After years of printing more and more currency that has fueled mind boggling inflation in Zimbabwe, Mugabe has tried price controls. Not surprisingly that has not worked, but only caused more economic destruction to a vulnerable economy. This Reuters report details the heart of it: But the British diplomatic source said Mugabe’s price-cutting attack “completely [...]

Christopher Hitchens speculates in this Slate article on the chances that Al Gore may yet make a run for president in 2008. At the heart of the speculation is the idea that Gore looks like getting a Nobel Peace Prize next month. So, and if I am right, the former vice president will then complete [...]

I used to have two clear favorite columnists on the NY Times Op Ed page – Thomas Friedman and David Brooks. Now that they are back in the conversation – what my son Julian refers to as Web 2.0 in social media terms – I realized how much I had missed them. Two years ago [...]

My son Julian points out in this post at his Exceler8ion blog that there is a technological side to Web 3.0 that I haven’t incorporated into newmediatheory.net. To be fair, newmediatheory.net doesn’t feature the tech side of web 3.0 yet (things like artificial intelligence or automatic linking and categorization with other like databases). On the [...]

The New York Times will stop charging for access to parts of its Web site, effective at midnight tonight. The move comes two years to the day after The Times began the subscription program, TimesSelect, which has charged $49.95 a year, or $7.95 a month, for online access to the work of its columnists and [...]

(Photo Boston Globe) That cowbell is there to warn truckers and anyone else with a vehicle too high to fit under Boston’s notoriously low underpasses that they are headed for tribulation and heartache. I grew up just about exactly 100 miles north west of that cowbell and I recognize a certain indigenous style in its [...]

The political wrangling over the Petraeus report has been pretty predictable. The problem for both sides is that the reality on the ground is difficult and ambiguous – the outcome uncertain and neither victory nor defeat inevitable. As John McCain said in reacting to the Iraq hearings: “Americans don’t want us to fail. They don’t [...]

As I read about the travails of Norman Hsu I find some of it very familiar. To start at the end, the accounts of Mr. Hsu walking around on the train without his shirt and shoes feels to me like someone having a breakdown, not a fugitive trying to avoid notice. Another thing that is [...]

I’ve blogged quite a bit about Hillary, not because I support her, but because I have thought for some time, and still do, that she will probably be the next US president. My first choice has always been Rudy and it is probably time to say something about why he has consistently been my first [...]

Peter S Magnusson, a Swedish American computer entrepreneur doing his second startup, got, as he puts it, Instapundited and Slashdotted for this post. Its called For the first time in 10,000 years farming is not the dominating industry. Peter points out that while the newspapers missed this macro turnover point, micro-focusing quite understandably on the [...]