"Smoking is one of the leading causes of statistics." - Fletcher Knebel
***
My Favourite Periodical:
November 24th:
"He was once colossally fat. Feeling unwell, he asked his doctor what the problem was. “You're fat,” said the doctor. Mr Huckabee said he wanted a second opinion. “OK, you're ugly, too,” came the reply."
December 8th:
"Nigeria's history of fighting the scourge is not the sort to discourage dealers. Its drug agency, founded in 1990, was immediately immersed in scandal when its own top people were themselves found to be involved in trafficking. At the end of October the country's independent commission on corrupt practices called in the agency's former chairman and eight other officials for questioning over money and drugs missing from an exhibit."
"Richard Cates, the associate special general counsel to the House Judiciary Committee during Richard Nixon's impeachment hearings, told his nephew that law was the only place where reason controls power. Though Mr Lessig's later battle to reverse copyright extensions suggested otherwise, the young man decided that law was the career for him."
"It takes three kilograms of cereals to produce a kilo of pork, eight for a kilo of beef"
Beef should be made haram.
December 15th:
"Newly converted to fiscal constraint, Mr Bush also vetoed a bill to expand children's health insurance."
"In 1903 the trade journal Telephony reported an elderly woman's complaints about her niece, who received a phone call from a male friend while dressing. “The two of them stood talking to one another just as if they were entirely dressed and had stopped for a little chat on the street! I tell you this generation is too much for me,” she grumbled."
January 5th:
"Last month opponents of the pole tax filed for a temporary injunction against it. They argued that nude dancing is a type of expression and that its free exercise should therefore not be inhibited. The judge was unimpressed."
"Brazil is fertile land for Pentecostalism, a strain of Christianity characterised by the belief that God performs miraculous works for his faithful so regularly that they can be written into a timetable... The man behind this religious conglomerate is Edir Macedo, known by his followers as “the Bishop”. One of the world's most successful religious entrepreneurs, he does not give interviews... To sacrifice is divine, he tells the congregation. Maybe so, but to devise ingenious business models is human."
Ooh, dangerous stuff.
[From the same article as the above] "He attacks the Catholic Church for eulogising poverty."
Hands-down, this has got to be the best bit. He might as well attack Jesus.
"As Joaquín Morales Solá, a political analyst, puts it, the Argentine predisposition “is to look for a conspiracy, to see captive courts [in the United States] because Argentina has them. It's a mixture of narcissism and naivety.”"
February 2nd:
"Only seven out of every 100 Asians use deodorants, the company reckons, while many Russians and others use them only for special occasions, such as weddings."
February 9th:
"To arrive at his conclusion that the West is incompetent and Asia competent, Mr Mahbubani has to use a rather distorted view of recent history... Of the four new nuclear-weapons states that have emerged in recent decades, three have been Asian—India, Pakistan and North Korea. Two of those—Pakistan and North Korea—attained their nuclear status with a technological helping hand from China, a country Mr Mahbubani rates as being run by peace-mongering geopolitical geniuses... Mr Mahbubani's argument is... that Asia has been much better at keeping the peace in its region. This view can be sustained only if you ignore the recurrent conflicts between India and Pakistan over Kashmir, and the civil war in Sri Lanka, as well as Asia's closest parallel to the former Yugoslavia, which is Indonesia."
February 16th:
"SIR – Concerning your confusion over the exact nationality of a “renowned” Belgian mathematician (Letters, January 19th). The trouble is that when you are famous, no one knows you're Belgian. And when you are a mathematician, no one knows you're famous.
Edward Whitehead
London"
"Some sites carried advertising suggesting a surprising degree of official entrepreneurship: Bolivia's portal, for instance, had a banner ad for passion.com, which promised “sexy personals for passionate singles”."
"Richard Clayton, a fellow-campaigner, says that personal information should be treated like plutonium pellets: “Kept in secure containers, handled as seldom as possible and escorted whenever it has to travel. Should it get out into the environment, it will be a danger for years to come. Putting it into one huge pile is really asking for trouble.”"
"People who would strongly resist giving any personal information to the government are quite happy for Google to know that they have been searching for “hot Asian babes”."
[On Rowan Williams on Sharia] "Studied closely, the archbishop's speech—and a radio interview he gave the same day—did not read like intentional provocation: it was the sort of intellectual conceit that might have worked well in a theological seminar."
"But who qualifies as a civilian?... many of those who do not carry arms (or wear uniforms) may be very much part of the war effort—ammunition workers, porters, victuallers and the like. And what of the ideologues whose hate-filled doctrines fuel the conflict, the newspaper editors who disseminate the propaganda or the taxpayers who pay for the war? Should they be afforded special protection when the unwilling teenage conscript is not?"
February 23rd:
"TO SEE what the future of film distribution might look like, go to a website called ZML.com. It offers 1,700 films for download to personal computers, iPods or other hand-held devices, or to burn to DVD. It is inviting and easy to use, with detailed descriptions of each movie, editors' picks, customer reviews and screen stills. And the prices are reasonable: “Atonement”, for instance, costs $2.99. There is one small catch: ZML.com is a pirate site."
March 1st:
"FOR a man who has placed “hope” at the centre of his campaign, Barack Obama can sound pretty darned depressing."
"John Reid, a former British home secretary, later described that ruling as “outrageously unbalanced”, famously adding that the European judges “just don't get it”. The rights of the individual had to be balanced against the security interests of the host state, he argued. In this week's ruling the judges have retorted that they did “get it”, and that their opinion remains the same."