My drawings are not always solely produced using graphite; quite a few are produced using airbrushed paint as well. I am constantly experimenting with other mediums and surfaces. I have drawn with pencil since primary school. I feel comfortable using this medium and enjoy the control pencil affords me. I also like the fact that complex images can be produced using such a rudimentary medium.
Hyper-realistic artwork by Scottish artist Paul Chiappe
The response from Kyl's office?Sen. Jon Kyl (R-AZ) defended Republicans’ willingness to shut down the government over funding for Planned Parenthood by falsely claiming that abortion is “well over 90 percent of what Planned Parenthood does.” In reality, just three percent of its work is related to abortion.
His remark was not intended to be a factual statement, but rather to illustrate that Planned Parenthood, a organization that receives millions of dollars in taxpayer funding, does subsidize abortionsSo there.
The security guy at Bratislava airport looked at my passport. "New". he said to his colleague. Then spent five minutes examining it in minute detail with two magnifying devices before handing it back. "Is there a problem?', I said. "No, no" he said. "Very nice passsport". What the fuck? Perhaps he hadn't seen one of the fairly new microchipped passports or maybe he was just taking the piss?What is going on? How did we arrive at a situation where giving offence is automatically sackable or worse? Surely the freedom to disagree with a comment or to ignore it is enough. When it is suggested that certain points of view or ways of expressing them might be or should be illegal – or that intolerance should not be tolerated, to purloin the common malapropism – a notion that should chill anyone who holds the principles of liberal democracy dear is given life: the notion of thought crime. Freedom of speech was hard-won in the West; the freedom only to speak inoffensively is no freedom at all...
Furthermore, the giving of offence need not be intentional, nor the words (or cartoons) themselves possessed of the propensity to give it in order for it to be taken. Never mind the freedom to speak offensively: people have been invited to believe there is such a thing as the right not to be offended. Never mind that ‘incitement to hatred’ is a grey, disputable thing, and a different thing to incitement to violence, which was already a criminal offence. Never mind that most ideas are capable of giving offence, and that Socrates, Galileo and Darwin were all considered beyond the pale in their time. And never mind that in the marketplace of ideas, ‘hate speech’ can be challenged, debated or ignored. What we now have is moderated free speech at best.
I won't be around "in decades" so I can't afford to wait until things improve. Leaving the UK looks like a more attractive prospect every day.The Labour party's most senior figures, in defiance of their education and intelligence, keep claiming that Osborne's actions are "driven by ideology, rather than necessity". This is absurd. Anyone who argues that rapidly addressing the fiscal catastrophe Labour left behind is anything other than absolutely crucial either knows nothing about global bond markets, or is so blindly ambitious, so determined to close their eyes to the facts, as to be unfit for public office...The UK's fiscal crisis is of monumental historic importance...What is in the balance...is the prosperity of the British people for at least the next few decades and our status as a top-ranking nation.
Over the last 12 months, then, this country's "on-balance-sheet" liabilities have risen by £147bn. That's roughly what we spent on the NHS and defence combined in 2010 – and that was merely, during this last year of "austerity", the incremental increase in what Britain has put "on tick"....What matters to the finances of any household is the size of the outstanding mortgage, the on-going costs of financing that mortgage, and the prospects of paying it off. Only an economically illiterate fool would claim the family finances will soon be "under-control" because sacrifices will be made and lifestyles reined-in to such an extent that, hopefully, if everything goes to plan, having re-mortgaged every year between now and 2015, that family will then enjoy a single year in which it won't need to re-mortgage.
Like other eight-year-old girls, Britney Campbell loves dancing to Lady GaGa, is fond of fashion and enjoys putting on make-up But Britney's beauty regime goes way beyond playing with Mummy's lippy. Once every three months, Britney climbs on a beautician's table and watches as mum Kerry prepares needles of Botox and fillers to be injected into her face.
Beautician Kerry, 34, from Birmingham, buys the substances online and injects them into her daughter's forehead, lips and around her eyes.The beauty-pageant obsessed single mum also takes her to have her body waxed, in a bizarre bid to stop her growing hair when she eventually hits puberty.
Kerry says these shocking and potentially dangerous treatments will guarantee Britney becomes famous as a teenager.Famous as a teenager?
Ours is not the first age when the public has been constantly urged to cut back on the demon drink. But never before has the campaign for public abstinence taken such an elitist and morally vacuous form...
Current responsible-drinking policy is not concerned with self-control, but with official control of people’s behaviour. Public-health officials seem to recognise no limits to their interventions, and indeed I have heard discussions at alcohol-policy conferences about how they might close down drinks-related Facebook groups or prevent parents from leaving their beer in the garage.
As Japan struggles with damaged nuclear reactors, the German government has announced that some nuclear power plants in Germany will be taken offline. In her policy speech last week, Chancellor Angela Merkel reiterated that the German nuclear power plants were among the world's safest. However, events in Japan had created a new situation in which the seemingly impossible had become possible. It was now necessary, Merkel said, to suspend for three months a previously announced policy to extend the life of some of these power stations.Yep. Earthquake and tsunami in a country sitting on the worlds greatest fault line leads to a land-locked, earthquake free country in central Europe reconsidering its nuclear policy. Nuts.
S&M can be criminal even if it’s consensual, a Brooklyn judge said today during the arraignment of a self-described Craigslist sex-slave master.Erm, no, that's not what the judge said. He said that just because someone agreed to indulge in sado-masochistic activities doesn't mean that nothing that follows can be considered criminal. It's no different from the law regarding "normal" sexual activity. It can start off consensual but become criminal.
Yes, nuclear power plants are dangerous. But for Britain, the alternative is to start hoarding candlesIt would be easy to just accept that this is just more twaddle from that great Daily Mail tit, Max Hastings but let's just stop and ask ourselves how the fuck that headline got written. As someone pointed out in the comments section of this appallingy piss-poor piece in the Guardian today:
But I have decided to keep an eye out for the first day the disaster fails to be the number one story in the papers and then for the day it fails to feature at all. Give Jeremy Brett A Posthumous BAFTA Award. Most noticeably we have the support of many people and societies, some highly influential. To name but a few of them: actors Stephen Fry, Edward Hardwicke, David Burke, Timothy West, author Paul D. Gilbert, and several Sherlock Holmes Societies, including The Sherlock Holmes Society of London, the exclusive and upon invitation only Baker Street Irregulars Society, and La Société Sherlock Holmes de France and its chairman, Thierry Saint-Joanis, who, in 1993-1994, successfully campaigned to have Jeremy awarded the French Légion d’honneur.
What a pleasure to welcome back into our newspapers that grasping porcine ginger trollop, Sarah Ferguson. It is money, of course, which has seen her return to media prominence; perpetually skint as a consequence of her fabulously extravagant lifestyle and sense of entitlement, she allowed her incalculably thick ex-husband, Prince Andrew, to fix up a loan for £15,000 to help clear her debts, money which came from a convicted paedophile, the US businessman Jeffrey Epstein...
Now that the press have found out about the loan, Fergie is cloaking herself with that most modern of adornments, faux contrition. She is appalled to have accepted the loan which Andrew sorted out for her, she now says, it was a quite ghastly mistake. And she also felt the need to add to her press statement the confession that she feels very strongly that adults shouldn’t shag children, it’s something she’s always been very decided about, shagging children.
Ditto the magnificently horrible John Galliano, who believes that having told someone that he thought Hitler was ‘great’ and that he wished their relatives had died in the gas chambers did not, per se, reflect upon him as having an anti-Semitic mindset. No, no, quite the reverse. One would have been more appreciative of Christian Dior’s handling of the matter were it not for the fact that Christian Dior was himself a Nazi collaborator and a friend of both Hitler and Eva Braun, and that his niece, Françoise Dior, was convicted in Britain of attempting to blow up synagogues and was married — at separate times, no bigamy implied here — to John Tyndall, later the leader of the National Front, and Colin Jordan, a neo-Nazi who was himself imprisoned for violent racist acts.
