Get in touch with your inner racist!
When I lived in New York, there was a small shop across the street that was owned by a man from Afghanistan. I used to visit him in the days after September 11, and he had a bewildered, beleaguered look…
Happy July 4th!
As Americans celebrate their Independence Day tomorrow by grilling dead animals and hoisting flags, I have a proposal to make for the rest of the world: let’s declare our independence from America. So many people are doing it already –…
“The Muslims are breeding”
It’s sad that there’s a site called “Islamophobia Watch.” Not, as its critics would argue, because there’s no such thing as Islamophobia and it’s all just political correctness gone mad, but because it shows that every day, several times a…
Heal Thyself
If, like me, you’re a meat-eater, you NEED to watch the video over at The Heathlander. Personally I love a bacon sandwich. But I am becoming more and more incapable of reconciling that with the way animals are treated. I…
Reading Chomsky
When I first started reading Noam Chomsky’s work it was with a large amount of, dare I say it, shock and awe. Every few sentences I went scurrying off to the copious footnotes, unable to believe that the US really…
Who’s your audience?
I love watching Chris Rock. He’s one of the few stand-up comedians who is pretty much guaranteed to make me laugh every time I watch him. However, watching Chris Rock videos on YouTube recently proved to be a very different…
The crime of compassion
Sometimes I think I have become so cynical that I am no longer capable of feeling true outrage. I have come to expect fascism, brutality and heartlessness from my elected leaders as a matter of course. But every now and…
The waters are rising…….
Something strange is happening here. I lived in Britain for about 20 years and never heard much about flooding. There were occasional floods of low-lying areas, but mostly floods, like all other natural disasters, were something that happened in other…
Children as possessions
I was on the bus the other day when a young mother came on with a child in a pushchair. The child must have been 4 or 5 – he was almost bursting out of the chair, and his knees…