1 March 2021 If Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, the de facto ruler of Saudi Arabia, were a burglar, he wouldn’t be George Clooney in ‘Ocean’s Eleven’. He’d be a cartoon burglar in a carnival mask and a top with black-and-white horizontal stripes, carrying a sack labelled ‘SWAG’. He’s not a burglar, of course. He’s …
Khashoggi and the Gang Who Couldn’t Shoot Straight Read More »
24 February 2021 To those who obsessively followed the Covid websites over the past eleven months (including me, I must admit), one thing demanded an explanation above all: why were the worst death rates-per-million in the richest, most developed countries, and in the United States and the United Kingdom most of all? Bits of the …
22 February 2021 Texas puts out more carbon dioxide than any other US state, so there was some innocent amusement to be had from the indignation of Texans unable to boil their drinking water during the Big Freeze because the power was still out. Things like that are not supposed to happen in a modern, …
17 February 2021 Dubai can be amusing, in a voyeuristic way, for a week or two. Tallest building in the world and the mall with the shark tank, but it’s the people, really. There are a quarter-million expats, mostly British or American, living much higher on the hog than they ever could at home – …
15 February 2021 The self-esteem of two-year-olds and nation-states is too fragile for them to admit they were wrong, which makes it hard for them to move on from blunders. That’s why the toys don’t get picked up and the broken treaties don’t get fixed, and why there may be a tantrum (in the case …
10 February 2021 It seemed innocent enough at the start: just a surge in the number of boys coming to school with notes from doctors saying they were excused from playing contact sports. But pretty soon high schools all over China were having trouble finding enough willing young men to make up a football team. …
The Proposal to Prevent the Feminisation of Male Adolescents Read More »
7 February 2021 If the Republican Party splits, what name should the breakaway part use? The White People’s Insurrectionary Libertarian True-Blood Republican Party (WPILTBRP), or just the Trump Party? Or maybe the hijacker-in-chief gets to keep the name of the party he stole, in which case the rump has to come up with something completely …
3 February 2021 China’s Xinhua news agency tactfully described the Burmese army’s seizure of power on Monday as a ‘cabinet reshuffle’. This suggests a possible new approach for Donald Trump’s legal team as he faces a second impeachment trial, but it won’t work, for two reasons. One, Trump’s coup attempt failed. Two, people got killed. …
1 February 2021 My wife and I had our first shots of a Covid-19 vaccine this weekend (Astra-Zeneca, since you ask), and none of our children are old enough to be particularly vulnerable. I therefore no longer have a dog in this fight, and can write with godlike impartiality about who else should get the …
27 January 2021 They were planning to put on a play written by an artificial intelligence programme in Prague this month, to mark the invention of robots (or at least the idea of robots) in the same city exactly one hundred years ago. Covid-19 got in the way of that, and it will now only …