Paul Krugman likes one of my favorite movies

Here is a quote

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FT exchange rates

The Financial Times is the best place to sell your dollars. In the normal world 1 USD buys you 0.7 euro cents or 0.6 pence. In the FT world 1USD buys 1.7 euros (2.5 times the normal exchange ate) or 0.8 pence (1.3 times the normal exchange rate). 

Here it is: How much would you pay to read this page? At about 2,000 of the roughly 50,000 printed words in a typical copy of the Financial Times, it should in theory be worth about 4 per cent of the newspaper's cover price - 10 US cents, 17½ euro cents or eight pence.

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Wolframalpha

This may become bigger than Google. The intro video is here (well worth the 13 minutes). I found it on MR. It has a lot of economics stuff.

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Me on Radio

In Italiano (some of the things I said came out a bit distorted)

PS

from minute 8, need real player

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Harold Pinter

Harold Pinter passed away on December 24, 2008. This is his 2005 Nobel Lecture. The Lecture contains several exaggerations and I don't share Pinter's enthusiasm for the Sandinistas (even though this is one of the best albums ever). But the beginning is very nice:
'There are no hard distinctions between what is real and what is unreal, nor between what is true and what is false. A thing is not necessarily either true or false; it can be both true and false.'
I believe that these assertions still make sense and do still apply to the exploration of reality through art. So as a writer I stand by them but as a citizen I cannot. As a citizen I must ask: What is true? What is false?
Truth in drama is forever elusive. You never quite find it but the search for it is compulsive. The search is clearly what drives the endeavour. The search is your task.

This is somewhere in the middle:
As every single person here knows, the justification for the invasion of Iraq was that Saddam Hussein possessed a highly dangerous body of weapons of mass destruction, some of which could be fired in 45 minutes, bringing about appalling devastation. We were assured that was true. It was not true. We were told that Iraq had a relationship with Al Quaeda and shared responsibility for the atrocity in New York of September 11th 2001. We were assured that this was true. It was not true. We were told that Iraq threatened the security of the world. We were assured it was true. It was not true.
The truth is something entirely different. The truth is to do with how the United States understands its role in the world and how it chooses to embody it.

And this is towards the end of the lecture (thanks to Raja for sending it):
I know that President Bush has many extremely competent speech writers but I would like to volunteer for the job myself. I propose the following short address which he can make on television to the nation. I see him grave, hair carefully combed, serious, winning, sincere, often beguiling, sometimes employing a wry smile, curiously attractive, a man's man.

'God is good. God is great. God is good. My God is good. Bin Laden's God is bad. His is a bad God. Saddam's God was bad, except he didn't have one. He was a barbarian. We are not barbarians. We don't chop people's heads off. We believe in freedom. So does God. I am not a barbarian. I am the democratically elected leader of a freedom-loving democracy. We are a compassionate society. We give compassionate electrocution and compassionate lethal injection. We are a great nation. I am not a dictator. He is. I am not a barbarian. He is. And he is. They all are. I possess moral authority. You see this fist? This is my moral authority. And don't you forget it.'
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A praise of shoe-throwing

Here , and here is the video. More here
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Probably the best website, ever

Any music video, any time! Here
Addendum:
OK, Raja is right, No Sex Pistols either. MTV, for the moment you still suck
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It's all Disney's fault

If you ask my 3-year old daughter to describe herself she will answer with one of the following 4 words: principessa, princess, amira, princesse (the answer will only depend on the language in which the question was asked). Until yesterday, I thought that it was our fault and that we should stop spoiling her and treating her like royalty, but after reading this, I realized that it is all Disney's fault.

But it gets worse. This piece suggests that Disney's redesign of the eyes and mouths of its female characters could be linked a recent increase in teen pregnancy (what was Sarah Palin's daughter watching?).

Maybe, I should only let her watch Disney's evil characters. Check this out.
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Luca Ricci on Business Week

Luca, who also used to be a rollerblader, tells Business Week about the employment effects of the crisis.
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Italian mothers in law and the Middle East

Da Wife sent me this article on a divorce caused by a terrible Italian mother in law (I think she's getting along well with her own Italian mother in law, so I don't think this was a subtle hint to anything).

In the meantime, I received another book recommendation from SiL Nadine. The book is titled Sharon and My Mother-in-Law. This made me think that Middle Eastern policy could have been different if we had exported some terrible Italian mothers in law to Palestine!
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Is this the dirtiest electoral campaign ever?

John Judis says so.
PS
I have never met Rashid Kahlidi, but he is the brother of my colleague Raja.
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Left wingers: US versus Europe

Very few Europeans (Silvio Berlusconi is a notable exception) would classify the Financial Times as a left-wing newspaper. But Americans are different. Check out this letter: the FT’s slightly left-leaning slant has lost the “slightly”.
And the guy is from Northern California. Texans probably think that the FT is a hardcore communist newspaper. This is a nice paper on why Americans don't like redistribution.
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Better than in "The Apprentice"

Here is Donald Trump. I am sure he would love to say "You're fired!"
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Palin videos

The real thing
SNL
SNL with Hillary
The movie (Disney version)
The other Palin
Thanks to Max&Raja
More real thing
They say she is not goood in foreign policy, but check out how she charmed the president of Pakistan.
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Smoke police, thought police

I don't smoke, but I think that anti-smokers are becoming Goebbelsques (I think I just invented a new adjective!), check this out.
BTW, do you remember the 80s song about her eyes?
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Thomas Friedman

I just came out of a meeting in which we talked about Thomas Friedman. I did not share my colleagues' enthusiasm for the guy.

I first heard of Thomas Friedman when I was about to move to Lebanon and my Lebanese wife gave me a copy of From Beirut to Jerusalem. I thought that the book had some interesting points hidden into pile of junk (actually, I liked the book more than my friend Pask who also has a Lebanese wife but is much smarter than me). More annoyingly, the book has a strong us versus them tone (which became much worse in Friedman's later writings in the NYT).

Then I started reading the Lexus and the Olive Tree and thought that if the guy had something to say about international affairs, he really had no clue about economics. This was proven by the masterpiece the World is Flat. A funny review of the book is here. It ends like this: How the *$#! do you open a window in a fallen wall? More to the point, why would you open a window in a fallen wall? Or did the walls somehow fall in such a way that they left the windows floating in place to be opened?

Here is a more serious (bus still funny) and academic review by Ed Leamer (one of the world's top trade economists).

What about Friedman's McDonald's theory of war (countries that have McDonald's restaurants don't go to war against each other)? Didn't he ever have a Big Mac in Ain el Mreisseh or a kosher burger in Givat Ram? Yet, he lived in Beirut and Jerusalem.
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Digital intimacy

This is a long but really, really, really good article on facebook, digital intimacy, and twitter. By the way, I have a twitter account but I never used it. I need to convice my friends in DC and Lebanon to get one as well.

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English as a second language, the LPG tour

The story is here. What about teaching them comparative advantages?
Thanks to Dan D.
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Philippe Petit

Chris Blattman reports on a documentary on Petit's amazing walk (here). Wikipedia on how he did it (here).
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Sarah and Sarah

My friend Sarah Wildman talks about Sarah Palin (here). Here is SW's web page and here is a TV show about Sarah (W) and the Italians.
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