14 October 2020 After eight full months of the global pandemic, the pressure to keep the economies open and let the chips (or rather, the elderly) fall where they may is growing strong. The ‘Great Barrington Declaration’ of 4 October was signed by three medical professors from Oxford, Harvard and Stanford universities and by tens …
Herd Immunity, Reinfection and the Great Barrington Declaration Read More »
In times of great emergency, when the normal rules have been suspended, all sorts of things that used to seem unthinkable suddenly enter the realm of possibility. A national health service paid for by taxes and free at the point of delivery in the United States, for example – or a guaranteed basic income in …
‘Homo economicus’ is dead. Long live ‘homo tribuarius’! That’s not really something to celebrate, but it’s certainly true that in most democratic countries economic self-interest is no longer the most important factor in voters’ choices. Tribalism of various sorts is taking its place, and that is not an improvement. Take three quite different countries that …
The demonstrations, some of them violent, are still going on in Catalonia a week after Spain’s Supreme Court sentenced nine separatist leaders to between nine and thirteen years in prison for sedition. This was the last thing Spain’s prime minister Pedro Sanchez needed three weeks before a national election in which his Socialist Party was …
It’s been a busy week in Spain. On Tuesday twelve Catalan leaders of the attempted secession from Spain in 2017 went on trial in Madrid, charged with rebellion, sedition and the misuse of public funds. And on Wednesday the Spanish government fell when two small Catalan nationalist parties voted against its budget, essentially to punish …
I’m sitting here trying to write an article about the election in Catalonia on Wednesday, because there’s nothing else to write about. It would be more interesting if the African National Congress, South Africa’s ruling party for the past 23 years, elects a new leader who is not Jacob Zuma’s ex-wife, but the results on …
It’s been going on for a while. “Recently in Catalonia we have been living through a kind of ‘soft’ totalitarianism…the illusion of unanimity created by the fear of expressing dissent,” wrote best-selling Catalan author Javier Cercas in the Spanish newspaper El Pais in 2014. Those who didn’t want independence kept their heads down and their …
Catalonia, the north-eastern region of Spain (population of 7,5 million), declared independence from Spain last Tuesday evening. It was done quite formally, in the regional parliament in Barcelona, with regional president Carles Puigdemont, members of his cabinet and some leaders of other parties signing the independence document. Independence was “the people’s will”, Puigdemont said, referring …
Catalan nationalist leader Carles Puigdemont got most of what he wanted out of the chaotic pseudo-referendum on Sunday: 761 people injured by the Spanish police trying to block it. One or two martyrs dead for the cause of Catalan independence would have been even better, and no doubt the 761 injured include a fair number …
“The EU is dying. I hope we’ve knocked the first brick out of the wall,” exulted Nigel Farage, leader of the United Kingdom Independence Party. He proposed that June 23rd, when the British narrowly voted (51.8 percent of the votes) to leave the European Union, should be a new national holiday called Independence Day. But …
Brexit – and Maybe Then Frexit, Nexit, Swexit, Plexit…? Read More »