Bushfires

Indigenous intervention, doing good and racism

Well, Brendan O'Neill is still a Marxist, even if the rest of Spiked have abandoned ship

Revolution
Since some of the discussion on Legal Eagle’s ‘Eating Greens‘ post revolved around China, I thought this image was apposite.

Eating greens
Okay, I’m probably going to get in trouble for putting my oar in here. But I’m cranky about this suggestion by Lord Stern that we should all go vegetarian to stop global warming. Ken Neilsen has already done a good post at the Cat on how climate change politics seems to cause some people’s brains to fall out of their ears. I noted somewhat maliciously that Al Gore hedged a

The Myth of Violence
… Or, as John Humphries often says, don’t be scared. Not everything Steven Pinker says in this is right, but most of it is, and it’s a salutary reminder of the gifts bestowed by science, technology, markets and the old trifecta of ‘peace, order and good government.’ More reasons why this little black duck is an unashamed Whig… It’s just under 20 mins long, so won’t take up too much of your time.

Have a go hair-o
London mayor Boris Johnson has rescued a woman who was being attacked by an armed group of young girls, chasing them down the road on his bicycle. Franny Armstrong called for help as she was surrounded and pushed by the girls, one of whom had an iron bar, in Camden, north London, on Monday night. The mayor, who was cycling past, stopped and chased the girls down the street, calling them: “Oiks”. Ms Armstrong said: “He was my knight on a shining bicycle.”&

Moral panic? What moral panic?
Being of a libertarian cast of mind, I’ve often been of the view that all the campaigns about smoking, drugs and obesity are more than a little overdone. It’s not that I think these things are unhealthy — they plainly are. It’s more that I suspect the moral panic is made worse not because we are genuinely concerned about our fellow citizens, but rather because we are worried that our fellow citizens will cost us a motza in the future. This is because most countries (even the US) have partly or wholly socialized/public medicine, especially for the elderly. Large scale state interventions are costly; if something comes along to drive up those costs in unpredi