http://www.spectator.co.uk/books/books-feature/8770721/a-deeply-stricken-country/

The above is a lamentably inept 'analysis' from Paul Johnson, demonstrating, if little else, that he knows next to nothing about Ireland mid-19th c. What's worse, he can't even be bothered double checking to his own satisfaction the state of knowledge on the most elementary statistic of them all, the numbers who died and emigrated.

He writes;

"Tim Pat Coogan’s The Famine...

It is then not a web
nor yet a gulf
stream of daily
sensory input shoots
between that shanty-dwelling
urchin

Combing garbage heaps
a dollar in scrap metal
will procure
the protein of a tin of beans
to the languid backswing
of the hacienda dweller

- nouveau conquistador -
who, just upwind
away from the stench,
curses his luck
that his elegantly struck
dimpled spheroid ...

Obviously its early days yet but it should be clear to everyone that the US is not the same player it has been traditionally now that we have an Obama administration. What exactly those differences are, whether they are strong enough to actually make a renewed peace process viable, the coming years will decide. Obama's decision, for instance, to make entreaties on the Saudi-owned al-Arabiya news channel to renew diplomatic relations with the Iranians has been viewed by the wider Arab and Muslim...

A friend of mine was recently assaulted by “the PC brigade” for disciplining his child in a parking lot. His four year old boy had been acting up all day and on the back of several warnings he decided to pick him up and deposit him unceremoniously in the front seat. Apart from eliciting several glares a woman approached him to tell him he was being “too aggressive” He later protested, quite reasonably, that as the child’s father he was entitled to raise him in the way that he believed was right...

The economic and political problems related to population growth are all interconnected of course and shouldn't be considered in unison. As the oil runs out and prices rocket inputs for large-scale mechanised farming will rise which will push up farmers production costs and raise the price of grain; wheat, corn and basic staples will rapidly become unaffordable for the billion or so people on this planet who are already regularly on the brink of starvation.

The same oil is being spewed...