Farmer Diaries

I lived in the UK, first as a student and later as a banker.  London is an amazing city, but the spectacle of the city  (and as a microcosm for the country as a whole) was to behold in the early 1980s.  It is hard to express how London was "failing apart" during that time (yes Thatcher was prime minister, but had not yet embarked on her fight against the coal miners' union).  You could see the rot as it were. Over the last few nights violence has exploded in the city, first it appears caused by the death of a young black man, 20 yards from his home in troubling circumstances.   Penny Red , and Englishwomen blogger wrote the following: Riots are about power, and they are about catharsis. They are not about poor parenting, or youth services being cut, or any of the other snap explanations that media pundits have been trotting out: structural inequalities, as a friend of mine remarked today, are not solved by a few pool tables. People riot because ...

Ms. Frozen in the North and I enjoy two reality shows: The Amazing Race and Survivor, the first where contestant race around the world the other where they are left stranded on an Island, a-la-Robinson-Crusoe mold. Last Sunday while watching the Amazing race the ignorance of the average American amazed both my wife and I, the contestants were given a picture of a women waving from an official car, and they had to figure out where this picture was taken. Immediately, my wife and I recognized Jackie Kennedy -- wife of JFK, but none of the contestants recognized her! Not one, not even the "old guy" on the show. The contestants were in Burma (there virtually every cab driver could identify Jackie and could also tell the hapless Americans that the picture was taken in front of a famous hotel in the capital). Later on the contestants were told the head to the tallest building in the Persian Gulf, one contestant actually asked for a flight to a country called the "Persian ...