Apologies to all my countless readers in the blogosphere for being remiss in offering recent posts. (I bet at least 25% of all blog postings consist of similar apologies.) It’s just that as I approached the end of my employment with “A Once-Leading Irish Software Company, Erstwhile Great White Hope of the Dotcom Bubble”, I […]

From Seymour M. Hersh’s article in this week’s New Yorker:”The immediate goals of the attacks would be to destroy, or at least temporarily derail, Iran�s ability to go nuclear. But there are other, equally purposeful, motives at work. The government consultant told me that the hawks in the Pentagon, in private discussions, have been urging […]

You write a post about the lingering fascination of Nazism and what happens? The nice-but-dim third-in-line to the British throne is snapped wearing a swastika armband. Considering the Windsors are about as British as bratwurst, such antics were likely to prod the broadsheets into dredging up the Royal Family’s (and particularly King Edward VIII’s) rather […]

The Dutch novelist Harry Mulisch once said something along the lines of the Second World War cannot really be said to be over until parents could innocently name their child “Adolf.” That day seems to be retreating further into the future, in part due to excellent programs such as the BBC’s Auschwitz: The Nazis and […]

When the smoking ban in enclosed places was introduced in Ireland, many remarked that such a prohibition would never even be mooted in Southern Europe, with its bars and cafes perpetually wreathed in tobacco fumes. Well it’s happened in Italy and my fellow Three Monkey’s blogger “The View from Bologna” reports on how the new […]

American radio isn’t all shockjocks and foaming-at-the-mouth evangelicals–National Public Radio (NPR) is sort of like an American version of BBC Radio 4, which makes it an object of fear-and-loathing among those who think Ann Coulter is a rational human being. (Her latest musings ooze under the rubric “Liberals Love America Like O.J. Loved Nicole“.) But […]

Here are three things, tenuously connected, I’d like to mention today:*Contrary to previously expressed hopes that the Indian Ocean disaster might encourage a new generation of sceptics, this Washington Post headline doesn’t bode well: ‘In Angry Waves, the Devout See an Angry God.‘ *As the Economist pointed out, this is not the worst loss of […]

To that appalling spectacle of woe,Will ye reply: �You do but illustrateThe iron laws that chain the will of God�?Say ye, o�er that yet quivering mass of flesh:�God is avenged: the wage of sin is death�?What crime, what sin, had those young hearts conceivedThat lie, bleeding and torn, on mother�s breast?Did fallen Lisbon deeper drink […]

In those happy years before background checks and random drug tests become the norm, the ranks of store Santas in the US came from a far richer and diverse cross-section of humanity. At least if the evidence of these photos is any guide. (And what can you say about the rheumy-eyed character in this slide?)Well, […]