Spain is just below the OECD mean on both GDP per capita and learning skills. Catalonia, being a rich region, is slightly better than the national average and does worst in reading skills, probably because half the population are prevented from learning in their mother tongue. The regional education councillor, Marta Cid, is incredibly proud…
According to a book by ex-spook F Hoekstra, the Dutch Secret Service (BVD) set up a Maoist party, the Marxist-Leninist Party Netherlands (MLPN), to figure out the extent and nature of Chinese influence among students and scientists in the 70s. Operation Mongol was so successful that Holland’s genuine Maoist parties didn’t get any of the…
Burglar and ex-Libertines singer Pete Doherty was caught in June carrying a flick knife. “If the law was to send me to prison it wouldn’t be able to look itself in the eye,” he commented after yesterday’s hearing, in what critics are taking as a clear rejection of the post-Surrealist aesthetic currently sweeping East London…
Re Mark Liberman’s European Politics 101, I’d have thought that one would describe Derrida and Habermas as conservatives not because of any association with any particular dogma but because they both clearly long for times past. The 70s, let us not forget, were a period which combined rampant collectivism with reasonable sales for the writings…
Interlingua is a highly user-friendly language with a pedigree that is a bagful of doughnuts better than bitter, twisted Esperanto. Try this: Interlingua es un lingua international facile e de aspecto natural elaborate per linguistas professional como un denominator commun del linguas le plus diffundite in le mundo in le dominios del scientia, cultura, commercio,…
I always thought that a commodity was an article that could be traded, and that time (99-year lease, delivery in October, they’ve already started rotting) was a major determinant of price. Not so in the Guardian, where Hugh Muir writes of Simon Hughes’ moribund campaign to become London mayor that The Liberal Democrats need a…
We already knew from a footnote in Marx’s Capital that the Scottish industrialist Peter Fairbairn, who based his life and business in Leeds and was city mayor, “discovered several very important applications of machinery to the construction of machines as a result of strikes in his own factory.” Now Oxford has digitised a number of…
Lluís Foix is another of the lost old fools who wander round La Vanguardia gabbling the ultra-conservative mantras of the Franco era, but with a Catalan accent, bien entendu. Lying (sorry: publishing extraordinary errors of fact) about America has been an integral part of La Vanguardia’s corporate culture for a very long time, and Mr…