Si, is brilliant Spanish bicyclist Carlos Sastre, who win France’s Tour de France last week in Paris, France, putting the seal (and also the lion) on a fine summer for Spanish virility, which have seen the man-boy-child Rafa Nadal also lick all-comers at Wimbledon, England, and the genius national football team win Euro 2008 in [...]

Saturation Point: A Review of The Socal Atom
John Green on Mark Buchanan’s The Social Atom. A book that follows the current trend of ‘new, updated, biodegradable, non-toxic economics, an economics that has learned its lesson’ and realised people behave irrationally sometimes. Like, duh.

: : drb.ie – Review of Health, Wealth and Happiness in Tiger Ireland
Cormac Ó Gráda concludes a review of a socio-economic survey of Ireland during the 'Celtic Tiger' years with "it may well be that the connection between riches and happiness is looser than most economic and political commentators…

It was only a matter of time before the business sector opened up another front in the recession wars. Hamburger king Pat McDonagh of Supermac has accused the Government of ’strangling entrepreneurship’ and ‘criminalising business’. And just how is the vile Government doing this?
‘Bureaucracy, legislation and regulation’.
But Mr. McDonagh is just getting started.
McDonagh [...]

Man in powdered wig and lipstick may have been slightly bendy, claims Tatchell ” Splintered Sunrise
The powdered and perfumed King Billy, less than a manly kind of male hetrosexual? So suggests Tatchell, the scamp. It's enough to give Iris Robinson a stroke, after a prolonged session of her cursing his utter gayness for even making [...]

The bloggers over at Dublin Opinion are forever uncovering gems. Their latest little dig, courtesy of Conor, brings us ‘Charley’s March of Time’- an animated promotional film produced by the British Labour Government to explain the introduction of social (or national) insurance back in 1948. This was the foundation of the modern [...]

LRB · Stefan Collini: Upwards and Onwards
A detailed review of the new authorized biography of Raymond Williams. The book only goes up to 1961, three years after the publishing of Culture & Society and deals with him in isolation, away from continental socialist theory, for example.

History shows illegal drugs are not a recent problem - The Irish Times - Tue, Jul 29, 2008
Fintan O'Toole suggests that the "war on drugs" needs to take a chill pill. Demand for illegal substances has hardly waned, or increased that dramatically in over 300 years. Name your poison and there's always someone jumping the [...]

Binoy Kampmark: Socializing Losses
The dig out from the US House of Representative which saves Fannie Mae and Freddy Mac from bankruptcy shows how US capitalism will ensure that profits are privatized' while losses are socialized' while free market buccaneering is allow to contin

Ancestry of Barack Obama
William Addams Reitwiesner has compiled an ancestry of Obama going back to 1677. There, somewhere between 1882 and 1887, is Joseph Kearney, a shoemaker from Moneygall, co. Offaly.