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Up to London to collect my Ph.D. from the London School of Economics. My name is Dr. Taki from now on, and Jeremy Clarke can eat his heart out. If he’d stay out of pubs and do some research instead, he might one day get a Ph.D. like Dr. Gaddafi and Dr. Taki. Actually, my thesis was on the environmentally friendly method of converting Gaddafis into waste. The ceremony did not last long. It took me less time to write my thesis ...
GSTAAD—From my study’s wide-open, icicle-covered windows, one feels cocooned from the elements, as if in a prison cell but with the doors unlocked. The snows have finally come. The horizons are totally white. Clouds and snowy peaks intermingle in a rhapsody of snow-white, pine-green, and sky-blue. Thirty-five or so years ago, I took a ski-plane up the Jungfrau, landed on an upward slope, and skied down to Kleine Scheidegg, ...
Remember the old cliché about someone who is perpetually vacillating between a necktie and an open shirt? Or the one about the man who is noticeable for being completely unnoticeable? Step forward Ban Ki-moon, the useless UN's useless Secretary General. Despite persistent allegations that he is a habitual body-waxer, I have always insisted that Moon does not wax because he's Korean. No body hair. Then there were rumors that ...
I haven’t got that much time left, but I’d gladly give 10 years of my life to see that homicidal maniac Gaddafi strung up from a palm tree alongside his wart-hog sons, especially Hannibal Gaddafi, an expert in imprisoning and torturing helpless servants and beating up women in posh Western hotels. What a ghastly world we live in. Gaddafi has been bullying us for 41 years, his henchmen murdering an English policewoman, ...
When a supermarket's decision to put a modesty shield over a magazine cover featuring Elton John, his male lover, and their surrogate baby attracted a fierce backlash from the usual suspects"liberal busybodies, professional gay militants, publicity-seekers, and other such rabble"I was personally delighted. The star writer of my own Takimag, Jim Goad, was the first to comment on this brouhaha and took a neutral stand. ...
Philosophy is a bit of a struggle for many of us, except, of course, if we’re professional footballers, pop stars, film actors, reality-TV performers, or hedge-fund managers. Although in last week’s Takimag I wrote about Nasser’s Egypt, I forgot to mention that the reason Nasser was so wildly popular with the people was because he was totally incorruptible—as rare as a virgin in a harem where Arab politics is concerned. ...
GSTAAD—Speaking in the House of Commons in 1940, Leo Amery rebuked Neville Chamberlain and his colleagues with the Oliver Cromwell quote, “In the name of God, go.” This was after the fall of France with England on the brink. Those telling Mubarak to go are on the street, not in parliament, which doesn’t exist in the way we know it. I was in Damascus back in 1970 when Hearst correspondent John Harris burst into my room ...
About fifteen years ago I received a very polite letter from Belgium asking me to list three of the most pompous and self-important people in the UK. It came with a self-addressed return envelope and stamp. The writer was known as l’entarteur, a man who would approach the pompous and vainglorious and shove a pie in their face. He would never insult the victims nor use foul language—in fact, he always remained silent—and ...
Having spent a great part of my life charting the decline of civilization, I am not surprised at the goings-on in Tunisia, especially as I never considered the place to be civilized. How apt that the arch-crook dictator Ben Ali (Baba) slithered away to Saudi Arabia, itself a beacon of democracy and human rights—especially for women—instead of landing here in good old Helvetia and embarrassing my little community of Gstaad. ...
GSTAAD—Back in 1975 Adam Ferguson, a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature, published a very important book with a very apt modern title, When Money Dies. It was about the Weimar hyperinflation nightmare, something our so-called leaders might well think about, which of course they will not. We are so dumbed-down by reality and talent shows on the idiot box, why bother to bring up unpleasant subjects? Only recently I read ...
GSTAAD—Six hours into the New Year, and already there was trouble. My own bash to welcome 2011 with fifty of my nearest and dearest finished around 5 a.m., so I rolled down toward the Palace hotel still looking for some action. I had a very pretty German girl in tow, my son’s friend Fiona, so I swept into the lobby in style. Then it happened. I saw the vision to end all visions and a desperate, sensuous pain, the type that ...
OK. Let’s start the new year with a politically incorrect column by telling it like it is, for a change. During the last week of November, in Portland Oregon, the F.B.I. arrested a Somali born U.S. resident as he was about to blow up a Christmas tree lighting ceremony in a public square full of mothers and children. Although the authorities were aware of it and had provided the would-be multiple murderer with phony bombs of ...
NEW YORK—This is a bad time of year for atheists. So much so, they are showing signs of desperation. In the cesspool that is Uncle Sam’s capital, an unusual Christmas message began appearing last week on the sides of buses and trains: “NO GOD?…NO PROBLEM!” Two hundred and seventy of these ads have gone up, paid for by secular groups in cities around the country. Similar signs are being placed on buses and billboards ...
This is in praise of younger men. An outrage will take place at Preston Crown Court on January 7, 2011, when beautiful 27-year-old ballet teacher Sarah Pirie will be sentenced for an “improper relationship with a 15-year-old” who was not named (unlucky chappie) for obvious reasons. In my not-so-humble opinion, this is dead wrong. If Pirie’s sentence is harsh, it will be the cruelest decision since the Athenians sent poor ...
The death of anyone well known - especially in New York - invokes more clichés than you know what draws flies in summer. Every obituary I read about Elaine included the words, "icon", "brassy", "landmark", "true New Yorker", and other such epithets. Let’s take it from the top. I was among the original clients of Elaine’s, having been taken there by Clay Felker, the great magazine ...
The irony is such that the word itself loses meaning. The ultimate Afghan con man, an oxymoron if there ever was one, is someone Hollywood couldn’t make up. A catch-him-if-you-can type of script wouldn’t make it past the first rewrite. Even “based on a true story” wouldn’t help. If it weren’t for the dead and maimed-for-life, I’d be laughing my pants off. Just as funny was the timing, at least for myself. I’d ...
