I've spent a week slaughtering daddy longlegs

I have an aversion to spiders, moths, wasps, cockroaches and stag-beetles. Like most people, I'm generally fine with bumblebees, ladybirds and "cute" beetles - e.g. green, armour-plated shield bugs. If it looks pretty or amusing, I can live with it. I'm not fond of flies, but I don't have any fear of them - they're just annoying. But when it comes to daddy longlegs, I'm a fullblown phobic - these ugly, gangly, amorphous, pointless bastards induce panic-attacks. Once I'm aware there's one in the room, I have to leave or kill it...

It's cold - but I don't want to be somewhere warmer. Where I'd like to be is Northern Norway...

That's the Arctic Cathedral in Tromsø, which is inside the Arctic Circle. I've...

Next, a measured, sensible and unbiased look at the week's main news - with just a splash of sarcasm

Now there's a slogan I can really get behind! If that was the Freudian Slip of the Week, this was the Oxymoron of the Week:

"Let's leave my despicability to one side..." Jacob Rees-Mogg meets a moron

One of the outstanding features of modern politics...

Left-wing Newsweek "journalist" Kurt Eichenwald has breakdown live on air - why mordern lefties can't bear defeat

Quick, nurse - the screens!...

Former Director-General Mark Thompson wants more Tories in the BBC? Here's a word-association test to identify the right applicants.

Mark Thompson recently made the following statement: “It helps to have Conservatives, people who tend to think from a perspective that goes with the Right rather than the Left, across your newsroom and inside your senior decision-making bodies and inside your leadership.” (You can read the whole story here.) Given that I've been banging on in a similar vein for years (albeit muttering to myself like some deranged old vagrant on this blog), I couldn't agree more. The only problem is that this tall, amiable, ginger-bearded former boss of mine is currently CEO of the screamingly left-liberal New York Times, and was the Director-General of the left-liberal BBC for the eight years up to 2012. If he's so keen on having right-wingers "across your newsroom", why weren't there any at the BBC when he was in charge of News - and why is the NYT so left-wing (although, as it isn't funded by a poll tax, it can take any political stance it wants)?

Did the Scots beat the English at Bannockburn? Or was it a case of Normans beating Normans?

Every country, race, religion and individual views the world through a multi-faceted and often self-contradictory prism of myth and legend (and if that doesn't get me into Pseud's Corner, nothing ever will). Not all myths and legends are untrue, of course, and not all myths and legends are harmful to those whose view of reality is coloured by them - but many are both false and harmful.  I suspect many Europhiles of the Islington tendency would cite everything from Londoners battling heroically through the Blitz to the view of the British Empire as an almost unalloyed good which brought law and trade to those lucky enough to be colonised as partially responsible for British voters' "disastrous" decision to "leave Europe". In the US, left-wing historians have spent decades sneering at the myths which have made generations of Americans proud of their country.

New study shows tall people are more politically conservative - if they are, why are they?

This from a report at the phys.org website:

The taller a person is, the more likely he or she is to support conservative political positions, support a conservative party and actually vote for conservative politicians, according to a new study using data from Britain.

"If you take two people with nearly identical characteristics - except one is taller than the other - on average the taller person will be more politically conservative," said Sara Watson, co-author of the study and assistant professor of political science at The Ohio State University.

The researchers found that a one-inch increase in height increased support for the Conservative Party by 0.6 percent and the likelihood of voting for the party by 0.5 percent.

What Eric Hoffer, Jung and Solzhenitsyn had in common - apart from being three of my heroes

Solzhenitsyn

Our head of History at King's - a bearded left-winger from the Midlands who went on to become the headmaster of a comprehensive - once exclaimed, in reference to Peter the Great, "There was a man!" (The only other thing I clearly remember him saying, after asking us how we'd have voted in the 1970 general election had we been old enough, was "What a bunch of little Tories!") The reason "There was a man" stuck in my mind was that I instinctively knew what our teacher meant, without being able to put it into words. Looking back, I suspect Jeff (Geoff?) Taylor meant that P the G exhibited a blend of vigour, certainty, belief, vision, clear-mindedness, willpower, and a refusal to settle for the easy option: not only was the emperor who dragged his country into the Age of the Enlightenment a man - he was his own man.

Please, please, please - would everyone dealing with the threat of Islamic terrorism just read Eric Hoffer's "The True Believer"?

"How could anyone do something like that?" (or some variant thereof) has probably been the most-asked question in Western countries during the past few weeks, as one ghastly, barbaric Islamist atrocity has followed another with bewildering rapidity. One convincing answer was provided by an autodidact San Francisco stevedore called Eric Hoffer 65 years ago in his book, The True Believer: Thoughts on the Nature of Mass Movements, in which (among other things) he described the psychology of the typical follower of significant religious, nationalist and political movements in their various phases throughout the ages. I've written about Hoffer before (here), but I make no apology for doing so again. I read The True Believer for the third time last night, and I can confirm that almost every word of it seems eerily prescient. Here, for instance, is Hoffer's answer to "How could anyone do something like that?":

Sky News breaks ranks on the British media's preferred narrative about racist US cops killing blacks

I've been avoiding TV news coverage of the recent spate of American police shooting unarmed blacks and armed blacks attacking and/or killing American police officers. I  prefer to read about these events online, because the reporting on Sky and the BBC has been so lazy and skewed as to make an old news producer despair: for British television journalists, it's still 1962, the US Civil Rights Act hasn't been passed, Lyndon Johnson's ruinous "Great Society" programme hasn't been put into effect, billions and billions of dollars of public money haven't been power-hosed at American black communities in order to ease their suffering, all cops are white racists who only shoot black men because they hate them, the South is almost entirely populated by Ku Kux Klan members, and the idea of the American people electing a black president is still a fantasy (that'll be the day!).

So when Sky News went over live to Dallas the other day, where grizzled veteran Jeremy Thompson was out on the streets...

And the award for truly grotesque post-Paris mawkishness goes to... Sky News's Kay Burley for tweeting this:

Good grief! But - never fear - an antidote to this sort of sentimental drivel is readily available thanks to the likes of Iain Dale and, of course, James Delingpole:

Writer and director Bruce Robinson, hating Mrs. Thatcher, and Jungian complexes

Trundling through the various bits of the Daily Telegraph this morning provided a study in contrasts. First, there were lengthy extracts from the second volume of Charles Moore's official biography of Mrs. Thatcher,  in which - among many, many other things - she plays a key role in paving the way for the defeat of Soviet communism. Then I read a profile in the magazine section of Bruce Robinson, who wrote and directed Withnail & I, which is one of my favourite films. Disappointingly, Robinson turned out to be an utter prat. Not only has he spent fifteen years producing a book purporting to show that Jack the Ripper was a successful Victorian song-writer whose identity was covered up by The Establishment because he was (prepared to be shocked) a FREEMASON (oh, do give it a bloody rest), but he also hates Margaret Thatcher, who was, apparently, a "cancer" in British politics. The very mention of her name starts him ranting.

The Age of Infantilism, Part One: are we a nation of Big Babies?

One of my favourite bathroom books is Michael Bywater’s Big Babies: Why Can’t We Just Grow Up?, first published in 2006. Practically everything that has happened in the eight years since I first read the book has borne out its arguments. Here’s a lengthy segment:

I imagine myself to be a grown-up, as, presumably, do you. You think that because you negotiated puberty and developed secondary sexual characteristics, and got qualifications and opened a bank account and subjected yourself to the scrutiny of anti-terrorism laws and anti-money-laundering laws and learned to drive and got a job and perhaps a spouse and maybe children, and quite possibly even pay your taxes, you are a grown-up.

Does the masculinity of Islam make left-liberals randy? Rabbi Daniel Lapin thinks so - and he could be right.

The real problem with Boko Haram is that they already have what they want – just read Eric Hoffer’s “The True Believer”

And so the search for rational motives has started. Who are Boko Haram? What have we in the West done to anger them? What sort of society do they seek to create? What beliefs have prompted their enslavement and rape of schoolgirls? What sort of Danegeld would make them go away? Shouldn’t we be talking to them in order to understand them?

And blah blah blah.

Charlie Chaplin, Venice, Roger Ebert and Jung - you decide whether it was synchronicity or coincidence

I buggered my sciatic nerve last week while vigorously ripping ivy off a brick wall in our garden. By the time I’d gone on the wash the car and clean the shower-room, I was in agony, and have remained so pretty much ever since. Despite the regular ingestion of painkillers, the pain when I’m not lying on my right side in bed or on the sofa or immersed in a really hot bath has been impressive: until today, I couldn’t stand up for more than two minutes or walk more than 200 yards or sit at my desk for more than ten seconds without starting to make a panicky hooting noise like a tortured gibbon (at least, the sort of panicky hooting noise I imagine a tortured gibbon would make).

Yes, I know – boo hoo!

Keep staring at the dot when the picture changes - you'll be amazed!

I can't "borrow" the sequence in question and feature it on the blog, so you'll have to click here to experience one of the tricks your mind can play on you. Just remember to keep staring at the dot or you'll wonder the fuss is about.

Weird or what!

Hat-tip: Chris Deerin, the Telegraph's tweeter-in-chief.

Niall Fergusson, Keynes, homosexuals, parents, children and our attitudes to the future

Professor Ferguson – who I worked with a few times on BBC political talk shows – is my kind of chap: a fearsomely bright, hard-working, flinty little right-wing Protestant Glaswegian economic historian with a great sense of humour and an atavistic predilection for fish and chip suppers.

Babies, beards and spectacles

Get into a staring contest with a reclining baby, and you’ll most likely lose. Babies don’t suffer from embarrassment: because they’re not conscious of themselves, they’re not conscious of us as separate entities - we’re just a collection of familiar or unfamiliar shapes, noises and smells to them. I was sitting on the tube yesterday on my way back from Euston Station when I became aware that I was proving a source of intense fascination to the two babies in the double pram/pushchair affair parked next to me. Their eyes never left my face for ten minutes.