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POPSTen Years of 'Change' in the UK
Tony, confines himself to doing only a modest amount of harm. I ended up being almost grateful to Tony Blair. Given that he was leader of the Mother of All Champagne Socialist Parties he actually behaved with more wisdom than might have been predicted. And I even came to quite like the guy. he thing I still do not go along with though is why all the vitriol towards George Bush? Sure, back in 2000, I too was seduced like all the rest of the European public by a relentless media derision-fest at his expense. Once I had managed to step aside from all this however and to make up my own mind about him , the mythical, ignorant cowboy moron turned out, to my eyes at least, to be quite a decent, genuine and plain-speaking guy. I would have him any day in preference to the average mealy-mouthed, craven British politician. The kind whose words weave an elaborate linguistic dance choreographed to say absolutely nothing at all, so running scared are they of our great, overpaid TV star politic
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POPSSalt Comes In Gourmet Flavors & Designer Colors 
Mahatma Gandhi used salt to launch his first major campaign of non-violent civil disobedience. By picking up a pinch of salt left by the tide, he broke the British law making it a crime to possess salt not obtained from the government monopoly. Salt wasn't always readily available or cheap. In medieval Europe it represented a third of the income of Poland's kings. The ancient Egyptians salt-cured their fish. The Romans were big salt-users. They paid the soldiers in salt." Which is apparently where the term "worth his salt" came from, and the word "salary" and "soldier. You may not know this, but salt is used in the manufacture of some 14,000 different products. "SALT, A World History" is a book that shows how an item of food becomes a commodity of trade, so it becomes economically important, then it becomes politically important and eventually it becomes culturally important" I Highly recommend Kurlansky's book . It put history into a different perspective for me & I enjoyed
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POPSDubai: Boom and Busted One of the two was in Dubai to set up a business enterprise in the booming city. He was, obviously, unaware of the conservative Muslim influence. Suffice it to say, I have no plans to go get arrested in Dubai.
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POPSIs voting important? A British/UK politics site. These stats get you thinking about the state of democracy in the UK and whether civic duty is important
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POPSTo Pakistanis, Taliban looks like anti-colonialism "Some Pakistanis believe the Taliban insurgency is the latest in a long line of anti-colonial militancy stretching back to the mid-19th century uprisings against British rule. The Pakistan army, in contrast, is seen as an agent of the United States" "Without adequate political leadership, eradicating sympathy for the Taliban may prove more difficult than eradicating their hideouts in frontier Pakistan. But as long as NATO and the United States continue unilateral strikes in Pakistan that kill civilians, the real battle - for hearts and minds - will be lost"
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POPSWhy the UK Needs a Palin
But the absence of redneck representation is also partly a function of Britain’s recent political convergence. The main parties have crowded into the ideological centre, in pursuit of the magical swing voters in key constituencies. More extreme views inevitably get marginalised: they may be widely held, but in places and geographical patterns that make them electorally safe to ignore. So the loudest voices articulating the redneck attitude belong to blood-spitting tabloid newspapers. Liberal Britons who skip the Sun and the Daily Mail rarely encounter it, or indeed rednecks themselves, unless they meet at motorway service stations or on budget air flights. They are as distant from each other, intellectually, as are the denizens of New York and the Ozarks. It isn’t only the rednecks who ought to worry about the consequences of this. These include the stark decline in turnout at general elections—concentrated at the bottom of the social scale—and the creeping rise, in some places, of
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POPSBushisms If Bush didn't hold such a position of immense power he'd be a lot funnier. :-/
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POPSNATO- the paper alliance John Laughland is a British historian and political analyst, and director of studies at the Institute of Democracy and Cooperation in Paris.
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POPSLiterary Classics: Travel and Adventure Without Leaving Home The Custom of the Country by Edith Wharton This one is sharp and witty, with a great story and brilliant psychological insight into what it means to be a woman in a consumer culture—which is something that hasn't changed all that much since Wharton's day. The Autobiography of Benvenuto Cellini by Benvenuto Cellini A startling work of self-justification and score settling, this autobiography has all the action and romance you'd find in a gripping historical novel. Renaissance artist, friend of Michelangelo, favorite of popes, and rival to cardinals, Cellini was also a street fighter, a philanderer, an egoist, and quite possibly a murderer. Anna Karenina by Leo Tolstoy This is a big sweeping novel about a lot of very important things, like social class, politics, and agriculture. But it's also a great, compelling romance. Just don't read it on a train. You'll have to read it to find out why.
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POPSHigh childhood IQ linked to antitraditional attitudes in adults A study of a large representative sample of the UK population shows that high childhood IQ is correlated with antitraditional (i.e., liberal, mostly) attitudes in adults (described as "antiracist, pro-working women, socially liberal," and democratic).This correlation is independent of gender, occupation and social class. Full PDF at the author's website (http://snipr.com/3ixli).
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POPSNo right to on-line anonymity? Isn`t our democracy a hybrid? Partially open and democratic and partially like fascism or stalinism? Do you know who knows everything about you? Could be your neighbour. Or your sister.
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POPSObama is a retread from the past Continuing: Wallace's May 1947 political rally in Los Angeles was the biggest political event there in years. Twenty-eight thousand people paid admission to it... The keystone of the Wallace campaign was of course its advocacy of an American foreign policy consistent with that of the Soviet Union. Wallace defended the Communist coup in Czechoslovakia...O'Neill quotes Macdonald: Wallaceland is the mental habitat of Henry Wallace plus a few hundred thousand readers of the New Republic, the Nation, and PM. It is a region of perpetual fogs, caused by the warm winds of the liberal Gulf Stream coming in contact with the Soviet glacier. Its natives speak "Wallese," a debased political dialect. Here, O'Neill notes, Macdonald had fun with progressive jargon: Wallese is always employed to Unite rather than to Divide (hence the fog), and to Further Positive, Constructive Aims rather than Merely to Engage in Irresponsible and Destructive Criticism.
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