay …
Continue reading ‘Don’t investigate me for torture, I’m an American’ »
Chinese couples who cannot have children (or second children, or more) have found a creative way of becoming parents and bypassing the US immigration laws in one fell swoop, another example of money talking. Through legitimate agencies these couples hire American women to serve as surrogates for their children, “designer” babies for China’s elite at …
“British Cabinet ministers and members of the national security council were told nothing about the existence and scale of the vast data-gathering programmes run by British and American intelligence agencies, a former member of the government has revealed. Chris Huhne, who was in the cabinet for two years until 2012, said ministers were in ‘utter …
Boys with sisters are approximately 13% less likely to do the dishes than boys with brothers. ( Prospect Magazine, August 2013). I blame their mothers. An Epicurean upbringing teaches you to do the dishes for fear of being made to do the ironing.
Islamic teachings on whether women have to cover their faces date back to the seventh century. The niqab is not specifically mentioned in the Koran. There are, however, verses that refer to a woman’s obligation to cover herself with the khimar, a type of headscarf, and the jilbab, an outer garment, when in the presence …
Continue reading ‘Should women be allowed to cover their faces?’ »
There are about 400,000 kids in foster care in the United States. Many of them are subject to being moved around arbitrarily to different foster homes and have already suffered from parental drug abuse, domestic and sexual abuse, and poverty. In Los Angeles, for instance, there are only about 3,000 foster homes. About five years …
Continue reading ‘Looking after little children – part 2: the United States’ »
One of the most “shocking scandals in Britain today”, is the corrupt nature of our child-protection system. The law rightly demands that in cases where state officials seek to remove a child from its parents, the identity of the child be kept secret. But somehow that provision has become so broad it is now a …
In addition to shutting down the government, House Republicans have voted for a large cut in the amount of money devoted to food stamps. Because of the poor state of the economy the number of people on Food Stamps has shown a large increase from 26 million in 2007 to almost 48 million now. This …
Continue reading ‘Dismantling part of the social safety net’ »
This is a similar question to “Does the fact that the US provided chemical weapons to Saddam Hussein qualify the United States to lecture other people about their ownership and use of the same type of weapons.” There appears to be evidence that the CIA has gotten out of control and has been doing things …
A global survey of 156 countries, conducted between 2010 and 2012 by the Earth Institute, shows that Denmark, Norway, Switzerland, the Netherlands and Sweden are the world’s happiest countries. People in Rwanda, Burundi, the Central African Republic, Benin and Togo are the least satisfied with their lives. The United States came in at number 17 …
A new book by Frank Ledwidge, a former military intelligence officer, shows that since 2001 444 British soldiers have died and more than 2,600 have been wounded, in a war that will have cost us at least £40bn by 2020. And to what end? The task was to flush out al-Qa’eda, but Qa’eda has long …
Continue reading ‘The British have wasted £40bn on Afghanistan’ »
In America we are effectively governed, not by rational, educated people, but by spoiled brats, whose claim to fame is that they can gerrymander constituency boundaries and thus cannot be easily removed. They consistently ignore decisions democratically arrived at. Since they do not wish to govern responsibly, they not only should have their pay sequestered, …
When did the standing ovation become de rigueur in British theatre? Where once it was the volume and duration of the applause that marked the exceptional from the ordinary, it now seems that even modest performances have half the theatre on its feet whooping for more. If we are to mimic the audiences of La …
