"The trouble with being poor is that it takes up all of your time." - Willem de Kooning

***

My Favourite Periodical:

"Most of America's intellectual centres are firmly in the grip of the left-liberal establishment. For all their talk of “diversity” American universities are allergic to a diversity of ideas. Washington is one of the few cities where conservatives regularly do battle with liberals." (October 6th)


October 13th:

[On the Japanese Sumo Association] "In the past, the JSA sued publications for defamation following articles that alleged match-fixing. Now they have a lot more on their hands."

"He is instinctively sympathetic to anyone on the anti-Bush team, but he can't help noticing what ghastly people some of them are. He meets... bloggers who think that profanity is an adequate substitute for thought. He is clearly shocked to discover that Markos Moulitsas Zuniga, a blogger so influential that party leaders prostrate themselves before him, knows practically nothing about policy or anything that occurred before 1998. He also treats his fans with disdain and coldly urges the Democratic Party to do the wrong thing if it might be politically advantageous.

By far the nicest and most reasonable folk in Mr Bai's account are the politicians themselves. He describes how Barack Obama was hounded for advocating politeness towards people with whom one disagrees. And he watches Mark Warner, a moderate and popular ex-governor of Virginia who is hoping to run for the Senate, try but fail to woo the netroots. At a bloggers' convention, Mr Warner denounced the Iraq war, a stance he thought progressive bloggers would applaud. Instead, they harangued him—because he, like Mr Bush, had suggested that Iran was a threat. “To the bloggers”, says Mr Bai, “if Bush said the sky was blue, then it was green.”"


October 20th:

"Traditionally, India has been one of the few countries in which sales of men's clothes have outstripped women's."

[On Allan Zeeman and Ocean Park in Hong Kong] "He relented after his sixth refusal, perhaps reasoning that since he had built successful saloons without being a drinker himself, he could run an amusement park without having taken a ride."
All theory no practice works!


October 27th:

[On the Pope's attacking labour laws] "The devout, though, may also care to reflect on the parable of the workers in the vineyard (Matthew 20:1-16). This describes how an employer recruited labourers on (very) short-term contracts and paid them equally, regardless of their hours. The evangelist did not demur. But Benedict, presumably, would not have approved."

"War and politics visibly intertwined with music in the 20th century, under totalitarianism and after it. As Mr Ross documents, classical music blared constantly in the choreographed background to Nazi life. For a time, the classical repertoire was deemed to have lost its moral stature because of the Nazis' embrace. This was one reason why some composers tried to scrap classical forms and explore the alternatives, leading to the dissonant pandemonium of experimental music in the 1950s. Theodor Adorno, a left-wing sociologist and musician, wrote in 1949 that preserving tonality betrayed a fascist mentality."


November 3rd:

"SIR – I was amazed to learn on a visit to Cornwall about 30 years ago that Cornish nationalists were campaigning for a revival of the Cornish language. I was even more amazed to read that they have succeeded (“Back from the dead”, October 20th). Reviving a dead language must be about the most useless activity for humanity to engage in.

Rodney Angove
Mountain View, California"

"GLOBAL capitalism has worked many wonders, but where in the free world can one see 10,000 children dancing in synchronisation, dressed as eggs? Such weirdness makes North Korea, a basket-case state, a must for a certain sort of backpacker."

[On their report on religion and public life] "Given the emotion the subject arouses, the chances are that some of what follows will offend you. "
Given that they know they are going to offend people, they should be charged under Section 298 of the Penal Code: Uttering words, etc., with deliberate intent to wound the religious feelings of any person

"Christianity advanced from an obscure sect to the official religion of the Roman empire by focusing on women. Christians stressed fidelity and marriage, which attracted women to the faith, who then bore Christian babies."

"To understand the competitive mechanism, you need only two sacred texts. The first is “The Wealth of Nations”, in which Adam Smith argues that the free market works in religion as in everything else. Non-established clergy, who rely on the collection plate, show greater “zeal” in proselytising “the inferior ranks of people” than the established, salaried sort, who are more interested in sucking up to clerical bigwigs. Europe has been a textbook illustration of this"

"The second lesson from Korea is that hotter religion does better. In the 1960s it was thought that if any sort of religion would survive, it would be the reasonable and ecumenical sort—intellectual Anglicanism, say, or Graham Greene's doubting Catholicism. In fact, certainty has proved much easier to market. In America the famously tolerant Episcopal Church (which recently elected a gay bishop) has been in decline; the Southern Baptists (who in 1988 denounced homosexuality as “a manifestation of a depraved nature”) have jumped forward... In global terms the most remarkable religious success story of the past century has been the least intellectual (and most emotive) religion of all. Pentecostalism"

"Heat in religion does not necessarily generate light. Relatively few Muslims have actually read all of the Koran, and although 83% of Americans regard the Bible as the word of God, half of them do not know who preached the Sermon on the Mount."
I prefer how 12% of Americans think Joan of Arc was Noah's wife.

"By some counts there are at least 500m declared non-believers in the world—enough to make atheism the fourth-biggest religion."

[On India] "Muslims are allowed to live by their own family law and enjoy plenty of positive discrimination, including subsidies to fly to Mecca."

"One great irony of the war on terror is that although George Bush has declared war upon jihadism, his enemies devote very little energy to fighting him. The jihadists' main war is not against the West but against apostate Muslim regimes"

"Upmarket escort agencies target almost all publications—including, believe it or not, this one."