There’s an old story variously ascribed to any number of inscrutable Chinese men: how do you get the cat to bite a hot pepper? Zhou En Lai (or Mao, Chiang Kai Chek, or possibly that bloke who taught Grasshopper on the TV) asks his students. ...
If the Dow plunges a thousand points in 10 minutes, what should we do about it? Other than scrape that brown stuff off the insides of our underpants as we contemplate the wreckage of our retirement plans? How about this as a truly radical ...
Yes, it’s Earth Day again, the day we’re all supposed to think about Mother Gaia and what we can do to worship her in the correctly communal and communitarian manner. One little tip for you though (stolen shamelessly from PJ ...
No, you don’t have to be clever or intelligent to either get or be rich. Some achieve great wealth via the Lucky Sperm Club, others through just being in the right place at the right time. Michael Jordan, for example, would not have made a ...
Good looking man who can sing and dance is gay: well, that’s a shocker really, isn’t it? “I am proud to say that I am a fortunate homosexual man. I am very blessed to be who I am.” And with that Ricky Martin ...
What’s wrong with American trade? In short, the people America has negotiating its trade agreements. One Robert E. Lighthizer, a deputy trade rep under Reagan, took to the New York Times this week to tells us all what was wrong with current ...
Kate Winslet and Sam Mendes: Hollywood power couple marriage ends up on the trash heap. Does this come as a surprise to anyone? There are those of us who thought such was inevitable right from the start. The chance that two self-absorbed ...
Much as it pains me to do so I fear that I must praise a left leaning economist. Dean Baker, please stand up and take your bow. He’s told the truth, always a bad career move in the political arena, about the current financial crisis and ...
Much of international discourse, international politics, is all about how they should become more like us. Quite how they should become more like us depends upon the speaker: if it’s Hillary then more attention should be given to strong, ...
I think we’ve found the secret of Paul Krugman you know. No, really, an excellent little piece in the New Yorker gives us what we need to analyze the great man. Yes, he is indeed a great man but like all of us he has his flaws and this piece ...
It’s hardly rare for social climbers on one side of the Atlantic to claim connections with part of the elite on the other side. We had in the UK just recently some no name from flyover country insisting that he was a Rockefeller. Managed to ...
There’s nothing quite like a New York Times columnist for spouting gobbledegook on matters economic: perhaps only the editorials themselves are worse. Tom "Airmiles" Friedman gives us a lovely example here: Banks, multinationals and ...
