I'm one of those foreigners Farage wanted out of here. I haven't got around to getting my British citizenship for the simple reason that for most of my 27 years here I haven't had the thousand pounds plus for the fee and there was little benefit for me in getting a British passport.The only thing I cannot do here is vote in the general election and ( Read more... )

Maybe I should start reading the Venezuelan news. A couple of our TV channels stream on the internet but I find more or less unbearable to watch them -the official channel is boring and shouty, the opposition channels are garish, cheap and shouty. The press is a strange thing, again very divided and the reporting on pretty much anything always has ( Read more... )

It was kind of none of my business and I didn't have a position about it but I had been watching the process of the Indy referendum in Scotland with interest. It could have had lots of repercussions down here and in Europe at large (the Catalans, the Basque and a number of other nationalities/national groups subsumed into a larger country were ( Read more... )

This is from memory so probably not verbatim ( Read more... )

A reflection by matociquala, the fantastically talented SF writer Elizabeth Bear, after the shootings by that guy who, if he couldn't have the girls, he would just kill them ( Read more... )

Watching the news. One of the two items dominating the news is a world crisis that seems like it could just possibly trigger a third world war. The other one is a celebrity's murder trial, with what seems to me like large portions of misogyny and other unpleasant reflections on our media culture (which seems to have more sympathy for the accused ( Read more... )

"Government Decides More Unhappy People Will Help"

from the Daily Mash, nicked from asw909

The whole incredible, sordid, amazing story of the Murdoch newspapers here in the UK keeps getting bigger and wider, like a cancer or an oil slick. It has the fascination of a snake, a car crash, a major disaster taking place in slow motion right in front of our eyes... it is difficult to imagine how it could get worse and yet...

 Watching the Prez and the Prime Minister frying hamburgers for veteran soldiers on BBC News. I suppose this is the 21st century's equivalent of hugging babies ( Read more... )

Watching 'Russia Today' on the box and it is as if the old Cold War had never ended. Or perhaps it never did end. A feature on the dire state of the US economy and how debt is out of control and the floor is about to fall under them. Another one about how the Lybian situation is a war by proxy between the USA and China, for control of resources and ( Read more... )