And so she is finally gone, turned into a handful of ashes and a puff of smoke into the Mortlake sky. As was the case with Osama Bin Laden there will be no gravestone around which worshippers will be able to congregate, or for dissenters to desecrate. That’s the end of Margaret Thatcher – the [...]

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One only has to scan the news papers or listen to comments about religion to see anti religion is now in style: not just of Catholics, of course, but hatred of all men of good will who follow traditional values. How dare they think that some things are actually right and some things are wrong [...]

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The BBC series Sherlock has hit the Philippines, and although I think the plots are stupid, the dialogue and characters are quirky enough to keep my interest. But as a doc, I got very annoyed with the Dr. Watson limp in story number one. Quick: What’s wrong with this picture? The answer is that he [...]

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Welcome to the First Virtual Church of Our Lord and Savior, Steve Jobs. As you enter the sanctuary, please do not make eye contact with anyone. Keep your eyes focused on the screen of the mobile device of your choice. We are relevant and practice diversity here, which is easy since no one will even [...]

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“A politician thinks of the next election. A statesman, of the next generation.”  James Freeman Clarke  I suppose we all flirt with stupidity once in a while. The relationship that we should have seen was doomed from the start. The career move than wasn’t right and was made for the wrong reasons. The intemperate response [...]

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In the book The Hobbit, Bilbo was given a short contract that included “funeral expenses” and a right to one fourteenth percentage of the treasure. Peter Jackson in his usual fashion did Tolkien one better, so Balin gives Bilbo a long intricate paper contract with a lot more details, written in a satire of legalese. [...]

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“You oughta get better locks around here if you don’t want people taking your private information, Mr. Squirl. It’s up to you to do something preventive….” “Mr. Mercer, I’m Jack Squirl, President of Data Miner Servicing, y’ know, ‘Servicing You With a Smile.’ Our security guard detained you one hour ago, and we are holding [...]

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It is the fearful, unthinking herd instinct and the forces that exploit it that are making us such a polarized nation. You don’t have to have a sick religion or be a right wing Republican to be delusional. Twitter is dripping with delusionalism in politics and atheism. And just try to convince me that Oswald [...]

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We read about one incident of a lunatic shooting people in a theater, a lunatic shooting people at a school, a lunatic crashing jetliners into skyscrapers. Then we conclude that all strangers are lunatics, too dangerous to connect with. So we stay alone, unconnected, and slowly we become a nation of benign lunatics.    I see [...]

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“On the 19th September 1946 Winston Churchill delivered a famous speech at Zurich University which proposed the formation of a united Europe. Prescient though Churchill was about the need for political unity to replace conflict in Europe, there was some ambivalence about the part that Britain was, in his view, to play in this development. [...]

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What does the UK Guardian asking for us to reconsider the crime of pedophilia, and the Life of Pi have in common? Making up pretty lies to confuse the reality of the crime. The Guardian insists that the crime of having sex with children isn’t bad and such impulses should just be accepted as part [...]

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In the early morning of Wednesday March 13th 1996 I was in a hotel bedroom in Houston, Texas. I had arrived the afternoon before from London and, as so often happens after a long flight with changing time zones, I had slept fitfully. At around 5:00am I was wide awake and put on the television [...]

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The deepest schism in British politics at the moment is not between the governing Coalition and the official Opposition, the Labour Party, nor even between the occasionally warring Coalition partners (Conservatives and Liberal Democrats) themselves. It is within the Conservative Party itself where a large group of Members of Parliament, backed by much if not [...]

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From the Daily Mail in London: Sick children are being discharged from NHS hospitals to die at home or in hospices on controversial ‘death pathways’. Until now, end of life regime the Liverpool Care Pathway was thought to have involved only elderly and terminally-ill adults. But the Mail can reveal the practice of withdrawing food [...]

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BBG Watch Commentary After the American management of Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty (RFE/RL) headed by President and CEO Steven Korn fired without any warning dozens of Radio Liberty web editors and other journalists, cancelled their pro-human rights programs, and brought in a new team led by Masha Gessen to change programming philosophy and redesign the [...]

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The US Elections 2012 are a watershed. Despite the lesson of 2008 that pairing a mature experienced pragmatist at the top of the ticket with an extreme Rightest in the Veep spot won’t work the GOP did the same again. Admittedly this time the extreme Right Wing Vice Presidential candidate was a clever and articulate [...]

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I’ve no idea whether Conservative Chief Whip Andrew Mitchell actually called the policemen who got in his way “Plebs” or not – but it is the sort of thing that someone of his class and background might say – on a bad day. It is reported that the Etonians in the Bullingdon set at Oxford [...]

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Everything in the news seems to be hyperventillation about politics.  What is worse, it seems to be about trivia that have little or nothing to do with the world wide economic problems, or about trying to fix them. (e.g. a friend on facebook dissing Ryan’s marathon speed instead of the details of his budget). So [...]

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“So JFK is going to be the new president. Right? Not so fast. Some goober decides to drive up to the Kennedy compound with dynamite in his car….” I have a long memory, so I’m still unwilling to bet that Mitt Romney will win or keep the Republican nomination, much less the election. I know [...]

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Forget the soap opera about the coddled rich of Downton Abby. Move over reality shows like the Kardashians or Tots and Tiaras. If you want a slice of reality, you might want to check on the latest BBC miniseries on PBS: Call the Midwife. Call the Midwife is a moving and intimate insight into the [...]

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I’ve always been a little nervous of those elevators where you have to manually open the door. They creep me out. But, it was nearly one hundred degrees and Gramercy Typewriter was on four. In the end, I would take the elevator. And, I’d end up with a newly refurbished Olivetti Lettera 22. In this [...]

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This report from an Iranian blog on Global Voices, says they have such a chicken shortage the price of .chickens have soared. So someone decided to censor films and TV programs that show…chickens (!) Against a backdrop of lengthening food queues, Esmail Ahmadi-Moghaddam, the head of Iran’s law enforcement forces, has warned that films depicting [...]

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In Syria, the war is getting nasty. One recent massacre of women and children is being touted as the reason for someone (NATO? Turkey? The UN?) to step in and stop the killing. And news reports of the government bombing civilian areas make many shudder. StrategyPage points out that a lot of the massacres are [...]

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  Right Wing British Member of Parliamnt Douglas Carswell is a fervent patriot – but we all know what Dr Johnson said about patriotism! The problem with Mr Carswell’s “Doesn’t it feel great to be British?” in a recent Blog in response to the Queen’s Jubilee is not the statement in itself but the extension that [...]

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Okay, parents. Your 13 year old makes a decision that he wants to do something that has a 2 percent chance to be fatal. Do you 1) Forbid him to do it. 2) Try to talk him out of this but if he refuses to listen to your concerns, allow him to do it anyway [...]

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Should folks name a high school after a man who supported Eugenics? No, say the Canadian Metis blogger, ex-politician, and all around troublemaker Mrs. Gay Caswell on her blog. So who is she complaining about now? A Canadian bigshot who implemented socialized medicine in that country. Complains Mrs C: He followed the Regina Manifesto, a [...]

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Even in these extraordinary economic, social and political times around the world the core essence of an advanced Nation’s status is rarely endangered. This is not, however, the case with the United Kingdom. More by accident than design the Union is threatened for the first time in generations at the same time that our membership [...]

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UK economy shrank .2 percent in the first quarter as per the number released by the Office of National Statistics (ONS). It is against consensus estimate of 0.1% growth and follows a negative growth of .3% in the final quarter of 2011. Latest figure is based on about 40% of the information it will be [...]

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Autism campaigners around the world will be using the power of twitter in support of the 5th annual United Nations World Autism Awareness Day on Monday 2nd April this year. World Autism Awareness Day was launched by the United Nations General Assembly – the event was tabled by the State of Qatar in 2008. A [...]

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The calamity of BP’s Deepwater Horizon disaster continues to put corporate reputation as a subject very much in the spotlight and, hardly surprisingly, many commentators contrast BP’s past attempts to claim the moral highground on environmental matters with the stark reality of what happened in the Gulf of Mexico. The idea that corporations should be [...]

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