I saw the original of Caspar David Friedrich’s painting, Der Wanderer über dem Nebelmeer‘, (’The wanderer above the sea of fog’), or a painting very like it, several years ago, in a travelling exhibition in Edinburgh titled, ‘The Romantic Spirit in German Art’ (which I’d misread as, ‘The Romantic Shirt in German Art”).
This particular Romantic [...]
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tokyo snow, originally uploaded by suehiro.
All things dull and ugly,
All creatures short and squat,
All things rude and nasty,
The Lord God made the lot.
Each little snake that poisons,
Each little wasp that stings,
He made their brutish venom.
He made their horrid wings.
All things sick and cancerous,
All evil great and small,
All things foul and dangerous,
The Lord God made them all.
Each nasty little hornet,
Each beastly [...]
the government’s decision to abandon the ‘aggressive rhetoric’ of the so-called war on terror, the guide tells civil servants not to use terms such as Islamist extremism or jihadi-fundamentalist but instead to refer to violent extremism and criminal murderers or thugs to avoid any implication that there is an explicit link between Islam and terrorism.
Heaven [...]
Milton Friedman famously claimed there are four ways in which you can spend money.
You can spend your own money on yourself. When you do that, why then you really watch out what you’re doing, and you try to get the most for your money.
You can spend your own money on somebody else. For example, I [...]
Switched again from Drupal to Wordpress…still working on a few changes.
Photo by ekai, from Flickr, reproduced under the Creative Commons non-commercial share-alike licence
Gavin wondered if anyone had predicted that an Orwellian, totalitarian state might come in a religious guise.
Well the answer’s yes, of course. Margaret Atwood’s, The Handmaid’s Tale describes a totalitarian theocracy that specifically (for this is Atwood) oppresses women. She just picked the wrong religion.
