Rhode Frog: Heating Assistance for Royals

In the wise words of Monty Python, a watery tart distributing swords is no basis for a form of government. Why inbred dowagers continue to rule countries is beyond me. But this bit of news should make the English look to their former enemy France for advice on how to deal with unruly royals.

Yahoo News: "Queen tried to get UK poverty fund to heat palace"

Apparently, it costs 1.5 million pounds to heat Buckingham Palace. I've heard they have a history of taking from the poor and giving to the rich, but this is cold indeed.

This reminded me of Hadley Freeman's book on the UK fashion industry, The Meaning of Sunglasses. She wrote:

Designers love the equestrian look, not because they idolize jockey Franki Dettori (although that man is just fabulous as keeping his weight down) but because they associate it with the upper classes. Unlike a lot of people, when designers talk about the upper classes, they don’t mean the unnattractive, dull-witted, incestuous sorts you’d find in a Evelyn Waugh novel, but rather the breezy, arrogant types Helena Bonham Carter used to play in moves before she stopped brushing her hair. This is mainly because they think these people are the people who can afford their clothes, when in fact, as pretty much everyone else knows, these old-school aristos tend to be utterly broke, not have worked for the past thousand years and spending the inheritance on buying heroin and having the roof fixed.

Now that autumn is here again, I can't see an ad for boots without thinking of this. It just tickles me!

I wonder how much that crown is worth...

Bits & Pieces

Senator Al Franken has proposed a "Pay for War" resolution that would require Congress to raise taxes and/or cut spending before authorizing new acts of war, so that American foreign adventures can't contribute to the national debt.

In "The Long Road Home," historian Ben Shephard tells the neglected story of the refugee crisis the Allies faced when, at war's end, millions of displaced persons -- among them prisoners of war, slave laborers and survivors of concentration camps -- had to be repatriated to their homelands or resettled somewhere else.

For most of the last century, talk of secession, nullification and the rest of the extreme states-rights lexicon were relegated to the fringiest parts of the political fringe. But since Barack Obama entered the White House in January 2009, mainstream Republican rhetoric and proposed legislation at the state level have both warmed to the hoary idea that state governments can take their relationship with the federal government on what amounts to an a la carte basis or perhaps abandon it altogether.

Is the tantalizing dream of a universal library dead? Some scholars and librarians across the country fear it may be, now that a federal judge in New York has derailed Google’s bold plan to build the world’s largest digital library and bookstore.

...the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office... finds that a large part of the supposed savings from spending cuts would go, not to reduce the deficit, but to pay for tax cuts. In fact, the budget office finds that over the next decade the plan would lead to bigger deficits and more debt than current law.

...Republicans in Mississippi are divided over a wholly different wedlock issue: interracial marriage.

Nobel-winning economist Joseph Stiglitz writes in this month's Vanity Fair about the corrosive, self-reinforcing wealth concentration that has hijacked American politics, in which the America's future is sacrificed to give ever more money to an ever-smaller group of oligarchs.

Heating Assistance for Royals

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