Jan
31
2015
...a poitician for all that. If it didn't mean I'd also be voting for Cameron and Osborne I'd vote for him. But he's also a supporter of fracking. I went to see him and pointed out that the only...
Jan
30
2015
The way in which the three institutions were set up increased even further the American grip, or perhaps more importantly the potential American grip, over the world economy. The value of the dollar was set at 1/35th of an...
Jan
29
2015
Keynes’s scheme was in fact applying two classic principles of banking to the international scene. One was that the overall credit and debit accounts must be in balance. What has been deposited with the bank must equal the sum...
Jan
27
2015
It was, of course , unimagineably terrible and it is fitting that we have a Holocaust Memorial Day lest we forget it. Yet I’m wondering, too, whether mixed in with it all there isn’t something of that commonest of...
Jan
26
2015
Secular rationalists are always trying to debunk religious myths but invariably substitute even more fantastic ones of their own. Did you ever anything so grandiosely crackers as Marx’s dialectical materialism? And if you read The Origin of Species you...
Jan
24
2015
The economic shape of the modern world was decided at a meeting of British and American treasury officials, at a conference in a small American town in New Hampshire, called Bretton Woods, in 1944. Out of this meeting were...
Jan
23
2015
For a long time scientists have been telling us that so long as we kept average rise in global temperature below 2C, which might happen if carbon in the atmosphere rose to 450 parts per million, then there would...
Jan
22
2015
Anybody who knows anything about adolescent human males knows that the very last way to stop young Muslims going to Syria is to tell imams to lecture them even more sternly. These people are above all romantics. The right...
Jan
21
2015
We have little direct evidence of what Galileo’s feelings were about his experiments because, unlike Darwin, he has left us no autobiography, nor, as in the case of Newton, a hoard of secret documents recording his inmost thoughts only...
Jan
20
2015
7 a.m. The first new light of the year stealing into the day as softly and gently as - but what could be softer and gentler and more beautiful than light?