Christmas gift ideas to inspire and excite: Imagine. You have a guest around for a romantic evening. You’ve savoured a candle-lit dinner for two and are sitting, cuddled up on the settee, in the flickering half-light, preparing for the customary kiss. She waits. He smoulders. She pouts. He burns. He turns to her with eyes of flame and says, in a deep and sultry voice, “frothy milk darling?” How could anyone resist?

Christmas gift ideas to inspire and excite: The problem is that in your desperation to get it all done you go into some form of a blind frenzy. This is a bit like that battle frenzy that Viking Berserkers were said to experience, where they see red and want to kill everything in sight.

Only you don’t see red, you see bargains. And you don’t want to kill everything in sight, you want to buy it.

Manufacturing Consent for an Attack upon Iran: It’s at this point that I’d like to remind you of the dodgy dossier - information gleaned from a disaffected taxi driver, and cut and pasted from the internet - which made up the bulk of evidence in the run-up to the war on Iraq.

This is what Herman and Chomsky are referring to when they talk of “the manufacture of consent”. This kind of information doesn’t have to be true, it merely has to be repeated often enough and loud enough for people to start to believe that it is true.

In the Temple of the Heart: Amanae Receiving Workshop, Brussels, June 3rd - 5th 2011: According to the Penguin Complete English Dictionary a revelation is:

1a the act or an instance of revealing something. b something revealed, especially a sudden and illuminating disclosure. 2 a truth believed to be revealed by God to man, or the communicating of it.