Harry's Place

I gather England has suffered some sort of ignominious and humiliating defeat, a day after the USA’s not-quite-so ignominious and humiliating defeat.
Want to talk about it? Be sure to include lots of pretentious ideas about The Larger Meaning of It All.

By Andrew Murphy
In California a couple were caught outside of a Wal-Mart trying to sell their six-month-old daughter for $25. Ordinarily this is one of those stories at which you shake your head and move on. However now that rightwing libertarianism is on the rise in the USA, exemplified by Congressman Ron Paul, his son [...]

Nick Clegg can try all he likes to sell the rise in VAT and other elements of the coalition’s emergency budget, but voters aren’t buying the role the Lib Dems are playing in it. A YouGov poll in The Observer today says that Clegg faces a fierce public backlash.
Apparently people remember Clegg campaigning two months [...]

Paul Morley in the Observer sums up what has always been my attitude to big music festivals.
A confirmed non-visitor year in, year out to Glastonbury, and music festivals in general, for reasons to do with a general distrust of the open air, of camping, of hippies, of whatever the new versions of hippies [...]

The former Republican vice presidential candidate agrees with a suggestion that President Obama’s role in convincing BP to create a $20 billion escrow fund to compensate victims of the company’s disastrous oil leak in the Gulf of Mexico is a step on the slippery slope to American Nazism.
Just a month ago, former Gov. Palin [...]

So this is how it begins. The Guardian is reporting this morning comments Simon Hughes, now the Lib Dem deputy leader, made where he raises the prospect of tabling rebel amendments to the finance bill.
“If there are measures in the finance bill where we can improve fairness, and make for a fairer Britain, then we [...]

This is a guest post by Andy Lambert
A few weeks ago I wrote a piece which criticised one Sholto Brynes for writing an article which aimed to re-package Islamism and sell it to a western audience. The article highlighted how little Sholto knows about Islamism, Islam and geo-politics in general. There are a plethora of [...]

THIS IS A CROSS-POST BY A RABBIT’S EYE VIEW OF THE HYPERBOREAN NORTH.
At dawn 60 years ago today, North Korean armed columns under Kim Il-sung crossed the 38th parallel into South Korean territory. Then, as threatened now, a principal target was Seoul: which fell by 28 June 1950.
The rest, as they say, is history.

I have previously commented that the Federation of Conservative Students were “in some ways, a mirror image of the far-left they claimed to despise.”  I added that the FCS “may have loathed the political views of the far-left, but they admired their methods.”
The snippet that I copy from The Times Diary from the period of [...]

George B.N. Ayittey, a native of Ghana and president of the Free Africa Foundation, has published at Foreign Policy a list of 23 of the world’s worst dictators. Although I’m not sure all of them warrant the label “dictator” (Ahmadinejad, for example, lacks the ultimate power of the Supreme Leader Khamenei), it’s a useful compilation [...]