Our local MP is an excellent constituency MP but…

...a poitician for all that.  If it didn't mean I'd also be voting for Cameron and Osborne I'd vote for him.  But he's also a supporter of fracking.  I went to see him and pointed out that the only...

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Keynes at Bretton woods (3)

The way in which the three institutions were set up increased even further the American grip, or perhaps more importantly the potential American grip, over the world economy.  The value of the dollar was set at 1/35th of an...

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Keynes at Bretton Woods (2)

Keynes’s scheme was in fact applying  two classic principles of banking to the international scene.  One was that  the overall  credit and debit  accounts must be in balance.  What has been deposited with the bank must equal the sum...

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It was the Nazis wot did it.

 It was, of course , unimagineably terrible and it is fitting that we have  a Holocaust Memorial Day lest we forget it.  Yet I’m wondering, too, whether mixed in with it all there isn’t something of that commonest of...

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Secular rationalists are always debunking religious myths but invariably…

Secular rationalists are always trying to debunk religious myths but invariably substitute even more fantastic ones of their own.  Did you ever anything so grandiosely crackers as Marx’s dialectical materialism?  And if you read  The Origin of Species  you...

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Keynes at Bretton Woods (i)

The economic shape of the modern world was decided at a meeting of  British and American treasury officials, at a conference in a small   American town in New Hampshire, called Bretton Woods, in 1944.  Out of this meeting were...

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I am so disappointed in the Green Party

For a long time scientists have been telling us that so long as we kept average rise in global temperature below 2C, which might happen if carbon in the atmosphere rose to 450 parts per million, then there would...

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Anybody who knows anything about adolescent males knows…

 Anybody who knows anything about adolescent  human males knows that the very last way to stop young Muslims going to Syria is to tell imams to lecture them even more sternly.  These people  are above all  romantics.  The right...

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Galileo (6) The Importance of music in the experiments with free fall.

We have little direct evidence of what Galileo’s feelings were about his experiments because, unlike Darwin, he has left us no autobiography, nor, as in the case of Newton, a hoard of secret documents recording his inmost thoughts only...

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The first new light of the year…

7 a.m.  The first new light of the year stealing into the day as softly and gently as - but what could be softer and gentler and more beautiful than light? 

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