Russia drove its tanks and fired its missiles over the international rule book this week and launched an unprovoked attack on neighbouring Ukraine, unleashing a new war in Europe. Who wins the award for the most fatuous and fantastical depiction of the now red-hot Cold War? It is an overcrowded field, but the clear winner [...]
Lebanese American polymath Nassim Nicholas Taleb has gifted the world with imperishable ideas wrapped in memorable metaphors. In 2007 he published his ground-breaking book The Black Swan which illustrated the chaos caused by unpredictable, unprecedented events occurring outside the range of predictive probabilities bringing severe consequences in their wake. Some years before its publication, the late US [...]
Business Day’s recent front-page lead story might have tricked some readers into imagining they had stumbled back into a pre-Jurassic political age (“Job reservation is on the cards, government confirms”, February 13). The headline topped an article detailing neither a paean to Pan-Africanism nor a decent stab at promoting the country’s economic wellbeing. Rather it [...]
In the 2016 US presidential election, American satirist and mainstream conservative PJ O’Rourke endorsed Hillary Clinton with a magnificent backhander: “I am endorsing Hillary, and all her lies and all her empty promises. It’s the second-worst thing that can happen to this country, but she’s way behind in second place. She’s wrong about absolutely everything, [...]
