This isn't Black Death
Whoa! Come off it, folks! This isn't the Black Death, says Boris Johnson. Pinch yourself. Are you still there? Got a pulse? Thought so. Look out of the window. Those aren't zombies. They are men and women engaged in the normal business of getting and spending. This isn't some disaster movie about a virus from Mars. It's a recession, a downturn, a correction of a kind that is indispensable to any kind of human activity, and it does not require that we all go around under a special kind of credit-crunch pall. It does not mean we have to cancel all parties and talk in hushed credit-crunch tones. It doesn't mean we have to line our rooms with newspaper, get in the foetal position and live on tins: in fact, it means the opposite. Boris Johnson Daily Telegraph
Full article: Eat, spend and be merry - this is not the end of the world 
The economy: a trillion reasons to be gloomy
We're still encouraging debt
A couple of years ago I argued that debt was good for you, writes Mary Dejevsky. The point was not to recommend over-extension on the credit front, but to argue that all the incentives pointed in one direction, and one alone. They benefited borrowers at the expense of savers. Why save up for a house, holiday, umpteenth pair of shoes, if you could buy at once, confident that the same item would soon cost more - and, in the case of a house, that it would probably make you more money over the same time-scale than most people could ever earn from work. The truth was that low interest rates and lax lending policies together encouraged lifestyles that were otherwise unaffordable. Rather than using the present crisis to drive this point home, however, the Government is now bailing out the lavish spenders. Mary Dejevsky The Independent
Full article: The rush to rescue those in debt is cruel on us savers
Our coarse Auntie
The Jonathan Ross/Russell Brand incident says a lot about the recent histories of Radios 1 and 2. Too much of the stations' public profile is now bound up with unpleasant stuff: the oafish Chris Moyles popularising the pejorative use of the word "gay" and an inexplicable vendetta against a member of Girls Aloud, or Brand and Ross doing what they did 10 days ago. Elsewhere, I don't understand why Jamie Oliver apparently decided his mission to save Rotherham from bad food meant he suddenly had to start liberally using the F-word, or why BBC1's Traffic Cops is such a swear-fest; it bothers me that so much TV - from Spa of Embarrassing Illnesses, through the X Factor and on to Channel Five's surreally sadistic Unbreakable - depends on humiliation and borderline misanthropy. John Harris The Guardian
Full article: Our idiotic, coarse Auntie
People: The girl behind the Brand/Ross row
Why Americans are stupid
Ignorant politicians are elected by ignorant people, writes George Monbiot. US education, like the US health system, is notorious for its failures. In the most powerful nation on earth, one adult in five believes the sun revolves round the earth; two-thirds of young adults are unable to find Iraq on a map. This tragedy has been assisted by the American fetishisation of self-education. Though he greatly regretted his lack of formal teaching, Abraham Lincoln's career is repeatedly cited as evidence that good education, provided by the state, is unnecessary: all that is required to succeed is determination and rugged individualism. This might have served people well when genuine self-education movements, like the one built around the Little Blue Books in the first half of the 20th century, were in vogue. In the age of infotainment, it is a recipe for confusion. George Monbiot The Guardian
Full article: How these gibbering numbskulls came to dominate Washington
Republicans fawn over torture
So what will be left of the Republican Party after next week's US election? The answer lies in the sands of Florida, where the sunshine-state Republicans have nominated an unrepentant torturer as their candidate for Congress, writes Johann Hari. Colonel Allen West has even taken to joking about the torture he carried out in Iraq, gaining applause for telling Republican audiences: "It wasn't torture. Seeing Rosie O'Donnell naked would be torture." West's "toughness" is fawned over; one leading conservative magazine has even named him its Man of the Year. And Sarah Palin, the Party's darling, mocks Barack Obama's opposition to torture. Palin is fond of saying that she "won't blink when it comes to terror", but if you don't blink, your corneas dry out, and you go blind. Johann Hari The Independent
Full article: The Republicans' dirty secret... torture
US Election: Obama lead slips as McCain goes on the attack
The Torturer's tale: Why Tony Lagouranis stopped torturing Iraqis
In Brief
How to tame house prices
Houses are a huge investment for most of us - yet are terribly difficult to trade. Robert Shiller, a Yale economist, argues that creating derivatives markets in house prices would help to tame the cycle of boom and bust. Sceptical investors could express that view in more immediate ways than selling their own homes. Housebuilders would note the expected price declines signalled by the market, and scale back their building activities. Oliver Kamm The Times
Full article: Plunging markets are far from irrational
Blofeld
The Conservative Party has, however, already taken millions of pounds from a man who refuses to say whether he is resident and pays tax in this country. It is surely only a coincidence that some around David Cameron jokingly refer to Lord Ashcroft as "Blofeld". Rachel Sylvester The Times
After Corfu, the spotlight turns on Belize
Aid for India
India has just sent a rocket to the moon, part of a billion dollar space programme. Earlier this year, the Indian conglomerate Tata bought Land Rover and Jaguar for £1.15bn. Indian steel magnate Lakshmi Mittal is said to be worth $45bn and is one of London's most famous 'nondoms'. So why did Gordon Brown commit £825m in foreign aid to India at a time when that country is buying up British firms and sending rockets into space? Richard Littlejohn Daily Mail
Full article: India does not need our aid, we do ...
Bad heroes
I think Ulrika Meinhof [of the Baader Meinhof gang] probably possessed qualities of idealism, resilience and determination. Just like Bobby Sands, just like Che Guevara. It should remind us that, with nothing certain and a world recession on the way, this is a bad time to be lauding bad heroes. David Aaronovitch The Times
Full article: This is no time for heroes with bad causes
Baader Meinhof film divides Germany
Minnesota's lewd Senator?
Improbably, a Democrat is also a serious contender for the Senate race in Minnesota, despite the fact that the candidate, Al Franken, is better known as a comedian, and not one of your kinder, gentler comedians either. Franken is a veteran of Saturday Night Live and, among other things, the author of an infamous article on virtual sex, published in Playboy, about which not everybody got the joke. Anne Applebaum Daily Telegraph
Americans: Maddow about the girl
Full article: Whoever wins, the Democrats will rule
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