If you take the lower 50 percent of the American population - the base of the earnings pyramid if you like - they earn 2.5 percent of the national income. Half the population: 2.5 percent of the total national income. Take the forty percent of the population that sit above that, and their share of t...

I'll just put a follow up to yesterday's post in first, in that the Labour minister replying to Jeremy Corbyn in the House, when the latter was making just the compliant I'd made about the lumping in of Palestine Action in with those other groups, made exactly my point. He said there was "prece...

It might be assumed that some number amongst the 650 UK MPs may be concerned about the home secretary Yvette Cooper's decision to proscribe the affirmative action group Palestine Action as a terrorist group, membership or promotion of which can land you with up to 14 years in prison (and that's even...

James O'brien was yesterday trying to make sense of why disability claims have gone up by forty percent in the UK since the end of the pandemic. He tentatively suggested that "perhaps the virus might have had something to do with it," and then immediately said with scorn in his voice, &quo...

(Continued from the above post, and if you haven't read that one I urge you to do so - it contains important background to the following report without which you might struggle as I do, to give it credence, so unbelievable is its content.) First thing I'd say is I really struggle to think I'll have ...

Haaretz , founded in 1918, is Israel's oldest running newspaper. It is described by Wikipedia as "Israel's newspaper of record," meaning that it is the newspaper with the biggest circulation who's news gathering is considered "authoritative and independent." It, says Wikipedia, ...

Let's have a look. Time must be given for broadcasters to claim biological men are women, says broadcasting regulator Ofcom. Fair do's. The moon might be made of green cheese, but either way claiming it or otherwise won't make it so. My belief is that when you have an essentially infinite gender lis...

:lol: My insides are trying to grind it as I speak Sarge! By the time I realised the enormity of my (yes - very expensive) mistake I was eating it. But I learned from it, and I won't make that mistake again. Old Chinese proverb; the bitterness of low quality remains long after the sweetness of (rela...

It's a thin Sunday for news when the most eye catching headline across the press is Werewolf Spotted in Bridlington , but there you have it. Entirely predictable was the pompous outrage at the BBC for its partial broadcast of the Northern Ireland rap band Kneecap set from Glastonbury. Less so was th...

:lol: Ever find yourself in Cornwall Sarge and it'd be my pleasure. Just as a follow-up however, I followed my own recipe earlier on today and it was a disaster ! Hasten to add, it wasn't the technique rather than the quality of the steak. I compromised and paid the price. Damn it - I could see it w...

Here's a method I did the other day, really simple, that produced one of the best steaks I have ever eaten. Good (and I mean really good) steak is essential. Like prime Aberdeen Angus, center cut from the fillet (not the tail end or the fat end with that extra useless bit stuck on the side). Put it ...

Norwegian tourist Mads Mikellsen was detained by border officials for five hours when he attempted to enter the USA on holiday, before being refused entry and returned home. His sin it appears, was that the immigration official processing him spotted a meme on his phone depicting J D Vance as a baby...

Post 2. It was entertaining to see past footage of Home Secretary Yvette Cooper standing in the House of Commons, wearing the rosettes and colours of the suffragette movement (it was an anniversary of their successful campaign to achieve sufferage for women or something), an activist group far more ...

Let's just have a brief look at post war Iranian history. In 1953 a coup d'etat organised by the CIA and MI6, oversaw the ousting of the parliamentary Prime Minister Mohammad Mosaddegh, who had been unwise enough to agitate for nationalisation of the Anglo-Iranian Oil Company (later to be renamed BP...

Yesterday James O'brien quoted a line from Orwell's 1984 about how the Party's final and most essential command was that you reject the evidence of your eyes and ears. It was a very apt quotation for the current situation we face in respect of Gaza, when we are told that Israel are not committing ge...

Such is the bizarre, topsy-turvey nature of the world we live in today, that it becomes almost impossible to report on it, let alone actually make sense of what is going on. But in the belief that this is entirely deliberate, that the people with their hands on the wheel really don't want us to get ...

I took a drive with my wife yesterday morning, during the course of which I said to her that anyone who thought that Israel had gone to all the trouble it had simply in order to watch the entire war fizzle out following a few desultory strikes, largely ineffectual, on Iranian nuclear enrichment site...

L'E'tat, c'est moi! Translated as 'I am the state!', this was the absolutist attitude of Louis XIV, in which he meant, "There's me and there's God....and there's no other." When Donald Trump responded to that question on Airforce 1, about what Tulsi Gabbard had said in her report on the st...

Right. Continuing from above, it seems that Fordo has been struck, along with a number of other sites involved in the Iranian nuclear program. Needless to say, Donald Trump is crowing about the "spectacular military success" of the mission and the Iranians are playing it down as minor dama...

If Colonel Douglas Macgregor, ex American serviceman and advisor to the US government has any kind of handle on things, then the decision join Israel in its war on Iran has already been made. By his reckoning the two week window that Donald Trump has allowed, purportedly to give time for diplomatic ...