Every few years my CD player stops working properly and I need to go buy another one. After all, I have a library of about 300 CDs that I have paid good money for and should listen to more often. However, this is 2020, not 1990. I bought myself this iMac almost 18 months ago …
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Love (or Trade War) in the Time of Cholera (or Coronavirus)
In one of the early seasons of The Simpsons, there is an episode ‘Lisa The Beauty Queen’ where Lisa is runner up for the Little Miss Springfield pageant and then becomes Little Miss Springfield after the winner gets struck by lightning. Lisa being Lisa, she is not content to be a figurehead for the powerful …
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Anthem for A Trade War
http://www.youtube.com/watch As a twelve year old I liked this song. As an awake (not ‘woke’) fifty one year old I love it! Postscript- not sure that the link works but the song is Pell Mell ‘No Word From China’ . YouTube, you are unfit for purpose.
Australia Must Not Finlandize: Selling Our Birthright For Red Pottage
I recently read Jarrod Diamond’s latest book, Catastrophe, in which he discusses how various countries he knows well have dealt with an existentialist crisis facing them. One of those is Australia. The first country he writes about in his book is far flung Finland, somewhere on the far side of the world close to the …
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They gave the Nobel Prize to the wrong Dylan
Rodney Dangerfield was, in my view, rather intellectually underrated. His movie characters tended to be crass and nouveau rich, but rather than showing that money can’t buy you class, they showed up the posh snobs with inherited money, who might have more refined accents and manners, but who were far more ruthless and grasping. That …
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Then There Were Giants…
To the Barricades? A Pro-Free Market Capitalist Case for the Occupy Movement
Let me start by saying that despite the suggestiveness of the heading of this posting, I am not announcing a Road To Damascus style conversion to Marxism, socialism, or even social democracy. I remain a cultural conservative with a commitment to politically and economically libertarian values (much as I dislike the word ‘libertarian’). But I …
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Is it time to look a Gift Horse in the Mouth (or Mask)?
About seven years ago, I made a very speculative (and ultimately spectacularly unsuccessful) investment in a venture which was seeking to close a deal to clean up some of the abundant pollution in mainland China. As I trusted the friend who put me onto this (despite his starting to live a fantasy life approaching that …
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The Upside of Living in a ‘Provincial’ City
There is a saying I read somewhere several years ago, but which I cannot attribute to any source (believe me, I tried to find one today), which goes along the lines of: ‘Blessed is the country without a history.’ This is because when you look at the details in history, you usually find the four …
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The Strange and Highly Dickensian Case of Puneet Puneet
As a general rule (with a few exceptions like A Tale of Two Cities), I dislike reading Charles Dickens. I find him verbose and preachy and most of his characters are mere caricatures. When reading The Old Curiosity Shop, I found that I wanted to punch the grandfather in the face, he was so exasperating. …
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Lost For Words! 