Happy news! The government has come up with a 5.9 percent GDP growth rate in the fourth quarter of 2009. The recession is over. Or is it? Statistician John Williams has informed us that 69 percent of this growth, or 4.1 percentage points, is the result of inventory accumulation. That leaves a 1.8 percent growth rate, and the 1.8 percent is likely due to the underestimate of inflation and other statistical problems. The Federal Reserve’s own monetary evidence contradicts the recovery assurances from Fed chairman Ben Bernanke. The Federal Reserve continues to pour massive reserves into the banks. The monetary base, … 
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Most people know Robert Crumb as that esoteric cartoonist from the 60s who did the “Keep on Truckin’” guy. Comic nerds like myself, however, see him as the second coming of Christ. He has completed dozens of graphic novels over the years and the drawings just keep getting better. His writing is another story. Crumb’s fiction almost always falls behind his auto-bio stuff and this latest work, The Book of Genesis, is no exception. It is a fifty-chapter opus that chronicles, er, dozens of people over, um, thousands of years. Here are ten reasons why the pictures surpass his words… 1 … 
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Greece is a country that thrives on rumor. Hearsay has been a part of the Greek DNA since time immemorial. Even Plato remarked on it. Demagogues used rumor and gossip to silence their opponents, demagogism being a Greek word, after all. Greeks also thrive on the spoken word. As was the case of their ancestors, the power of the spoken word sometime drives out reason. As I write, I hear a lot of my fellow Greeks say some very unreasonable things. Such as, the Germans and the French conspired to embarrass us and take over our businesses and natural resources. Or, … 
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‘Live for the here…’ That was the unsolicited advice proffered by an aged Beat poet to a restaurant diner at a nearby table who would not leave his cell phone alone. A cigar for the poet. Because far from being liberated by mobile communications, we have become enslaved and tyrannized by them; rather than seeing our lives enhanced, we are squandering time, company, and true engagement and abandoning much of what is precious.  I am no Luddite, neophobe, nor techno-hater; I see the need for the white heat of progress and technical innovation and easy and efficient contact. But discarded in … 
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What’s the long-term future of spectator sports? With the conclusion of the Winter Olympics, some new trends have come into focus. The Olympics, for instance, have established a niche as the Exception to the Rules of Sports Fandom: they’re the athletic event for people who like watching sports in highly limited doses, a couple of weeks every couple of years. The audience for the Winter Olympics was 56 percent female. For women viewers, the Olympics in the 20th Century served as a prototype for the 21st Century reality television shows, with their human interest stories about a small group of good-looking … 
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We inherited the worst situation since the Great Depression. That is the reflexive response of President Obama to the troubles from which he has been unable to extract his country. Even before the inauguration, he says, there were projections of a $1.2 trillion deficit for 2009. That deficit is not my deficit. Presidents are usually blamed for deficits run while they are in office. But, in fact, presidents do not write budgets. Congress does. Presidents sign them. And the mammoth deficits of 2008 and 2009 came from budgets approved by a Congress run by Nancy Pelosi and Harry Reid. Did Sen. … 
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My instinctive reaction to what had just happened and indeed to the events of the day itself, was, of course, to head straight for the minibar. I found it lurking underneath the T.V on the right hand side of the room, a small brown camouflaged fridge between two sets of drawers. I squatted down and flung it open.       “Okey-dokey,” I said out loud, “what have we here?”       The two main shelves didn’t have anything of any use to anyone as far as I was concerned. On the top shelf there were two bottles of Heineken … 
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St. Moritz. As they used to say in Flatbush, I shoulda stood in bed.  So leaving the pretty village of Gstaad on a sunny Tuesday morning, I set out for St. Moritz to attend the annual general meeting of Pugs Club and to participate in the first Pugs uphill ski race on the new course laid out by our President Professor William H. Gimlet. As the prof has only recently learned to ski—ironically there are no skiing lessons provided by British institutions for the criminally insane—I should perhaps have foreseen, in the words of Irving Berlin, “trouble ahead,” but I didn’t. … 
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For those unaware, the literary world is currently aflutter over a scandal involving yet another freshman novelist accused of plagiarism.  Helene Hegemann, daughter of famed German dramatist Carl Hegemann, recently released her debut novel Axolotl Roadkill, which is currently working its way up a number of German bestseller lists.  At only seventeen, she’s heralded as a gifted writer, and the book itself is a finalist at the Leipzig Book Fair. Sounds great so far, but accusations of plagiarism recently surfaced when blogger Deef Pirmasens discovered that several passages in the book, and in one instance almost an entire page, were copied … 
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Handsome men born before 1970 were no different than any other, average-looking, men. I mean, they were the captains of the football team and they felt the breasts of every cute girl in school and they eventually ran huge marketing companies that made thousands of people rich but, on the inside, they were the same as you and me. Nevertheless, something unprecedented happened with Generation X. Hunks became male bimbos: Himbos. Nobody’s sure what caused it but most experts agree the concept of Male Modeling—as a full time career—is primarily responsible. Somehow being seen as beautiful is apparently not great for … 
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