Bart gets a facelift
Seen in an Arles street yesterday. With “No More War” scrawled on his forehead. Wonder what Homer would think.
Quote of the Day
”In this world of sin and sorrow there is always something to be thankful for; as for me, I rejoice that I am not a Republican.”
H.L. Mencken
Musical alternative to the morning’s radio news
The Grateful Dead | He’s Gone
Terrific. As you will have gathered I was a Deadhead. Still am, really.
Long Read of the Day
Blood and soil rhetoric in Buckingham by Andrew Brown
A really sobering essay. Kudos to Andrew for attending the gruesome event. He’s a very good journalist, and has been for many years. His brief preface gives you an idea of what it took out of him.
It’s taken me some time to write up the speech that Harrison Pitt, Rupert Lowe’s ideologue in Restore, gave to the Heterodox Sociology conference at the University of Buckingham in July. The delay is unprofessional, but I was too shocked to engage with it for a long time.
Pitt is described in the blurb to his policy paper as a “writer and academic”, without any academic affiliation listed. He is the author of Restore’s policy on mass deportations. He wants to abolish the asylum system and to “detain and deport every single person who has broken illegally into our national home”. Mass deportation is not a figure of speech here. He wants to deport nearly 2m people, who he hopes to get rid of in three years: 150,000 a year are to be forcibly deported, and three times as many would find life had been made so miserable that they would leave of their own fee will. All this is to be paid for by “taxes on remittance payments and fixed penalty notices”…
Read on. If you needed an antidote to these two parties (Restore and Reform) in the next UK general election, then this would be hard to beat.
Paul Brown RIP
Paul Brown, one of the great journalists of our era, has passed away at the age of 82. In a way, he was the man who invented environmental journalism, and he was the Guardian’s Environment correspondent for more years than I can remember. I got to know him when he came (with another great journalist, Frank McDonald of the Irish Times) on the Wolfson Press Fellowship programme that I’ve been running since 1996. They were an unforgettable pairing, who in addition to producing terrific reports (Paul on “The Voodoo Economics of Nuclear Power”, and Frank on the crazed ‘Celtic Tiger’ phase of Ireland’s path to perdition) managed to visit and assess every pub in Cambridge and its environs.
Appropriately, the Guardian has a good obit obituary of Paul. And our mutual friend, Joe Smith, has published a lovely memoir of him.
May he rest in peace.
Feedback
The other day I wondered if a claim I’d read that the average lifespan of a Russian soldier in Ukraine was 35 minutes could be true. Charles Arthur pointed me at an edition of the BBC radio programme More or Less in which Tim Harford takes these kind of claims apart. He also sent a link to the relevant discussion. But when I click on it, this is the result:
Bah!
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