by Harry on January 12, 2007
I see, via Chris Brooke, that those of you who live in the South East of England (and many of you who don’t, but live in bits of the Midlands that have been desginated as part of the South East) are now represented by an “Independent” MEP, which must be a bit of a shock. The question is, which is worse?
1) having an MEP who is a member of UKIP
or
2) having an MEP about whom rumours that he has joined the BNP are suffiicently believable that he has to deny them in a stop press on his website?
BTW, his biography is well worth a read; I was especially glad to see that he regarded Jeremy Thorpe was an acceptable leader for one of his previous parties. No playing of the pink oboe in the BNP, I’d hope. Commiserations to the lot of you. (Creepy link for Shane Warne fans
)
Update: I don’t know why I’m even more interested in this than Chris Brooke, but there you go. The delighful Mr. Mote is quoted in this article as saying:
The formation of a genuine centre-right multinational group in the European Parliament is long overdue. So is the need for the clear expression of the views held by millions of European Union citizens who profoundly disagree with the federalists and their vocal left-wing
Le Pen and Mussolini are on the center-right?
by Belle Waring on January 12, 2007
Henry’s post below reminds me of one of the 50,000 completely ridiculous things that have happened to my sister in her day. She went to a Christian day camp in Sewanee one summer when she was about 11. They all set out for an overnight camp-out, and decided upon a meadow of tall grass. The camp’s faithful golden retriever promptly got bitten by a copperhead. Now, for the benefit of our European readers, I will disclose some wisdom from the South, and that is, where there’s one copperhead, there’s another. The only solutions are either to get the hell away, or, if it’s your own yard you’re talking about, stalk around nervously with a gun until you’ve shot both of them. (I did once watch my mom chop the head off a snake with a hoe and some vigorous action, but that was only a rat-snake. It had just swallowed “Quing-Quack”, my newborn duckling friend, who unfortunately did not survive. The life of a hippie farm is not necessarily a placid one.) [click to continue…]
by Henry Farrell on January 12, 2007
“Scott”:http://www.insidehighered.com/views/2007/01/10/mclemee has an interesting new column up at _Inside Higher Ed_ suggesting (not entirely tongue in cheek) that George W. Bush may qualify as being a great man under G.W.F. Hegel’s definition of what a great man (sexism direct from the original source) is [click to continue…]
by Henry Farrell on January 12, 2007
I flew into Prague a couple of days ago; before boarding my flight, I spent a little time in the Dulles Borders browsing. I was a bit surprised to see a big display in the impulse buy area beside the cash register for “Snakes on a Plane.” Seems like a fairly odd marketing strategy to me – I don’t imagine that it’s likely to be the kind of movie that many people would want to watch on a plane, or even buy on the spur of the moment just before getting on a plane. The fun of watching people trying to deal with poisonous snakes in a confined space would pall quite quickly, I imagine, if you were in that confined space while watching it. I asked the asst. manager at the register how many he’d sold; he said none so far, but it was the first day it was on display. Not that I have any great wisdom to impart on this or anything, but just thought it was a little odd.