"Cameron couldn't galvanise a flea circus."

"As the world found out the hard way in the 1930s and is now discovering afresh, there is quite simply a limit to how much austerity people will swallow."

The Second Coming by William Butler Yeats

Turning and turning in the widening gyre
The falcon cannot hear the falconer;
Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.

Surely some revelation is at hand;
Surely the Second Coming is at hand.
The Second Coming! Hardly are those words out
When a vast image out of Spiritus Mundi
Troubles my sight: somewhere in sands of the desert
A shape with lion body and the head of a man,
A gaze blank and pitiless as the sun,
Is moving its slow thighs, while all about it
Reel shadows of the indignant desert birds.
The darkness drops again; but now I know
That twenty centuries of stony sleep
Were vexed to nightmare by a rocking cradle,
And what rough beast, its hour come round at last,
Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?

Two articles in the left wing media about the same man. Fascinatingly different interpretations.

Niall Ferguson: admirable historian, or imperial mischief maker?

Niall Ferguson and the brain-dead American right.

El Greco, View of Toledo, ~1600

Currently reading He Died with His Eyes Open by Derek Raymond. A London based noir police detective novel populated by East End gangster types. Compelling.

"There were only four drunks in there when I arrived; also an attractive dwarf with big breasts who had once got a Cabinet minister busted. I ordered a ring-a-ding and drank it alone, slowly, at the end of the bar, staring into the glass."

20 hour Yale course on Hemingway, Fitzgerald, and Faulkner

David Foster Wallace

"All things are subject to interpretation. Whichever interpretation prevails at a given time is a function of power and not truth." ~ Friedrich Nietzsche

Black Rebel Motorcycle Club, Whatever Happened to my Rock 'n Roll

Going further than we have ever been before.

"Dream no small dreams for they have no power to move the hearts of men." ~ Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

mono no aware

Herzog & de Meuron and Ai Weiwei's Serpentine Pavillion

“The need to let suffering speak is a condition of all truth. For suffering is objectivity that weighs upon the subject..." ~ Theodor Adorno

"...we drifted from having a market economy to becoming a market society" ~ Professor Michael Sandel.

You can watch his full Harvard course on Justice here.

The way Curiosity is deployed onto Mars is pretty much the coolest thing.