Two recommendations

1) Everyone who loves music and/or follows the BBC and/or lives in or has to do with Britain ought to sign this petition. If you don't, and the kind of attitude it denounces spreads or even survives, you will have yourselves to blame.
http://www.ipetitions.com/petition/youngmusician/index.html

2) Wemyss' new fic http://wemyss.livejournal.com/125758.html is excellent. It requires some knowledge of modern British history and is heavily tinged with the author's idiomatic, not to say idiosyncratic, politics, but it is one of those few ideas that are so good that I find myself wishing I had had them.

A short thought

Liberty is not itself a virtue, but it is the condition without which no virtue can meritoriously or properly be exercised. Not even obedience; for obedience at the point of a gun is not a virtue.

What the President had to say about the credit crisis

True they have tried, but their efforts have been cast in the pattern of an outworn tradition. Faced by failure of credit they have proposed only the lending of more money. Stripped of the lure of profit by which to induce our people to follow their false leadership, they have resorted to exhortations, pleading tearfully for restored confidence.

Only the President in question is FD Roosevelt, and the credit crisis in question is the Great Depression. Are you, however, going to tell me that "stimulus packages" and the like are any cleverer than what he calls "the lending of more money"?