Over the past 50 years these Houses have transformed from modest white cubes into a vibrant display of personality and present a rebellion against conformity. My work asserts that human individuality cannot be contained. Inevitably it shines through even the most average facade.

More than one out of every six workers — 17.5 percent — were unemployed or underemployed in October. The previous recorded high was 17.1 percent, in December 1982.

This includes the officially unemployed, who have looked for work in the last four weeks. It also includes discouraged workers, who have looked in the past year, as well as millions of part-time workers who want to be working full time.

The official jobless rate — 10.2 percent in October, up from 9.8 percent in September — remains lower than the early 1980s peak of 10.8 percent.

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With the release of the jobs report on Friday, the broadest measure of unemployment and underemployment tracked by the Labor Department has reached its highest level in decades. If statistics went back so far, the measure would almost certainly be at its highest level since the Great Depression.

                                  Chart from Innocent Bystanders

The flame that was snuffed out by freedom

My small contribution consisted of joining like-minded colleagues to smuggle books and printing materials, to organise lectures and to maintain an underground messaging service. The experience taught me a lot about people, and in particular about the transforming effect of sacrifice on the human character. The people that I met were imbued with a more than ordinary gentleness and concern for one another. It was hard to earn their trust but, once offered, trust was complete.

Moreover, because learning, culture and the European spiritual heritage were, for them, symbols of their own inner freedom, and of the national independence they sought to remember, if not to regain, they looked on those things with an unusual veneration. As a visitor from the world of fun, pop and comic strips I was amazed to discover students for whom words devoted to such things were wasted words, and who sat in those little pockets of underground air studying Greek literature, German philosophy, medieval theology and the operas of Verdi and Wagner.

In 1985 the secret police moved against me and I was arrested in Brno; visits to Czechoslovakia came to an end and I was followed in Poland and Hungary. But our team kept going until 1989 when, to our surprise, the catacombs were opened and our friends came pale, staggering and bewildered into the sunlight, to be hailed by the people as the natural trustees of their restituted country. This was a wonderful moment and, for a while, I believed that the public spirit that had reigned in the catacombs would now govern the State.

It was not to be. Having been excluded for decades from the rewards of worldly advancement, our friends had failed to cultivate those arts — hypocrisy, treachery and realpolitik — without which it is impossible to stay in government.

Sold out to Europe by generations of weak, lying leaders

The drive by the Eurocrats to impose the Lisbon Treaty has made a mockery of democracy.  The Labour Government promised the British electorate a  referendum but disgracefully reneged on that pledge. Hugh Gaitskell would have been outraged by Brown’s refusal to keep his word. In his great 1962 speech he said that British  people had to be consulted about their future in Europe. The belief that the political élite knew best, he argued, “was an odious piece of hypocritical, supercilious, arrogant rubbish”.
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WE will lose any vestige of control over our borders, our  justice system and our foreign policy
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Our national embassies will be soon be superseded by those of the EU, while our Army will be subsumed within the new European Defence Force. EU control of all environmental policy will mean sweeping new regulations on everything from bin collections to petrol prices.

For the first time the EU will have the power to raise its own taxes, bringing another heavy financial burden on the already oppressed British public.
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Already 80 per cent of our laws are dictated by the EU. Lisbon will make Westminster redundant as an institution, there will be a Europe-wide police force, complete with all the  sinister intrusive powers of the modern surveillance state.
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We can be sure that the fashionable ideology of political correctness will be rigorously enforced by our European masters, crushing the rich heritage of our Christian civilisation in the name of diversity. It is no coincidence that on the very day that the Lisbon Treaty was finally ratified by all 27 member states, the European Court ruled that crucifixes had to be banned in Italian schools for fear of offending minorities.   

The definition of dictatorship is the inability to remove from power those who govern us, no matter how corrupt or authoritarian they are. That is exactly what the post-Lisbon EU will be like, wielding unprecedented authority but accountable to none, insulated by privilege and riddled with abuses
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But now, without even a whimper, our politicians have thrown away our democratic liberties. What is even worse, the entire saga of our relationship with the EU has been based on the cynical deception of the public by the  political establishment.
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"The demise of a once- great nation has arrived  without a vote being cast or a bullet fired.

Via American Thinker comes this graph of the day showing the extraordinary fossil fuel energy resources the United States has - more than Russia, Saudi Arabia, Iran, Iraq, Venezula and Canada.  The figures are sourced from this Congressional Research Service report released last week.

Randall Hoven pulls out these statistics from that same report.

Total fossil fuels (oil, coal, natural gas) reserves of the US, in Barrels of Oil Equivalent:  1,321.3 billion BOE.

US consumption of fossil fuels in 2008:  14.8 billion BOE.

Earlier this week Daniel Yergin in the WSJ wrote about America's Natural Gas Revolution

Yet the natural gas revolution has unfolded with no great fanfare, no grand opening ceremony, no ribbon cutting. It just crept up. In 1990, unconventional gas—from shales, coal-bed methane and so-called "tight" formations—was about 10% of total U.S. production. Today it is around 40%, and growing fast, with shale gas by far the biggest part.

The potential of this "shale gale" only really became clear around 2007. In Washington, D.C., the discovery has come later—only in the last few months. Yet it is already changing the national energy dialogue and overall energy outlook in the U.S.—and could change the global natural gas balance.
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With more drilling experience, U.S. estimates are likely to rise dramatically in the next few years. At current levels of demand, the U.S. has about 90 years of proven and potential supply—a number that is bound to go up as more and more shale gas is found.
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A  'shale gale' of unconventional and abundant U.S. gas is transforming the energy market.

The most famous climate change believer of all stands to make a bundle.  Al Gore could become the world's first carbon billionaire

For the NY Times, John Broder examines Gore's dual role as advocate and investor.

Hoag's object

Growing up in a home-schooling family in rural Texas, I got used to thinking of myself as fringe. Like a good number of home schoolers, my parents distrusted television, the food industry, the medical profession, and, well, just about anything that average middle-class Americans considered normal. Most of my brothers and sisters were born in our parents’ bedroom and never made the pilgrimage to the local hospital for vaccinations. We spent lots of our days away from textbooks, trying our hands at growing and raising our own food and tackling grown-up chores. We did not catch many episodes of Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles or eat many Pop-Tarts.

Needless to say, I was, for much of my adolescence, preoccupied with proving I was “mainstream”—that despite all this natural, organic, precocious living, I was capable of consuming as thoughtlessly as everyone else. Now, as a post-college transplant to New York, I have to do a rapid reverse. Never did I imagine that what I once considered my parents’ annoying “alternative” choices would be lifestyle gospel in New York, praised on the cover of cool magazines, evangelized by all sorts of celebrities. Now, I’ve started to think of my parents and their obscure home-schooling friends living in tiny, isolated American towns as some kind of urban prophets.

That’s the conclusion of a “consensus’’ statement written by leading gum disease specialists and cardiologists published online earlier this year in the American Journal of Cardiology and the Journal of Periodontology.

“The mechanism of the relationship strongly points to inflammation’’ as the culprit in both cardiovascular disease and periodontitis, or gum disease, says Dr. Thomas E. Van Dyke, a professor of periodontology and oral biology at the Boston University School of Medicine.
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Dr. Paul Ridker, director of the Center for Cardiovascular Disease Prevention at Brigham and Women’s Hospital, notes that “cardiologists now understand that inflammation is a major risk factor for heart disease. Patients with periodontal disease, rheumatoid arthritis, and psoriasis all have chronic inflammation, and all turn out to have higher cardiac risk than previously appreciated.’’

From the soon-to-be official Dark-Sky Park, in Galloway Forest, registering Bortle 2 on the international darkness scale.

Not far away comes the traditional Scottish prayer.

From ghoulies and ghosties
And long-leggedy beasties
And things that go bump in the night,
Good Lord, deliver us!