The opposition in Iran, as elsewhere, uses the language of human rights to assert its moral superiority over its enemies in their seats of power. Opposition spokesmen point to government kangaroo courts, rapes, beatings, electric shocks and imposition of the death penalty to convince the world outside that the regime is illegitimate. Vicious attacks on students by the modern brown-shirts of the Basij militia further undermine the right of the clergy to govern.

Yet, amid the justifiable outrage at the punishments the Iranian regime metes out to those it suspects are trying to overthrow them, there are memories of a previous opposition movement that made the human rights case against the Shah in 1979. Then, Iran’s opposition groups, who were both democratic and theocratic, contended that torture and murder by the Shah’s secret police, the notorious SAVAK, proved that the Shah was not fit to govern.  As soon as the clergy seized power, however, prisons and torture chambers in which the new rulers themselves had once suffered were overflowing.

Ayatollah Khalkhali sat in judgement day and night to send not only members of the ancien regime, but former revolutionaries, to the gallows. Born in idealism and supported by a broad base of democrats, secularists, leftists and prelates, the Iranian revolutionaries exceeded SAVAK in the use of intimidation, torture and killing. Evin Prison, symbol of the Shah’s hated police state, saw more torture and murder than the SAVAK had practiced. Moreover, the clergy did not take long to exceed the Shah’s cronies at siphoning off as much of the country’s wealth as they could stuff into the folds of their jellabas.

Iranian men and women, however, enjoy more rights than their fellow Muslims across the Persian Gulf in Saudi Arabia. Countries that support and trade with the Saudi monarchy lack credibility when condemning the Iranian mullahs for human rights abuses that are routine in Saudi Arabia. In both countries, women are made to cover themselves lest they invite the lust of men. Iranian women, however, enjoy legal protections that Saudi women have never known. They work in the professions, and they drive cars. They vote and stand for parliament, while their Saudi sisters have no parliament and must be driven by a male relation or retainer.

Iran holds elections that in the past have expressed the popular will, but the rulers clearly tampered with the results of last June’s presidential poll to avoid relinquishing power—not to the opposition—but to a man from within the ranks of the theocracy who had twice been a much-feared prime minister. Mir Hosein Musavi’s election would not have portended a counter-revolution so much as a partial reform, but even that was too much for the Supreme Leader and the system over which he presides. Denying Musavi the presidency—more importantly, denying the electors their choice or president—may have initiated the counter-revolution that the ayatollahs of Qum fear most.

As the regime fights for its life, Iranians suffer more abuse. Stories of those who have been released from prisons since the demonstrations against the fraudulent elections have been harrowing and well documented. Women and men have been raped in their cells. Beatings are routine. Policemen torture youngsters into informing on their friends. And there is nothing we in the Western world can do about it.

Even before the elections, Iran executed children: twenty-six under the age of eighteen with another 130 awaiting the death penalty. (Saudi and Sudanese courts also execute children for criminal offenses.) Iranian courts put to death more than three hundred adults, after trials that barely deserve the name, in 2007. Human Rights Watch reported that another 29 men were hanged in one day in 2008 without so much as disclosing most of their names. Detentions without trial are commonplace, and political activists often disappear into a security system that has no habeas corpus. This was routine before the regime felt threatened, and it can only increase as its opponents mobilize for their overthrow. A year ago, a few activists asked for reforms. Now, they are openly shouting, “Death to the Dictator.”

As the people lose their fear, that of the rulers increases. A frightened regime, like a wounded lion, is not interested in anyone’s rights.

Condemnations of Iran’s human rights abuses are justified. Coming from the United States, however, they are little more than hypocrisy. The US government’s use of torture and maintenance of torturers in Iraq, Saudi Arabia, Egypt, the Israeli-occupied West Bank and Colombia deny it credibility. American manipulation of separatists in the Kurdish, Arab, and Azeri regions of Iran further diminishes any role the US can play among the vast majority of the Iranian population who believe in national unity and fear civil war. Pleas by Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch, and other advocates of adherence to international law are welcomed by Iranian citizens who need to feel, as anti-apartheid militants in South Africa once did, that they are not alone in the world. However, the regime in Tehran is just as likely to ignore Amnesty as it does the US government.

Noam Chomsky said recently, “Putting aside the details of the election, about which we don’t know much, the whole structure of the regime is oppressive and authoritarian, and undermines basic civil and other human rights. Protest against it is not only honorable but courageous, because it faces extreme violence.” The question is less how to persuade the regime to lessen the violence against its citizens than how to encourage those who are standing up to its violence that they can prevail. The duty for its friends abroad is then to hold them to the ideals for which they are risking their lives now. Civil society in the rest of the world can demonstrate its support of Iranian democrats. It can also restrain the Israeli and American governments from launching an attack on Iran’s nuclear facilities that will give the regime a new breath of life, a blunder that would equal Saddam Hussein’s invasion of Iran in 1980 that saved the Iranian revolution by forcing all Iranians to unite around Ayatollah Khomeini.

Dr. Trita Parsi, president of the National Iranian American Council, wrote in The Daily Beast in December, “No one can predict a revolution nor say with certainty when an authoritarian state loses its footing if not its grip.” The signs are, though, that resistance to authority is having an impact. Parsi added, “The State’s ability to use the language of religion to repress these developments is failing. Again and again religion has proven itself to be much better suited as a language of resistance than governance.” If the Resistance succeeds, it may embrace, as the mullahs have since 1979, religion as part of the state’s structure. It may also, like the mullahs, ignore our calls for it to respect the human rights of its own opponents.

“You know, despite it all, it’s still really a miracle America elected a black man as president,” my 60-something neighbor said to me over beers recently. You get this a lot from people born before 1965. Apparently, America is a racist hellhole and the fact that they overcame this deep-seated hatred for blacks to allow one into the White House is physics defied. Um, as far as I can tell, a seemingly smart and in-control Democrat proceeded the most hated Republican president of all time. That’s not a “miracle.” It’s a “normal.”

I get insulted when Boomers tell me how racist my country is. I understand where they’re coming from, I guess. They grew up with survivors of the Great Depression: Grumpy old traditionalists that worked their fingers to the bone in isolation and never tried anything weird. That was then however, so please shut up about it. There is not a gigantic ogre of racism controlling our brains that took time off during the election but rears its ugly head every time we have a problem with, say, unprecedented taxation.

Now, I’m sure you can dig up some redneck who still says nigger or half a dozen skinheads in the middle of nowhere but hate crimes are a miniscule percentage of total crimes in America and if you get into per capita, all races get it about equally. I heard some horrible stories about drinking fountains from forever ago and I saw a video where dogs were attacking some dude but that was a different universe than my generation’s America. We don’t care if people aren’t like us anymore. We don’t even get what you’re talking about.

When someone under 40 hears boomer anthems like, “There’s a land where the children are free,” we go, “What the hell is this song about? Where are the children NOT free?” Old people grew up in a climate where nuns gave the strap if you wrote with your left hand and young boys were verboten from going near dolls. Our generation yawns at such superstitious claptrap. If my son turns out to be gay, I will go into a deep depression for about seven minutes and then I’ll get over it. The boomers grew up in a world where their parents dry-heaved at the thought of a black man breathing the same air as them. Even the boomers, I’m told, were occasionally mocked for not being exactly like the majority. My American Indian mother-in-law was nicknamed jungle bunny in college. Not only do we find that hard to comprehend. We think it’s funny. As Harmony Korine said, “I crack up at the race riots.”

We never would have made fun of this guy.

It seems like every children’s book I’m forced to read to my kid is about some freak that everyone learned isn’t a freak after all. We never thought he was a freak in the first place you ancient babies. If Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer were born today, the other reindeers would high-five him and ask him what reindeer games they think he should play. In my school, the kid with Down Syndrome was the school hero and the football team adopted him as their favorite fan without a trace of irony. The pre-1970 people are unable to grasp this. They created movies like Mask where a boy with craniodiaphyseal dysplasia, is mocked for his circus-like disfigurements. Or the show Square Pegs where the quirky, unusual kids were relegated to the bottom rung of the high school hierarchy. In my Secondary Education, all these people would have been rock stars.

The same goes with sexism. Why Men Earn More pointed out the obvious error with assuming women get paid less for the same work. Namely: Why wouldn’t corporations hire them in droves? They’re cheap labor, right? Turns out they earn less because they tend to be more committed to family events than staying up all night preparing proposals. In other words, they choose to earn less. After waves of famine, a great depression, and a free-for-all orgy of whining, we’ve figured a lot of it out and the old wive’s tales no longer make any sense to us.

We are the information generation. We know you’re born gay and there’s nothing you can do about it. We googled it. We know women can be just as capable at any job and we hire accordingly. We know freaks are not cursed by the almighty but just statistical inevitablilites. We are way too well-adjusted to push someone out of our life just because they don’t meet some strange parameters someone else invented so please stop doing a spit take when we don’t behave exactly like our grandfathers.

Enter a London coffee house or restaurant, check into a hotel, or wander by a building-site, and you will find the workforce almost exclusively foreign. Yet British unemployment continues to surge towards 2.5 million. Something is rotten in the heart of modern Britain, for that heart is the underclass and its malady is caused by welfare.

A process of reverse evolution is in train. It is no longer the fittest or the brightest, the fastest or the best, who survive and thrive in our contemporary jungle. It is the moronic and the bovine, the fattest and the least productive, who are cosseted and subsidized and excused their behavior. Because of it, they breed. After all, sex is free and the State will ever pick up the pieces. Collect £200 and Get out of Jail for free. While the benighted and exploited middle-classes pay their tax, marry late, and have fewer children, the underclass procreates with abandon. They have every reason, and no reason not to.

As Africa has systematically swallowed a trillion dollars in aid with precious little to show for it, so welfare at home has rendered a burgeoning social subgroup unable or unwilling to pull its (now grotesquely bloated) weight. The middle class pays dearly—housing these people, schooling them, nursing them for their myriad addictions and self-induced complaints, and then being mugged by them as they trudge home from their highly-taxed jobs.

Rather than imbue an ethic of hard work, discipline, and responsibility, through a process of handouts and hand-wringing we have promoted instead a culture in which it pays to be a dropout and where a man need not lift a finger (let alone a pick, shovel, mallet, chisel, or spanner) in order to earn a wage. Crack, smack, and street-robbery are so much more rewarding.  Whoever imagined nothing is for free was profoundly wrong. The underclass not only rejects the notion there is nobility in work, it cannot actually see the point.

Every decade that passes, the habits become engrained (some would say, enshrined) and the mindset reinforced. The underclass grows, and not merely because teenage girls fail to discover contraception and believe the swiftest route to a council house is via their own birth-canals. Enabling and sustaining it, feeding it with ceaseless waves of new recruits, is a liberal-left education establishment that has conspired to beach successive generations on the shoals of illiteracy and phonetic spelling and the sandbars of underachievement. Init, well wicked, knowhaddamean? Of course you do. Education used to point the way out of the ghetto. Today it simply consigns our young to a lifetime of delivering pizza.

Without the resources to renationalize industry, left-leaning governments have directed their energies towards taking the public back into state ownership. Create an underclass, make it dependent on your largesse, and you will garner its vote. That is the premise. Or maybe there is no logic; perhaps it is just the old knee-jerk and patronizing instincts of the left. They know best. And it has done irreparable harm. In place of parenting, there are social workers; instead of common sense, there is health and safety and the criminal records bureau; substituting for normal community interaction is diversity training; standing in for work there is always welfare. At every level the state intrudes and society suffers.

I am not advocating we eat the poor—far be it for me to promote a fatty diet—and nor do I suggest we abandon all financial safety-nets. I simply propose we ditch the tired vocabulary of victim-hood that categorizes the handout-consuming and habitually unemployed as the ‘most vulnerable in society’. It is the wealth-creators who are the most vulnerable.

Look closer and you will find that poverty is more often than not a matter of prioritization for those apparently caught in its maw. I long to hear a politician ask the question: If you have so little money, what on earth persuaded you to have five children? Why at Christmas do you purchase the latest consumer durables, computer-games and plasma-screen televisions and yet baulk at spending on private health insurance? How come you are so fat when fruit and vegetables are cheaply available? It will not happen. For we have infantilized the populace, stripping the underclass of pride, motivation, and personal responsibility and instead awarding it rights and benefits.

In the liberal-left world of the welfare state, everything is a condition, an illness, a fault of someone else. Even obesity is to be blamed on rogue genes, thyroid-malfunction or the antics of food manufacturers rather than on the sloth and greed of individuals. People forget the mouth is generally larger than the anus and thus cram it with more food. They have been allowed to forget.
The origin of yet another subspecies is revealed. But that’s okay. For the state will provide gastric bands and liposuction and will end up owning a few more souls.

Few cartoon characters have been loved—or argued over—more than Tintin, the Belgian reporter-cum-detective whose adventures have been translated into over 50 languages and sold over 200 million books. To be precise, it is not Tintin as such who is controversial but the “contradictory and inscrutable” man (as Pierre Assouline describes him) who dreamed him up and guarded him jealously until his death in 1983. Assouline is the highly-regarded biographer of Georges Simenon and Henri Cartier-Bresson, and his penetrating study, Hergé: The Man Who Created Tintin, will add to a growing international reputation.

Georges Remi—“Hergé” was derived from the pronunciation of his reversed initials—was born in Brussels in 1907, the first of two sons of a Walloon factory worker and a Flemish mother. His parentage symbolizes his persisting political importance to his deeply divided country. “Hergé was the personification of Belgium. He remains one of the last great myths of a Belgian Federation,” notes Assouline.

Hergé enjoyed adventure stories, drawing, American cartoons, Charlie Chaplin, and Buster Keaton; these influences gave his stories clarity of line, camera-like angles, and inventive typography, including the use of text bubbles to indicate who was speaking (of which technique he may have been the first European practitioner). He began drawing for Scout journals, then got a job contributing cartoon strips to the children’s section of the respected Le Vingtième Siècle newspaper, Le Petit Vingtième. He invented a Scout called Totor, who eventually became the 15-year-old Tintin—a round-faced, snub-nosed, fair-haired, plus-four wearing Bruxellois, invariably accompanied by a white fox-terrier called Milou (Snowy in English).

Tintin is brave, chivalrous, pure, intelligent—but without a past, a family, even a Christian name. It is curious how little personality Tintin has; the humour is almost all provided by his much more interesting friends—the hot-tempered alcoholic Captain Haddock, the incompetent detectives Thomson and Thompson, the deaf Cuthbert Calculus, the odious insurance salesman Jolyon Wagg, and the opera-singer Bianca Castafiore. Tintin is always a combination of Parsifal and straight man.

But despite Tintin’s many appealing characteristics, Hergé’s reputation is today often occluded by generic allegations of racism, anti-Semitism and wartime collaboration—with frequent attempts in some European countries to have some of his books edited or even removed from circulation.

Much of this controversy centers on Tintin in the Congo, published over 1930-1. Tintin goes to the Belgian Congo (now Zaire) as a reporter, and in his spare time goes big-game hunting. Hergé portrays the Congolese as being lazy and foolish—and it is assumed that they are better off being run by Europeans. (Such social solecisms impelled Britain’s Commission for Racial Equality to urge a ban on the book in 2007.) Yet the Congolese are also kindly and well-meaning while all the baddies are white, and the book is extremely popular amongst modern Zaireans.

Hergé disliked big business as much as he disliked communism, and an unfortunate characteristic of anti-plutocracy is that it often merges into anti-Semitism, and Hergé was unquestionably guilty of producing caricatures such as the unscrupulous financier Blumenstein in The Shooting Star (later bowdlerised to “Bohlwinkel”) and, some feel, both Laszlo Carreidas in Flight 714 and Tintin’s persistent enemy Rastapopoulos.

Other evils were battled by the plus-foured preux chevalier. Tintin in America bemoans the dispossession of the Indians. The Land of Black Gold assails the oil industry. The Red Sea Sharks attacks slavery. The Castafiore Emerald features gypsies being unjustly accused of theft. The Calculus Affair warns against the misuse of science for militaristic ends. Such concerns would hardly preoccupy a real fascist. Nor would a fascist have produced The Blue Lotus, Hergé’s first masterpiece, a denunciation of racial stereotypes and the cruel Japanese occupation of Manchuria in the 1930s, written in conjunction with a life-long Chinese friend.

Congo aside, Hergé’s reputation as Hitlerian fellow-traveller rests on his continuing to work for the Belgian press during the German occupation. His wartime strips (The Shooting Star, The Secret of the Unicorn, Red Rackham’s Treasure and The Seven Crystal Balls) were apolitical, but they appeared sometimes alongside pro-Nazi editorials, and were thought by some to be legitimizing those opinions. Assouline writes in respect of Congo, “[Hergé’s] talent was an anæsthetic. It disarmed all challenges to the established order”—inferring that his wartime work may have had the same effect.

But Assouline also observes that Tintin was read “avidly” in prisons and camps; would the inmates really have been better off without the cub reporter’s expeditions to find meteorites, latter-day Incas or pirate treasure? Hergé said afterwards that he saw his work as being no more politically significant than that of a plumber or carpenter. For Hergé, the cartoon was always more important than the context—to the extent that when in 1943 he received friendly advice to scale back his output in order to minimize likely Allied repercussions, he replied defiantly: “Now is the time to appear in the greatest number of newspapers possible…In any case I will have reached the largest public”.

To add to his charge-sheet, Hergé also retained ties after the war with some ex-collaborationists—although seemingly not former Vingtième Siècle colleague turned SS officer Léon Degrelle, who claimed later that he had been the model for Tintin, which, says Assouline, “hardly seems likely”. Hergé believed always in loyalty to friends, a Scoutlike virtue for which he would now be honoured had his friends been on history’s winning side.

Hergé was arrested on the day the Allies liberated Brussels, by resistants clutching a bulletin showing him as part of a “Gallery of Traitors”, with the threat that “The punishment that we will exact from them is merciless”. He was saved because of the popularity (and profitability) of his creation, but also because he had never been involved in politics and his brother had been a prisoner of war. But the legal process lasted almost two years, while professional disadvantage persisted long afterwards.

Although he threw himself back into making Tintin perfect (including canny redrawing to chime with new sensitivities), he was riven by doubt. He took unscheduled absences, and moved in with a mistress without divorcing his wife. He developed interests in Jungian psychology, jazz, Taoism, “cryptozoology”, and abstract art. His inner conflicts emerged into his output; the frigid tableaux of Tintin in Tibet were drawn from recurring nightmares of the time. “Elegant to the last”, notes Assouline, “he adhered to the dictum that humour is the courteous expression of despair”.

But Hergé’s genius has never been in doubt—giving rise to the term “hergémony” to describe his importance. His inventiveness, sly wit, slapstick humour, and the ever-growing period charm of his universe (not to mention that the first of a series of Tintin films should be released next year) means that Tintin will continue to be read for many decades to come.

MISSING: global recession, 6 billion careless owners.

No, really, why do I see thousands of people milling around in the shops as though the credit crunch was nothing more than an abdominal exercise machine with a built-in payment plan?

Alastair Darling, in his budget, forecasts a “return to growth in the fourth quarter” of this year, and here in London, the hellishly crowded Christmas shops suggest the punters think that’s a good thing. Bollocks. Am I the only person who is utterly furious? When everything went completely tits up we were promised an apocalyptic collapse of Western civilization. Finally all the tips we had gleaned from watching disaster movies were going to pay off.

You know the form: stock up on leathers, 4x4s (no need to worry about global warming in an apocalypse) and weaponry, set up gladiatorial arenas, cook your fatter neighbors, before retiring to some retreat with your leading lady. At the very least, you should be able to get a table in a restaurant good enough to impress that lady, and buy Eaton Square with the change.

Has that happened? My ass. Any girl daft enough to accept dinner with me is going to a place with an all-you-can-eat salad bar because every table at Sheekeys and the Wolseley is still crammed with bankers.

Don’t get me wrong. I’m not Gordon “back-to-the-Manse” Brown ranting about bankers like John Knox railing against Papal mistresses. I like bankers—and Papal mistresses, too—they invite me to parties and sometimes have even made me a penny. But I wouldn’t be human if my spirits weren’t raised by a few friends being found huddled around braziers under a bridge like Randolph and Mortimer. Trouble is, politicians are treating the economy with the foresight of a deep-fried Mars bar.

John Springs

The recession was caused by free money being handed out willy-nilly. Don’t listen to anyone else: a Bank of England report recently blamed “excessive risk-taking in the upswing of the credit cycle and insufficient resilience in the subsequent downturn.” That’s like the parents of obese children criticising their bloated offspring for being greedy. Children eat, it’s what they do. If you want a slimmer child, here’s a tip—stop feeding it burgers; if you want to stop unsustainable debt levels fuelling property bubbles, raise interest rates.

To be fair, we just copied the U.S. It was Greenspan who invented the soft economic landing, oblivious to the fact that every now and again some salad and a little roughage was important for the diet, not just slower protein. But, he was only the nurse; the parents were the politicians, and they liked an economic style that stuffed ice cream into the brat’s mouth every time it started to cry.

Hardly surprising that every other country took their lead, and nobody from nurse, parents or child complained until the 10 year-old boom became the youngest patient on the cardiac ward.

The fact is, if someone gives me £100 for doing sod all, I’ll spend it. So did you and now we’re all in debt. You might as well take a crate of vodka into an AA meeting as expect anybody to act responsibly in a credit boom. The real danger is what they’re doing now. 

The vodka has been drunk, and Majestic have delivered a few cases of Bulgarian Cabernet Sauvignon, oh and then there was the Special Brew, and did someone really polish off the Goldwasser and the Angostura bitters in what seemed a very promising new cocktail (for which we came up with a hilarious name) at 3 am?

Normally fatigue kicks in there, you sleep and wake with an unpleasant hangover that nonetheless reassures you for having suffered for your excesses. But if instead someone discovers the tequila? You drink shots until dawn, hit the all-night bars, collapse in an alleyway and wake up in jail in a position of unexpected intimacy with a tattooed cellmate called Cletus.

Lehmans et al. were someone saying ‘What, absolutely no more Angostura at all?’ Time for bed and that painful but morally cleansing recession. Instead the politicians, central bankers and economic doves rang the doorbell, handed over the mescal and shouted ‘Arriba’, cutting interest rates to zero, printing money and telling everyone to go out lending and borrowing again.

The result: full tables in restaurants, recovering house prices and Christmas presents all round. Enjoy it if you want, but I’ll bet you that in a couple of years when everyone sobers up, we’re going to hear two very different things: I’m going to hear the maitre d’ at the Wolseley saying, “Of course we have a table, sir, that’s no problem,” whereas all you’re going to hear is the sound of Cletus opening the lubricant.

Caramba!

I have come to see why the value of a woman is her femininity.  The ability to serve, please, and preside, without castrating the gents, is close to divine.

For instance: ‘Tis the week before Christmas, and a light snow is falling in London. This is my favorite season. I am about to head home to Switzerland, like I do every year.  A magical spell with family, friends, and festivities awaits.

My mother and I love to dress our Christmas tree, give presents, and eat delicious food. My father and brother don’t care much for Christmas, which is always a disappointment for my mother and me. They drink too much and scowl a lot. Furthermore, they are hopeless where gift-giving is concerned. (Though they can be generous when cajoled.) We do our best not to let them crush our Christmas cheer.

I am well acquainted with patriarchal conventions like grumpiness. Where I come from, there are many subtle practices that separate the boys from the girls. Roles are well defined. Equality is not much in our vocabulary.

Subtle things clue me into the fact that men and women are different. In my family, for example, men have endearing nicknames like Goofy or Rascal. Women are usually addressed as bitch, rather than by a first name, or some other more traditional designation.  Last week on a note left to me by my father, he wrote: Thanks for nothing—bitch. We ain’t no cooks—bitch. We had to eat out!

As one might assume, bitches are required to cook, clean, drive, and exhibit all the most favorable feminine qualities. Additionally, we are expected to be skilled in typically masculine tasks, like drinking, shooting, thinking, and fucking. Though we are supposed to conceal these talents, unless by request, or if it serves to highlight the men favorably.

This is all good. First-rate even. These are not complaints. Having, yet concealing certain skills, is an asset, not a detriment. Only novices make a show of their knowledge and know-how. I suffer from terrible guilt on New Year’s Eve every year when I see my kid brother standing meekly to the side while I put on a spectacular fireworks display in our garden. 

Doing women’s work doesn’t need to be demeaning. I learned as much this past week when I found myself for the first time, a woman alone in a house with nothing but men.  Big, tough, men.

I was visiting my father in New York. My brother, my male best friend, and my father’s sensei were also at the house. I wondered if they would have survived at all without me and our dutiful daily housekeeper.  I imagine they would have eaten out every night, the house would have been in shambles, and a roach or ant colony would have moved in, as none of them can manage a simple dishwasher or washing machine.

The first morning during my trip, I found myself in the kitchen. I was happy to have the place to myself. I don’t care much for conversation before noon. The men trickled in slowly. I could not finish my breakfast. Each one berated me with requests.

My father does not do anything practical, not even boil water.

The sensei, while extremely polite and unassuming, can only cook using his microwave, not ours. 

My brother needs three female assistants to do anything menial.  He often makes such a fuss about his obligations, a stable of women manage his burdens simply to quell his anxiety.

My best friend cannot charge his telephone without someones help.

By 9:15, I was ready for some retail therapy. 

Later that day, I poked around department stores looking for pretty clothes and Christmas presents. I felt extremely fortunate, and proud, to be a fairly obsequious bitch. I don’t have to fight to survive in quite the same way as a man.

Merry Christmas!

All good things must come to end, and so will my tenure as editor of Taki’s Magazine.

From the beginning, I thought of my role at Takimag as that of an impresario, my task being to surround myself with as many people who are smarter than I am as possible. (Whenever I’d mention this to my buddies, one would usually chime in with, “Well, Richard, that’s not too hard!” Hardy har har…)

Takimag was churning out great stuff before I arrived (with Paul Gottfried, Justin Raimondo, and John Zmirak leading the way), but I’m particularly grateful to those new contributors who helped me appear like an intelligent and well connected editor. These include, among others:   

Doug Bandow, Thomas Bertonneau, Austin Bramwell, Gary Brecher, Peter Brimelow, Patrick J. Buchanan, Lee Congdon, Karen De Coster, Martin van Creveld, John Derbyshire, Marcus Epstein, Daniel Flynn, David Gordon, Nikolas Gvosdev, Kevin R. C. Gutzman, Leon Hadar, Jeffrey Hart, Grant Havers, James Kalb, S.T. Karnic, Bill Kauffman, Razib Khan, E. Christian Kopff, Mark Krikorian, Alex Kurtagic, Robert Stacy McCain, Gavin McInnes, Ilana Mercer, Charles Murray, Brendan O’Neill, Michael Scheuer, Peter Schiff, “Spengler” (David P. Goldman), Caleb Stegel, Jared Taylor, Derek Turner, Laurence Vance, Thomas E. Woods Jr., Tim Worstall, and Elizabeth Wright.

I’m even prouder of the younger writers I brought on board over the past two years, most of whom got their start blogging at Takimag: 

Kevin DeAnna, Patrick Ford, Mark Hackard, Dylan Hales, Richard Hoste, Jack Hunter, Nina Kouprianova, Scott Locklin, Evan McLaren, Mike Payne, Keith Preston, Helen Rittelmeyer, and Devin Saucier. 

And then there’s Steve Sailer, who began writing a weekly “Zeitgeist” column in the spring of 2009 and who’s done some of his most memorable, and hilarious, work at Takimag. Paul Gottfried deserves special recognition, too, not simply as a frequent contributor but as an advisor and éminence grise. Thanks go out as well to Angelo Matera, who ran Takimag’s finances during 2008, and Lew Rockwell and Peter Brimelow, who have been highly supportive of me and who have introduced tens of thousands to the website through generous linking. 

And most of all, I’d like to thank Taki. My boss allowed me not to worry about finances for two years—quite a luxury among the blogging set!—and from the beginning, he gave me more editorial freedom than any 29-year could dream of. Taki has been an indispensable patron of and contributor to right-wing causes in America, Britain, and Europe, and I’m proud to call him a friend.

But never fear, loyal readers, Takimag won’t be going away—nor will I be severing my ties with the webzine.

Taki’s talented daughter, Mandolyna, who became a regular contributor, will be stepping in to fill my shoes and, no doubt, she’ll bring her own perspective to the webzine. Over the past month, Mandolyna has already taken on many of the tasks of editor, finding new voices and commissioning new pieces. And I’ll be sticking around, too, offering economic and political commentary on a regular basis. 

And what else will I be up to? Well, I’m currently hard at work creating a new web project. Many of the themes that predominated at Takimag over the past two years will be taken up again at the new site, but I also hope to cut some new paths, particularly in the discussion of Human Biological Diversity and also in terms of the format and look of a right-wing webzine. 

In order to fuel more speculation around the blogosphere, I won’t say anymore… But expect a launch by early February. And if you’re interested in supporting this project, then I encourage you to (JavaScript must be enabled to view this email address), as I’d love to discuss the details with you.

Crises are opportunities, and I hope that 2010 will be the year when the Alternative Right comes into its own. 

In closing, I’ve had a great time at Takimag over the past two years, and its been an honor to work with such intelligent contributors and readers.

Best wishes,
Richard

A distraught would be hack celebrity journalist today decried the way in which the media was draining the limited resources of Tiger Woods mistress stories.

Tim Worstall, speaking exclusively to Takimag, spoke out about the way in which the irreplacable stocks of tales of sexual misconduct by Tiger Woods were being wasted.

“We used to think that there was no shortage, that we could carry on mining and pumping out reports of yet another Tiger Woods mistress for ever. There were no limits to our environment and every day brought another cocktail waitress or hooker with which we could run a front page story.” he said. Worstall continued “How wrong we were: now the count has reached 18 we’re struggling to find more. The well has run dry and we’re reduced, like some desperate motorist screaming for just another gallon or two of gas, to running stories about how Tiger’s mother thinks he’s been a very naughty boy.

“We should have been more careful with this natural resource and not wasted it in a orgy of conspicuous consumption. After all, it’s taken Tiger nearly five years of marriage to produce and yet we’ve consumed it all in just three weeks.” Worstall concluded.

M. King Hubbert would be 106 years old.

I have long eschewed the materialist, and joshed at the slaves of greed.  But I have a watch fetish.

I, the otherwise non-materialistic- tomboy is felled by a fob. I, who would rather walk bare foot than bother with shoes at all, will salivate at the sight of the right timepiece. It is unseemly.

I couldn’t explain it if I tried.

One time, strolling London’s Portobello Road, my eye settled on a marvel. It caught my fancy, and then as surely, my heart.

A face was all it was. There was not even a band. So unwanted was this paraplegic that the vendor started the price too low to bother arguing. He was so chuffed to be rid of this orphan he was only a few pennies off actually paying me to take it.
I took the crippled mechanism to a watch doctor. After some radical surgeries the beast became a beauty. We lived some splendid years together.

I know the day it vanished.

In a messy move from London to Marrakech, my darling of a watch became lost in space.

Life went right on along. But in a in a low-grade, invisible way, I became unwell.  An unquenchable nausea invaded at the slightest memory of my lost love. I quietly lived with this heartache that could make me lose my balance, tip me into an armchair, dribble tears down my face. My true love, it turned out, was a thing. I mourned it. 

Months later, in the souk of Marrakech, buying almonds, I noticed the milky arm of a foreign lady. At the end of her slender limb, encircled at the wrist was a black soft cloth watchband. No question it was my watch.

My heart raced, sweat bunched between my breasts. The almond vendor jabbered on. Then, mid-negotiations, I bolted from the sacks of nuts and slammed into the crowd, toppling bodies out of my way. As I neared the lady, I slowed my gait to an unnatural over-excited hopping, tried to catch my breath, and prepared for the improbable show-down. Would she resist? Would she flat-out lie?

Fixated by certainty, I knew that whatever the means, the outcome could only be the watch and I being reunited. Romeo returns!

I pounced. ‘Where did you get that watch?’

Needless to say, it was not my watch. Just a grotesquely embarrassing moment for me, and no doubt a frightening one for this lady as she tore away from me.

Over the years I’ve had relationships with many other watches, all types. Though each had its sex appeal, not one of them ever lived up to that first heady liaison.

Nevertheless, I learned that to deny oneself is a shallow victory, so just the other day I indulged in a yummy new watch. It’s ‘Return on

Investment’ is exponential pleasure. Can’t really do much better than that.

In this season of gift giving I say feed the beast of your wants. Go buy yourself a thing you desire.

According to the AP, Tiger Woods was the outstanding athlete of the decade.  Also making the top six were Lance Armstrong, Roger Federer, Michael Phelps, Tom Brady, and Usain Bolt.

Lists like this list highlight the peculiarities of sports journalism.  Sportswriters commonly fixate on particular sports—men’s cycling, say—to the exclusion of others.  When a particular figure dominates the events they cover, their concentration on those events leaves them with the impression that he is the finest competitor in the world today, if not ever.

They are mistaken.  As anyone who has lived, let alone played organized sports, in the South knows, the best athletes are not playing golf.  Or swimming.  Or riding bicycles.

So, for example, although a golfer in my rural Texas high school won a state championship while I was there, no one thought he was the best athlete in school.  That title went to the fellow who later scored two touchdowns for the Redskins in the Super Bowl, Ricky Sanders.

Sanders simply excelled at football.  Perhaps the high point of his high school career came against our school’s arch-rival.  Sanders intercepted a pass on defense, scored a touchdown on offense, and kicked the extra point in undefeated Belton’s 7-0 victory over previously unbeaten Georgetown.  Both teams were in the state’s top ten.  Ricky was a sophomore.

He also made all-region at basketball and placed in three events—virtually without practicing the entire season—in the state track meet.

Football, basketball, and—why not?—track.  Oh, and I recall watching him loft pitch after softball pitch over the fence at the local baseball field one day.

He didn’t play tennis.  Or swim.  (Swim?  There wasn’t a single school in our district with a pool!)  Or race a bike.  (As I understand it, Texas-born Armstrong took up cycling only after failing at football.)

Why not?  As our head football coach put it one day at practice, gesturing toward the nearby tennis courts, where our school’s team was practicing, “If those guys were men, they’d be out here.”

A few of my teammates and I mocked the coach for this for the rest of my senior season.  “That Jimmy Connors is such a wimp,” I’d laugh as we ran past the tennis players.  “Yeah,” Paul Thorpe chimed in, “and so is Bjorn Borg.”  Yet, the coach’s comment captured an attitude that is very widespread in most of the country.

The finest American athletes play football, basketball, and—to a lesser extent—baseball.  That’s where the money is.  That’s where the fame is.  That’s the macho thing to do.  (Yes, some of them moonlight at track.  Bolt clearly deserves attention, but only because of the extent to which he has improved the world-record times in the sport’s glamor events—the ones every kid has tried.)

As to Woods:  his game is closer to athletic competition than darts, chess, or bowling, I suppose, but to call him a superior athlete to Tim Duncan or Kobe Bryant, Tom Brady or Ray Lewis is absurd.  To throw in Lance Armstrong and Roger Federer among the list of athletes finer than Albert Pujols or Alex Rodriguez is simply to ignore the fact that the best athletes play the glamor games.  I’m betting that not one of those guys took up football, basketball, or baseball because he first failed at cycling.