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‘Don’t worry, everyone, we’re not cancelling Christmas!’ That’s the message from IPPR’s Rick Muir after some accounts were made public of the think tank’s upcoming report, to which I responded in this post on Thursday last week. Muir responds with an article in today’s Guardian (some pre-publish damage control).

And it’s all about Google. After Apple released the revolutionary iPhone earlier this year, there have been rumours that Google would release a phone too, dubbed the gPhone. Well, the project announced today by Google – called Android – is much more exciting than that, and means most mobile phones ...

As part of the KLPZ Morning show today, I produced a segment which explored the results of placing various items in a microwave oven to see what would happen. Call it ‘practical science’, live on the radio. I was outside the studio with a cameraman and a microphone, and during ...

I had the pleasure of seeing the Blind Boys of Alabama at the Grand Opera House last week, and what a show it was. The only negative point about the night was the rather odd Argentinian guitarist & Irish accordion player duo singing songs mostly in Spanish, prompting my rather ...

‘Dog the Bounty Hunter’ is no more. The show was shelved by the A&E network on Friday, which is something I feared would happen when I wrote this post on Thursday. The network “stopped short of saying” they’d cancelled the show, although I’ll tell you in a few minutes what ...

Andrew Tyler has a piece in today’s Guardian which suggests that veganism is the new vegetarianism. It seems that being a vegetarian in modern Western society has become so common that the moral case against eating animals must fall exclusively to the vegans. I’m with them on this, actually. I’ve ...

My article on the virtue of rational self-interest stirred up a bit of debate between one of our regular comment-leavers, Dave Powell, and I. Finishing up his contribution to the debate Dave left a link to an article by George Monbiot in which Monbiot has a little pop at libertarians ...

Around the web today: Lev Grossman lends Time Magazine’s coveted honour to the Apple iPhone as it’s branded the “Invention of the Year”. I agree: the iPhone is a smouldering jewel of capitalism, a white-hot fusion of technology, ease of use and style, in your pocket. William Crawley reports on ...

I’ve found myself defending Rudy Giuliani a lot lately. He’s a far cry from libertarian, but his bread is buttered on the right side: Rudy tends to be morally liberal and fiscally conservative in general. This time, he’s coming under fire for comments he made about ‘universal healthcare’, and before ...

Libertarians: don’t miss this. Drew Carey was a relatively quiet libertarian throughout most of his career as a comedian, TV host and actor… until recently. Drew has been contracted by the Reason Foundation for a series of documentary-style videos online, a project they’re calling Reason TV.

Let me be among the first to say that I’m sad about what the media and public will do to Dog the Bounty Hunter after the National Enquirer got hold of a recorded phone conversation he had with his son Tucker, in which he uses the word ‘nigger’ several times. ...

You may think it a ridiculous question. I do. The people who should celebrate religious festivals are the people who want to celebrate them. The people who should not celebrate religious festivals are people who do not want to celebrate them. We’re all individuals with different values, different religious beliefs, ...

We’ve all experienced those moments of being caught in conversation with people we don’t really know and can’t really be bothered with, but find ourselves bound to make small-talk with regardless to avoid being labelled an ignoramus. One of two points of conversation almost always come up: “So, what do ...

That’s what Brendan O’Neill suggests in Spiked Online: that British authorities and others are now regarding Halloween as an annoyance and even a threat. What’s gone so wrong with Halloween, and how is this playing out? O’Neill writes: “Police forces around Britain are supplying households with posters warning children not ...

I’m delighted to see this. Students from 110 universities around the United States are today protesting campus prohibitions on carrying firearms for their protection. This is overdue. When a school shooting happens, people wring their hands and wonder how tragedies, like the one at Virginia Tech, can be prevented. At ...

Black men can generally run faster than white men. Black men are also generally better boxers. Asians are generally more intelligent than whites. But white men are generally more intelligent than blacks. How many readers glazed over the first three claims only to find themselves jarred by the fourth? The ...

As the fires in California finally come under the control of exhausted firefighters and over half a million people begin to make their way back into their San Diego area homes, some Europeans seem to have developed a hate for Americans such that preempts any thoughts of support or empathy ...

I shit you not. The man in the picture is David Pratt, an American who moved to England and is finding life rather less free on the other side of the pond, where he’s been hoping to apply for citizenship. He bought the T-shirt in Venice, California, where such shirts ...

This is about as good as it gets for a conservative presidential candidate pledging to be as tough on national crime as he was tough on New York crime as mayor. And before he was mayor of New York? He was prosecuting the mob. And they didn’t like that: “The ...

DUMBLEDORE IS GAY! Now, there’s a headline that never quite made it into the Daily Prophet. But, JK Rowling, author of the Harry Potter books, made the announcement recently at a gathering in Carnegie Hall, New York.