How shocking, but it looks like austerity isn’t working.

Standard and Poors have downgraded Spanish debt, from the fairly rubbish A to the kind of credit rating you or I would get if we tried to auction off our own debt: BBB+. For the Eurozone’s fourth largest economy to be just a smidgen above junk is seriously bad news for austerity fans everywhere.

Spain elected a centre-right government last November. Their message was the typical austerity one, but in a country with unemployment nudging 25% and an economy going backwards, it’s hard to see what austerity is going to achieve other than ever-decreasing circles of recession. Sadly the only more lacking than their policy ideas is their political courage.

Penn & Teller: The Bible is Bullshit

This is a great vid discussing some the veracity of Bible stories.

House of Lords reform: putting the cart before the horse

The Tories are revolting, but the Lib Dems are determined: The House of Lords needs reform.

Tony Blair started this ball rolling with a clunky half-hearted overhaul of the old peers, whittling their number down to 92 and filling the House with various appointees. This was a scruffy change, lots of muddy compromises, little coherence and no obvious objective beyond reform for reform’s sake.

Who gets to decide who gets what?

Living in Spain I am often challenged to return the tiny city-state of Gibraltar back to my Spanish colleagues. Of course this is something I am unable to do because, despite being English, I am not allowed to give away British territory to people who ask for it.

If I respond suggesting Spain might like to consider returning their Moroccan enclaves (Ceuta and Melilla), or maybe even the Canary Islands, the volcanic archipelago off the coast of Western Sahara, I am told that that’s different.

Hysterical nonsense and the NRA

I get that some people like guns. I get that some people need guns. I get that in a country like the US, where the criminal element are armed to the teeth, many people feel they need a gun for self-defence.

I get that.

What I don’t get is why they need to make their argument through hysterical untruths.

Ayn Rand on religion: why she doesn’t believe in God

I think Ayn Rand was very hit and miss with her ideas and philosophy, but her views on religion are one of the areas where I do agree:

“It gives man permission to function irrationally, to accept something above and outside of the power of reason, and superior to reason”

and

“It is a sign of a psychological weakness of a man who is afraid to stand on his own mind and his own responsibility”

Counterfactual nonsense: the President of the UK

I love political counterfactual history, or talking pointlessly about what might have been, as it’s also known.

As an anti-monarchist in principle (although less so in practice), I like to ponder what might have happened had a post-war Labour government legislated to end the monarchy on the death of the then King, George VI (the father of the current Queen).