The Sunday Times: The ‘mad as hell’ brigade stir to wobble the Washington bubble

July 15, 2014
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Photo: Marko Berndt

In the 1976 film Network, a crazed news anchor becomes so disgusted with the venal idiocy of American television that he refuses to say his lines. During a meltdown on air he encourages audiences to follow his lead and shout: “I’m as mad as hell and I’m not going to take it any more.” Instead of laughing at him the nation grinds to a halt as millions of Americans join in, screaming their frustration from the rooftops.

Last week 65,000 Republican voters in Virginia’s 7th Congressional District offered their own version of “I’m as mad as hell”. Only instead of screaming in frustration they used the primary race to get rid of Eric Cantor, the Republican majority leader in the House of Representatives. Instead of being good little followers and ticking the Cantor box, they voted for an economics professor, David Brat.

As the US media gleefully reported: Brat won by a whopping 56%-44%, despite having no name recognition and minuscule financial support. His campaign raised just $122,793; Cantor’s election headquarters spent $168,637 on steak dinners alone.

The Sunday Times: Let them eat cannabis cake: a great social experiment has begun

July 13, 2014
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Photo: Martin Vorel

In 1992 American TV audiences were amazed when the presidential hopeful Bill Clinton admitted on air that he had smoked cannabis while at Oxford. He managed to save his campaign by adding: “But I didn’t like it. I didn’t inhale and didn’t try it again.”

Back when Clinton was covering up his pothead years, there was no one in America — at least no one sober — who would have predicted that marijuana was going to become legal in a generation. The 1990s weren’t only about millions of schoolchildren being encouraged to “just say no” to drugs; they were also the decade when law enforcement agencies switched from chasing crack-cocaine dealers to focusing on cannabis possession.

Between 1992 and 2002, marijuana went from being a mere 28% of all drug arrests to 45%. As Senator Morris Sheppard of Texas said about prohibition in 1930 (three years before its repeal): there appeared to be as much chance of legalising cannabis as “there is for a hummingbird to fly to the planet Mars — with the Washington Monument tied to its tail”.

The Sunday Times: Right now, America’s Liberty likes her lemmings gluten-free

June 29, 2014
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Photo: Daria Nepriakhina

Is America a nation of gullible nitwits? For the record, there is no country on earth that can cast the first stone. Still, judging by the blind faith in loopy science that has turned the gluten-free diet into a $23bn movement, it is a valid question.

Gluten is a “gluey” protein found in wheat, barley and rye. It makes cakes go fluffy and bread taste moist. Wheat was one of the first domesticated food crops and is a staple food around the world. Nevertheless, a third of Americans now avoid gluten in the belief that it causes a range of ills from diabetes, obesity, autism and Alzheimer’s to joint pain, flatulence and diarrhoea.

A minuscule market that once served the 1% of Americans who have coeliac disease (and must avoid gluten) now commands the top shelves in the food aisles. Of all the egregious examples of corporate welfare, our paying huge premiums to Kraft and Kellogg’s for non-existent health benefits must take the gluten-free biscuit.

The Sunday Times: One Kardashian bum selfie and Occupy Wall Street is history

June 22, 2014
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Photo: @KIMKARDASHIAN ON INSTAGRAM

It was mid-September, three years ago, when a small group of protesters gathered by the raging bull sculpture in Lower Manhattan and formed the Occupy Wall Street movement. They had a grievance and a slogan: “We are the 99%”. A few weeks earlier Kim Kardashian, the world’s most successful reality-TV star, had held a lavish televised wedding to a basketball player named Kris Humphries.

Less than four months later OWS had transformed itself into a global movement with offshoots from Toronto to Tel Aviv. It had even received the ultimate accolade in the form of a message from President Barack Obama. That’s right; the White House had issued a statement assuring Americans that their president was working for the 99%. No other movement in history had enjoyed so enormous an impact in so short a time.

In Los Angeles, however, where the bodaciously vapid Kim and her sullen hunk of a husband Kris were back in the bosom of the Kardashian family reality show, Keeping Up with the Kardashians, things were not so rosy. With great fortitude and no doubt inhuman levels of personal sacrifice, they managed to keep the marriage going until October. On the 31st it was announced that they were filing for divorce.