"If little else, the brain is an educational toy." - Tom Robbins

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My Favourite Periodical:


September 13th:

"In her idiosyncratic way, Mrs Palin also represents the fulfilment of the feminist dream. She demonstrates that gender is no longer a barrier to success in one of the most conservative corners of the land, the Alaska Republican Party. She also proves that you can be a career woman without needing to subscribe to any fixed feminist ideology. Camille Paglia hails her as the biggest step forward for feminism since Madonna. One can argue, as we have, that it was astoundingly reckless of Mr McCain to have picked her on the basis of having once met her for 15 minutes. But if feminism means, at its core, that women should be able to compete equally in the workplace while deciding for themselves how they organise their family life, then Mrs Palin deserves to be treated as a pioneer, not dismissed as a crackpot."


September 20th:

"Things have been so good that perfume-makers face a new product-liability problem in Russia, where oligarchs’ girlfriends buy dozens of bottles in order to bathe in a fragrance, unaware that this can be deadly."

“The extractive industries, firms like Shell, got the message about political risk 30 years ago, but most of the Fortune 100 weren’t thinking this way until recently,” says Mr Bremmer. “Corporates in the tech area are among the worst, perhaps because their management is suffused with engineers.”


September 27th:

"I was surprised at your positive treatment of Islamic finance (“Savings and souls”, September 6th). Islamic finance taps into a captive market where people pay a premium in order to buy products that differ mostly in semantic terms from their mainstream alternatives.

These products are sanctioned by a select group of self-appointed scholars, who receive a tidy fee for their troubles, and have an interest in maintaining strict barriers to entry. Most users of such products doubtless do so sincerely, but I expected you to condemn those who sell them as old-fashioned rent-seekers.

Philip Blue
London"

"Muslims the world over poured scorn on Sheikh Muhammad Munjad, a puritanical Palestinian preacher, when he suggested earlier this month, on a Saudi television show, that since mice are abhorrent to God, Mickey Mouse deserved to die."


"Far from being some newfangled experiment of the 1990s, humanitarian intervention was a relatively familiar practice in Europe in the 19th century, Mr Bass says, and was understood as such, not just by the intervening countries, but also by those whose sovereignty was being violated. Then, as now, states would sometimes seek to cloak their rapacious imperialist designs in sanctimonious humanitarian rhetoric. But politicians are not always cynics or hypocrites, at least not always totally so, he argues. On occasion, states are genuinely driven by morality, even when it goes against their own interests.

Britain’s campaign against the slave trade and then slavery itself was waged at the cost of severe damage to its sugar industry, the souring of its relations with America and France, and the loss of some 5,000 British troops’ lives. Indeed, throughout the 19th century, Mr Bass says, Britain repeatedly went against its own realpolitik interests—notably its desire to check Russian expansionism—out of a genuine sense of humanity.

The doctrine of national sovereignty has always been fairly flexible, he argues. “Do not let me be told that one nation has no authority over another,” Gladstone thundered in 1894: “Every nation, and if need be every human being, has authority on behalf of humanity and of justice.”"


October 4th:

"One Confucian Chinese says with a rueful smile that most of the pretty girls at university were Christians–and would date only other Christians."

"Barack Obama does not let his audiences forget that he will not hire or take money from lobbyists. But he cheerfully collects donations from lobbyists’ relations, lobbyists can volunteer to advise his campaign, and he rakes in tens of millions of dollars from lawyers. Mr Obama has certainly taken cash from lobbyists in the past"

[On Obama] "His voting record is one of the most liberal in the Senate, but in his books, he tends to present two sides of each policy argument without reaching many firm conclusions. During the campaign he has tacked to the centre. Even professional observers are now thoroughly unsure what he stands for."

"Apologies for past wrongs by present-day institutions are trickier still. Jonathan Sumption, a London lawyer and historian, calls them “a vulgar anachronism”—in effect, he says, “a rebuke to the past for not being more like the present”. Trading apologies and forgiveness on behalf of dead people sounds phoney—especially when the issue is centuries old (such as Viking rape and pillage in Ireland, which Denmark’s culture minister Brian Mikkelson bemoaned in 2007). Collective guilt is an odd idea even in the present (and has often been, Mr Sumption notes, the root of just the kind of massacres for which people are now apologising)."


October 11th:

"The Economist supporting a massive bail-out? Now I’ve seen everything. The only thing left to do is change the name of your newspaper to The Communist.

Carlos Ferrero
Salamanca, Spain"


October 18th:

[On a Rush Visa pre-paid charge card] "“This card is meant to get people laid, get them feeling dignity,” he says."


October 25th:

"You always bandy about the phrase “mildly Islamist” in articles on Indonesia and Turkey; indeed, you seem incapable of writing “Islamist” in any context other than suicidal fanaticism without putting “mildly” in front of it. Religion is not mild. It is a deep and abiding belief in the righteousness of one’s personal God that when unconstrained in government translates into correspondingly uncompromising legislation. The ransacked mosques in Jakarta of Ahmadiyah, a moderate Muslim sect, and the dwindling Christian populations of eastern Turkey are witness to the effects of even “mildly” dogmatic policy.

It is not the charters of religious parties that preserve the freedoms of non-believers in Indonesia and Turkey, but the safeguard institutions of, respectively, pancasila and the secular military, without which your favourite adverb would be mildly inaccurate.

Drew Newman
Jakarta"

"I find it somewhat inconsistent that as a society we are more than happy to profit from the sale of alcohol or cigarettes, the abuse of which indisputably causes medical harm or death, yet we squirm at the concept of creating a financial market for organ donations, which saves lives. As more and more people die needlessly, we might finally end up with a donation system that maximises utility of what shouldn’t be a scarce resource.

Austin Locke
New York"


"Other evidence does indeed show that homosexuals tend to be “gender atypical” in areas beside their choice of sexual partner. Gay men often see themselves as being more feminine than straight men do, and, mutatis mutandis, the same is true for lesbians. To a lesser extent, homosexuals tend to have gender-atypical careers, hobbies and other interests.

Personality tests also show differences, with gay men ranking higher than straight men in standardised tests for agreeableness, expressiveness, conscientiousness, openness to experience and neuroticism. Lesbians tend to be more assertive and less neurotic than straight women."


"Mark Abler, a Canadian writer, says the protection of endangered species is closely linked to the preservation of tongues. On a recent expedition in Australia, a rare turtle was found to have two varieties; a dying but rich native language, Gagudju, had different words for each kind."
Wth?! They're really desperate.


November 1st:

"Your rather sombre defence of capitalism reminded me of the late John Kenneth Galbraith, who said once that one of man’s oldest exercises in moral philosophy is the search for a superior moral justification for selfishness.

Murali Reddy
Lake Hiawatha, New Jersey"

"The French seem extraordinarily tolerant about being spied on in their daily life. The tradition reaches back far, and not only to dark times under Nazi occupation. Recently published archive documents from the Paris police headquarters include a leather-bound volume of intelligence files on 415 prostitutes, and two registers containing files on 1,200 homosexuals—all collected by police spies under Napoleon III."

"As a rule of thumb—call it the Richard Scarry rule—politicians will rarely challenge interests that feature in children’s books: such as farmers, fishermen, firemen and those that build exciting things. Mr Sarkozy told the European Parliament recently that EU leaders had a duty to ensure Europe could “continue to build aeroplanes, boats, trains and cars”... Mario Monti, a former EU competition commissioner, recalls how finance ministers would often visit Brussels, begging him to rule against subsidies they had promised to some local company, perhaps in the heat of an electoral campaign. They were “delighted” whenever he promised to block the state aid—with the understanding that, of course, they would condemn the commission’s move in public."

[On penalising Johns rather than Hos] "A sex-workers’ association in Sweden says the law makes life dangerous for those who ply their trade secretly. A life of dodging between apartments and exchanging furtive texts can leave women more reliant on pimps. Another argument is that fear of prosecution reduces the chances that clients will report the exploitation of under-age girls or boys."

"In 2003, [New Zealand] decriminalised the sex trade with a boldness that exceeded that of the Dutch. Sex workers were allowed to ply their trade more or less freely, either at home, in brothels or on the street. A study published by the government in May, measuring the impact of the new law, was encouraging. More than 60% of prostitutes felt they had more power to refuse clients than they did before. The report reckoned that only about 1% of women in the business were under the legal age of 18. And only 4% said they had been pressured into working by someone else... One unusual investigation concluded that from the prostitutes’ point of view, the New Zealand system was the fairest. A pair of British grandmothers from the Women’s Institute—a homely club that is more often associated with cooking tips [gave] top marks went to a discreet house in a suburb of Wellington—classed in New Zealand as a “small owner-operated brothel”—where two women offered their services from Mondays to Fridays. “Just like a regular job,” one of the grannies noted."

"Chanel’s logo is a pair of entwined “Cs”, the initials of the company’s founder, Coco Chanel, but given the price of Chanel’s wares the letters could just as easily stand for “credit crunch”."


November 8th:

[On war denial] "The public reaction to the affair reinforces how beleaguered these days are Japan’s history-deniers, says Jeffrey Kingston, a historian of Asia at Temple University in Tokyo. Even Yasukuni has toned down the exhibits in its notorious museum, where until recently militarism was celebrated and all atrocities denied. The most notable denial was of the Nanjing massacre of tens (or possibly hundreds) of thousands of Chinese in December 1937. Now the museum admits that killings took place, but suggests they were of enemy soldiers disguised as civilians."

"Esmeray wields a sharp tongue to expose the systematic violence faced by fellow transvestites. “I am a Kurd, a transvestite and a feminist, so I am screwed all round,” she says."

[On Patty Hearst and her time] "Some of this effort, however, stretches credulity: the break-up of the Beatles and the fact that Paul McCartney played all the instruments on “The Lovely Linda” are apparently proof of “the transition from group to individual”."