Linky, Linky

Mineralia:

Why carbon offsetting is just as another money making scheme exploiting liberal guilt.

How does Bush define victory? It’s the oil, stupid:

Under the new American-drafted law, the Iraqi government will offer contractual concessions up to 30 years’ long to foreign companies, using a system known as a PSA (Production Sharing Agreement). In other words, American and other Western oil companies are being allowed to exploit Iraq’s current predicament and negotiate self-serving, one-sided oil PSA’s that will legally commit the entire country of Iraq for the next 30 years.

Animalia:

3 cat videos –

Hot cat on turtle action!

The cat that likes to floss

Just Say No! Cats and the demon weed

Vegetalia:

Professional chav Jade Goody’s racism gives a fading reality show a popularity injection and the nation something to talk about. (Pssst, don’t mention the war!)

These white women, behaving like bitchy schoolgirls in the playground, have reduced Ms Shetty to tears on several occasions, accusing her of wanting to be white, having facial stubble, being “a dog”, making their skin crawl, touching their food (“you don’t know where those hands have been”), and have signally failed to get her name right, calling her “the Indian” at one point.

They might not have been quite as motivated by group tyranny as Orwell described – that “hideous ecstasy of fear and vindictiveness, a desire to kill, to torture . . . that seemed to flow through the whole group of people like an electric current” – but there seems no doubt that their pack behaviour was offensive to Ms Shetty and damaging to our desire to be seen as a tolerant nation. Remember the message: without intellect we are lost. Clips of those lumpen women are being broadcast round the world as typically British, voicing British sentiments; by default we are all cast in the same mould of molten ignorance; all reduced to the racist drone of a thousand pub conversations.

Marginalia:

Madison Guy has links to some of the best street fashion photoblogs on the web, courtesy Avedon’s comments section.

James Wolcott asks why are are British sex scandals so much more interesting than American ones? Short answer, for our politicians the illicitness is 75% of the fun and the danger of being caught adds more spice. American politicians do it from a feeling of entitlement rather than in the spirit of titillating adventure, so it’s more about the greedy consumption of a ‘luxury’ sexual product like high-class call-girls (or rough trade or kids as the case may be) than the eroticism and thrill of the chase. Though the erotic aspect falls down somewhat in light of the four-year liaison between former PM John Major and ex-health Minister Edwina Currie – “By the way, Edwina, that was a not inconsiderably satisfying orgasm”. Ewww.

Resolution? What New Year’s resolution? For your sweet tooth, here’s Fanny, a French patisserie chef who blogs in English at Foodbeam.

Read the recipes and patisserie reviews, drool over the pictures, and get baking. I made her Petits carrés au caramel et au chocolat, known to us commoners asmillionaires shortbread, last weekend using white chocolate ( because that’s what we had) and it was very, very rich and absolutely delicious.

Read more UK, Politics, Oil,IraqCats, Cake,Big Brother, Fashion,. Sex scandals.