Ran Jak Diary

100 US banks have gone bust this year

A year after Washington rescued the banks considered too big to fail, the ones deemed too small to save are approaching a grim milestone: the 100th bank failure of 2009.

NY Times.

Forbidden languages in Slovakia

The Slovak parliament has made it largely illegal for its citizens to use any language other than Slovak. The use of minority languages in “official” situations is now punishable by fines of up to €5,000.

Slovakia: the forbidden languages. István Deák. NYR Blog.

Big laughs from the Nobel team

Congrats to the hilarious comedy team called Nobel Peace Prize Committee for the zaniest, funniest award of all time. Instead of giving their 2009 prize to someone for a lifetime of good works, the laugh-makers chose as winner Barrack Obama, who didn't even start serving as president until this year, and whose peace contributions have been limited to feel-good concepts and a few proposals.

Horizontal Spiderman

Thanks to Tony.

Scandal in France

The real scandal is the French media's suddenly salacious interest in a book that was a best seller when it was published, way back in 2005. 

Gaultier scores

Game, set and match to Jean Paul Gaultier, whose new season for Hermes provided the highest point of the Paris shows.

Italy 'on the edge of a precipice'

Tonight the head of state, President Giorgio Napolitano, summoned the speakers of both houses of parliament to an emergency meeting, apparently to discuss Berlusconi's behaviour and the risk that he was tipping Italy into constitutional crisis. Within less than 24 hours of yesterday's judgment, the prime minister had insulted the constitutional court, questioned the impartiality of the president and his predecessors, and held a female MP up to ridicule on live television.

The senate's opposition deputy speaker, Vannino Chiti, said: "The prime minister's attack on the president of the republic is very serious. Berlusconi is a man of division. To safeguard his interests he would be prepared to destroy the country."

The Catholic bishops' newspaper, Avvenire, sounded an apocalyptic note. An editorial said Italy was "on the edge of a precipice".

Full report from The Guardian.

Herta Müller

Just when you were sure the Nobel committee had finally run out of anti-communists to honour, they found Herta Müller, and awarded her their 2009 prize for literature.

Excerpt from Müller's latest novel. signsandsight.com.

Berlusconi freaks out

An hour after the highest court in Italy declared it unconstitutional to pretend Berlusconi is above the law, he went before the cameras, visibly agitated -- furious. He talked like a one-man band -- a clown. "Without Silvio the country would be in the hands of the left and you all know what would happen,” Berlusconi declared. “The trials that they are going to throw against me are a farce. Long live Italy! Long live Berlusconi!”

Berlusconi hits out at court ruling. FT.

Gore Vidal on Obama

"I was like everyone else when Obama was elected – optimistic. Everything we had been saying about racial integration was vindicated," he says, "but he's incompetent. He will be defeated for re-election. It's a pity because he's the first intellectual president we've had in many years, but he can't hack it. He's not up to it. He's overwhelmed. And who wouldn't be? The United States is a madhouse. The country should be put away – and we're being told to go away. Nothing makes any sense." Obama "wants to be liked by everybody, and he thought all he had to do was talk reason. But remember – the Republican Party is not a political party. It's a mindset, like Hitler Youth. It's full of hatred. You're not going to get them aboard. Don't even try. The only way to handle them is to terrify them. He's too delicate for that."

It is clear the American experiment has been "a failure". It was all for nothing. Soon the country will be ranked "somewhere between Brazil and Argentina, where it belongs." The Empire will collapse militarily in Afghanistan; the nation will collapse internally when Obama is broken "by the madhouse" and the Chinese call in the country's debts.

Gore Vidal's United States of fury. The Independent

Election result: 0

Imagine they staged an election and no one came. That's become more than a throw-away line of satire following New York City's primary election yesterday. No votes were recorded in scores of the city's 6100 election districts.

City of 8 million was a ghost town at the polls. NYTimes.

Caring for your egg

From the London Review Blog. Jenny Diski.

You know the way John Wayne was hopelessly typecast, forever the cowboy, never Hamlet – who knows how vast a range he might have had? Well, so it’s beginning to seem to be for me and penguins. One of these days I’m going to branch out and give my attention to spaniels, or water buffalo, but in the meantime, those gay broody penguins I’ve mentioned before, who were given their own egg in a zoo, are the subjects of a children’s book, And Tango Makes Three which has made it to the top of the American Library Association’s list of the ten most frequently challenged books of 2008. Challenged, as in: take that filth of the shelves.

Aside from ‘homosexuality’, among the reasons given for wanting it banned are that it is anti-family and anti-ethnic. Obviously, it’s anti-family; almost everything is in America. Health care is anti-family. Questioning the right to bear arms is anti-family. Accepting Darwinian evolutionary theory is anti-family. Goes without say that gay penguins rearing chicks is anti-family. But anti-ethnic? Because penguins, being black and white, are mixed race? Were they given the wrong colour egg? Was it a Jewish egg, foisted on born-again penguins? Was a King penguin egg snuck into the Humboldt penguins’ nest? For god’s sake, was it an ostrich egg?