The security guy at Bratislava airport looked at my passport. "New". he said to his colleague. Then spent five minutes examining it in minute detail with two magnifying devices before handing it back. "Is there a problem?', I said. "No, no" he said. "Very nice passsport". What the fuck? Perhaps he hadn't seen one of the fairly new microchipped passports or maybe he was just taking the piss?
Maybe Britain needs a First Amendment, too
What is going on? How did we arrive at a situation where giving offence is automatically sackable or worse? Surely the freedom to disagree with a comment or to ignore it is enough. When it is suggested that certain points of view or ways of expressing them might be or should be illegal – or that intolerance should not be tolerated, to purloin the common malapropism – a notion that should chill anyone who holds the principles of liberal democracy dear is given life: the notion of thought crime. Freedom of speech was hard-won in the West; the freedom only to speak inoffensively is no freedom at all...
Furthermore, the giving of offence need not be intentional, nor the words (or cartoons) themselves possessed of the propensity to give it in order for it to be taken. Never mind the freedom to speak offensively: people have been invited to believe there is such a thing as the right not to be offended. Never mind that ‘incitement to hatred’ is a grey, disputable thing, and a different thing to incitement to violence, which was already a criminal offence. Never mind that most ideas are capable of giving offence, and that Socrates, Galileo and Darwin were all considered beyond the pale in their time. And never mind that in the marketplace of ideas, ‘hate speech’ can be challenged, debated or ignored. What we now have is moderated free speech at best.
Bad news for UKuncut and the marchers: the majority support the cuts.
The Labour party's most senior figures, in defiance of their education and intelligence, keep claiming that Osborne's actions are "driven by ideology, rather than necessity". This is absurd. Anyone who argues that rapidly addressing the fiscal catastrophe Labour left behind is anything other than absolutely crucial either knows nothing about global bond markets, or is so blindly ambitious, so determined to close their eyes to the facts, as to be unfit for public office...The UK's fiscal crisis is of monumental historic importance...What is in the balance...is the prosperity of the British people for at least the next few decades and our status as a top-ranking nation.
Over the last 12 months, then, this country's "on-balance-sheet" liabilities have risen by £147bn. That's roughly what we spent on the NHS and defence combined in 2010 – and that was merely, during this last year of "austerity", the incremental increase in what Britain has put "on tick"....What matters to the finances of any household is the size of the outstanding mortgage, the on-going costs of financing that mortgage, and the prospects of paying it off. Only an economically illiterate fool would claim the family finances will soon be "under-control" because sacrifices will be made and lifestyles reined-in to such an extent that, hopefully, if everything goes to plan, having re-mortgaged every year between now and 2015, that family will then enjoy a single year in which it won't need to re-mortgage.
I won't be around "in decades" so I can't afford to wait until things improve. Leaving the UK looks like a more attractive prospect every day.
Like other eight-year-old girls, Britney Campbell loves dancing to Lady GaGa, is fond of fashion and enjoys putting on make-up But Britney's beauty regime goes way beyond playing with Mummy's lippy. Once every three months, Britney climbs on a beautician's table and watches as mum Kerry prepares needles of Botox and fillers to be injected into her face.
Beautician Kerry, 34, from Birmingham, buys the substances online and injects them into her daughter's forehead, lips and around her eyes.The beauty-pageant obsessed single mum also takes her to have her body waxed, in a bizarre bid to stop her growing hair when she eventually hits puberty.
Kerry says these shocking and potentially dangerous treatments will guarantee Britney becomes famous as a teenager.Famous as a teenager?
Ours is not the first age when the public has been constantly urged to cut back on the demon drink. But never before has the campaign for public abstinence taken such an elitist and morally vacuous form...
Current responsible-drinking policy is not concerned with self-control, but with official control of people’s behaviour. Public-health officials seem to recognise no limits to their interventions, and indeed I have heard discussions at alcohol-policy conferences about how they might close down drinks-related Facebook groups or prevent parents from leaving their beer in the garage.
As Japan struggles with damaged nuclear reactors, the German government has announced that some nuclear power plants in Germany will be taken offline. In her policy speech last week, Chancellor Angela Merkel reiterated that the German nuclear power plants were among the world's safest. However, events in Japan had created a new situation in which the seemingly impossible had become possible. It was now necessary, Merkel said, to suspend for three months a previously announced policy to extend the life of some of these power stations.Yep. Earthquake and tsunami in a country sitting on the worlds greatest fault line leads to a land-locked, earthquake free country in central Europe reconsidering its nuclear policy. Nuts.
S&M can be criminal even if it’s consensual, a Brooklyn judge said today during the arraignment of a self-described Craigslist sex-slave master.Erm, no, that's not what the judge said. He said that just because someone agreed to indulge in sado-masochistic activities doesn't mean that nothing that follows can be considered criminal. It's no different from the law regarding "normal" sexual activity. It can start off consensual but become criminal.
