I have watched many Youtube videos with the former Greek minister of finance, including television interviews, academic debates and a radio appearance in Australia commenting on the Greek elections as a young economics PhD. The man talks brilliantly. Because he speaks with an Oxbridge accent and adorns his well-formed sentences with tangible metaphors, he brings a …
Dear Miru, Today, I want to tell you about Education. Even if we would want them to, our children don’t accept the concept of schooling as the transfer of a canon of established facts. They are so much used to Wikipedia and Google that it would be practically impossible to convince them that carrying knowledge …
Our letter ‘A’ started his career as Aleph, the first letter of the semitic abjads or writing systems, including Aramaic, Syriac, Phoenician, Arabic, Armenian, and Hebrew. The Phoenician letter was derived from an Egyptian glyph depicting the head of an ox. The Greek alfa has its origin in this Phoenician letter, and it’s obvious how …
We no longer understand economy as the study of human interaction under the conditions of scarcity. As production tends to near zero marginal cost, the manufacturing of artificial scarcity becomes more difficult every day. If only capital wasn’t biased towards scarce resources and abundant labor to exploit, but adapted to a world of abundant resources …
Margrit Kennedy, who died two years ago today, was one of the greatest advocates of an interest and inflation free money system. She was among the first to predict that we “cannot have infinite growth on a finite planet”. Of course this is true. Logically, there are two ways out. We can try to stop …
I want to describe this Christmas market with its two santa clauses with its smell of burning sugar and nuts its pointy shoed elves, its fake snow on miniature chalets, its happy tunes its steel frames covered with fake silk flowers its plastic mistletoes in the flickering light with a language that isn’t subject to …
dark waves pound the steep cliffs below where the sea is great and never settles i dream to find shelter, to house in her to return to those first beginnings to access the experience, to welcome the waves when they roll home to me and my love. i whisper to her, stay because of everything we buried …
On my screen is a translation of European data protection law. On my ears is Beethoven’s seventh. A major. I listen to one of the greatest geniuses of our modernity. My fingers are moving with every measure. The vacuity of the language I observe, as it emerges on my screen suddenly enables me to see …
Christopher Hitchens died four years ago today. Of course, he went far too early. We need “contrarian” intellectuals like him more than ever, to put into words what we would call the enlightened position on the Issue, because there really is only one Issue left. Call it the refugee crisis, call it climate change, call …
Most activists are frustrated when their opponent in a debate reduces citizen influence to consumer choices. They can’t stand people who still live in their liberal fairy tale world where the consumer votes with her wallet and from the sum total of consumers, in good Rousseauian fashion, emerges the volonté generale and determines the destiny …
An almost three-year old girl draws on everything. Miru takes her color pencils and makes her mark on the vocabulary cards that her mother has prepared for her early childhood education. Her third birthday is less than a month away and we think it’s great when she learns a lot now, while her need to …
During a ride share with Blablacar from Berlin to Utrecht there was a little incident. A Peruvian passenger ignited my anger when he agreed with developing country’s leaders who are selling out their natural resources, such as Ecuador’s president Rafael Correa does with his country’s oil reserves that happens to be underneath tropical forest. “Fuck …
Imagine the following scenario. A person who has noticed that the president’s hair has turned grey posts on social media that she suggests he should dye it. Having grown up in a very poor neighbourhood she had not been able to finish school, so she confused orthographical acuity with onomatopoeic precision and spelled it thus: …
I don’t like to write about the same topic twice, but in the case of hypocrisy I’m glad to make an exception. In what follows I promote an enhanced flavour of it, so those who believe hypocrisy to be intrinsically unsuitable as a starting point are advised to browse elsewhere. The word ὑπόκρισις is an …
