It’s that time when everyone’s writing retrospectives of the dying year, and looking forward to the next one. What 2014 will mean for the Tories, why Labour had a good year in 2013, will Abbey Clancey run for office in the European elections, etc, etc. So I thought I’d join in. But I’m a boring…
Month: December 2013
Andrew Neil, climate troll: ‘Hey look, there’s ice at the South Pole’
[ooyala id=”83dDQ5ajrmcIjwCsHBN2UtdZqt4KzPYr&pbid” ] Andrew Neil, bless him. He is absolutely world-class at trolling Lefties, and I speak as a well-trolled Lefty. The dear chap has sent Twitter into one of its periodic paroxysms by tweeting a few hours ago: Climate scientists stuck in ice still insist sea ice is receding! — Andrew Neil (@afneil) December…
It’s hard work, hating Christmas
I’ve spent the past couple of decades building up a hard shell of anti-Christmas sentiment. I’ve been through all the stages – the “it’s not really a Christian festival you know” cod-historical argument; the “it’s all just a corporate consumerist charade” teenage-Marxist righteousness; the “we shouldn’t need arbitrary holidays to need a reason to be…
Whatever happened to Christmas songs?
I started thinking this earlier on, when the radio started blaring out something Christmassy – Stop the Cavalry, maybe, or Santa Baby, or I don’t know. It was a song from before I was born. And I thought, when was the last Christmas song released which everyone actually knows? I still vaguely think of Wham!’s…
The BBC putting Anjem Choudary on the Today programme isn’t ‘free speech’. It’s trolling
People get a bit confused about freedom of speech. They don’t always see the line between “being allowed to talk” and “other people having to listen”. It’s a conversation I have every so often in the comments here – the fact that you’re not allowed to say something on our website does not mean you’re…
Of course assisted suicide is a moral concern
Should people be allowed – or helped – to take their own life when it becomes unbearable due to terminal disease? And is the question a moral one? In the Supreme Court, yesterday, lawyers representing right-to-die campaigners suggested that it was not, at least as far as the court is concerned. “The question is not…
The big dog in robotics: Google buy Boston Dynamics
Interesting news in The New York Times this morning: Google has bought up the cutting-edge robotics firm, Boston Dynamics, for an unspecified sum (although, since even Snapchat thinks it’s worth more than $3 billion, presumably it’s quite a lot). The firm, a spin-off from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, is the one behind those YouTube videos…
Lie, and lie again: a parents’ guide to a child’s happiness at Christmas
Kids, if you’re reading your Mum and Dad’s newspaper, Father Christmas is definitely real. Nothing to worry about there. Now put the paper down! Go and play outside. Build a snowman or something. Now, parents. Lock the door: we may have a bit of a problem. Simon Tatton-Brown, a vicar in Wiltshire, seems to have…
Why it’s ‘Ukip’, not ‘UKIP’, and why I find that amusing
It’s one of the weirdest ongoing arguments that rages in the comments underneath Telegraph Blogs – more heated, at times, than whether or not Muslims are behind the global warming scam, or if the moderators are in the secret pay of Brussels. The argument is: is it Ukip, or UKIP? Underneath Ambrose’s piece published a…
Uruguay leads the way on cannabis regulation. Maybe one day, Britain will follow
Funnily enough, as Uruguay passed its historic legislation last night – becoming the first country in the world to make the production, sale and possession of cannabis legal, under a strict and sensible regulatory framework – I was at an event in the House of Commons, organised by some people who advised the Uruguayan government…
A small step for Stevenage, a giant leap for mankind
British universities and industries are at the cutting edge of a unified global space race Stevenage, we have a problem. And that problem is, it’s quite hard to take someone seriously when they say that Stevenage, the somewhat undistinguished Hertfordshire town between Letchworth and Welwyn Garden City, is going to be the next Cape Canaveral….
No, 100,000 Christians will not be martyred this year
A chilling blog post by my colleague Alan Johnson this morning documents the horror of religious violence against Christians: there have been brutal stories, recently, about attacks on ancient Christian populations, in Iraq, in Syria, in Pakistan. Unfortunately, Alan’s piece starts with a frequently repeated statistic which is, in fact, not true: “One hundred thousand…
Tom Chivers 