James Wimberley

For a year French opinion polls have consistently given François Hollande the forecast of a comfortable victory over Nicolas Sarkozy in the second round of the French presidential election. It seems extraordinarily unlikely that Sarkozy will pull some rabbit out of the hat in the next 10 days: the massacre by nutter-terorist Mohamed Merah in […]

What happens when Rupert Murdoch dies? Since he’s made fortunes by pandering to the public’s voyeurism about the private life of every other celebrity in the world, he and his adult family are fair game for less idle speculation. There’s a strong public-interest defence. Paris Hilton, English football referees, and the Queen of Great Britain […]

Joachim Gauck has been elected President of Germany. Very much against Angela Merkel’s wishes, but the two previous Presidents, unremarkable warhorses from her own CDU party, both resigned in disgrace and Gauck became inevitable. He’s the dream candidate to everybody who isn’t Chancellor and wants an invisible head of state rather than a possibly inconvenient […]

In what I named the “dumbest blog post of 2011“, economist Karl Smith conceded that There will be large environmental costs associated with climate change includ[ing] a very rapid increase in extinctions but we should ignore this and pursue the development of fossil fuels as rapidly as possible including looking for ways to streamline regulation […]

Campaigning Republicans are banging the patriotic and Israel-first drums for a preventive war against Iran, allegedly to stop it from deploying atomic weapons: though how this is supposed to work without a full-scale invasion and 20,000 American dead is left studiously unclear. “Surgical” air strikes, perhaps? Pillar: As Richard Betts remarks in his recent book […]

The blogosphere is unnecessarily puzzled by Mitt Romney’s repeated claims, to audiences of Michigan Republicans, that The trees are the right height. I explained all this a fortnight ago. The question whether trees have the “right height” has meaning only for large, long-necked herbivores; in our day giraffes, in the Jurassic many different and much […]

In the GOP, there is, or was, a horse-race for the Presidential nomination: strike that as unfair to horses, and the race has been won by the Vulcan ahead of the circus barker and the various escapees from their carers. We know the platform already: soak the poor and the middle class, . On the […]

Support for carbon taxes is related to geography, not just political ideology. It’s also important to look at identification driven by the production of energy. Miners, and people who live in communities dependent on coal, will be pro-coal; so Wyoming is Republican, and the Democrats are losing West Virginia. Similarly roughnecks and their communities in […]

My nomination (within a circle of prima facie grownups who should know better, omitting children and wingnuts) goes to economist Karl Smith’s post of 2 December on climate change. This is bravely entitled “In Praise of Dirty Energy: There Are Worse Things Than Pollution and We Have Them”. Samples: We should pursue the development of […]

For Kenneth Clark, it was “the greatest small painting in the world.” It’s certainly a masterpiece – and a puzzle. Why did the Umbrian master Piero della Francesca choose around 1450 to paint an overworked stock subject, the Flagellation of Christ, in this extraordinary way? The Flagellation of Christ, Piero della Francesca, ca, 1450 Source: […]