The EU says you should not drink more than four cups of coffee a day. Most of the French folks I know drink about nine. That might explain why an Air France jet tried to land in an active volcano a few weeks back, but I’m not sure. Quick, let’s start a conspiracy theory.
“We’re close to a deal,” said Alexis Tsipras late yesterday. “No we aren’t,” said Angela Merkel just before going to sleep in her fridge. The glimmers of deal-hope get shorter. If I was Syriza from now on, I’d just shut up until the ink’s dry on the paper or Greece defaults. Then they can bring Sepp Blatter in to reform all the corruption in the Greek bureaucracy.
Tony Blair has resigned as a Middle East Peace Envoy….£15m richer for having helped start a war (with a little poke up the bum from Murdoch) and then done, er, not a lot as a peace thing. In fact, nothing at all according to a bloke I met in Sharm al Sheik some time ago. Moral Tone is to be replaced by Goldsmiths University’s diversity officer Bahar Mustafa, despite provoking a storm of protest by tweeting #killallwhitemen and referring to them as “white trash”. Bahar’s idea of diversity on being appointed was to ban white men from a university event on diversifying the curriculum – and then defended her position by stating that she could not be racist “because I’m an ethnic minority woman”. We Mustafa look at her brain when she dies.
Another Putin critic has been poisoned, bringing the total over ten years to four. The Moscow School of Medical Coincidence is working on a theory that those who disagree with the Great Homoerotic One tend to have suicidal tendencies. Meanwhile, Met policemen working on the Elm House mystery have finally cracked a murder case 430,000 years after it happened. It seems that police scientists used ‘modern forensic techniques’ to determine that the excavated skull had received two fatal blows to the head. Mind you, the skull itself offered a small lead:
Detective Chief Inspector Ben Tecoppar told reporters, “Hon reachin’ the hobject, we used cuttin’ hedge micro-forencsic surgeree hinvolvin’ the use of personal heye happartus to determine that chummy ‘ad been given a right bleedin’ wallop hon ‘is ‘ead. Halthough the trails ‘ave gone cold, we hare treatin’ the death has suspicious hat this time pendin’ further henquiries. We hare halso hentirely satisfeed that no politicians were hinvolved hat hany time.”
In the first major US data to come out this week on the unstoppable just-round-the-corner booooom next year, the corner-turning manoeuvre isn’t going entirely to plan. As Wolf Richter describes in his blog this morning, it’s more of a buuummmerrr:
‘in the overall US trade statistics, the rise of commodity exports papers over the collapse in exports of manufactured goods. And a collapse it is. The index, at 0.665 in April, is 28.4% below a year ago and 33.5% below the level of January 2010, when it was set at 1.00. It’s less than half of what it was in much of 2010, 2011, and 2012.’
And finally, the two most gigantic turds in global media – Ruptured Turdoch and Saliva Bumholescammi – have failed to agree terms on a joint venture with Mediaset in Italy. Apparently the idea was “evidence that the frosty relationship between the Murdoch and Berlusconi familes is thawing” but this turned out to be yet another climate myth.
Yes, you’re right: the World is utterly, irreversibly and tragi-comically insane.
Last night at The Slog: Greece & EU ‘very close’ to innovative dry-Spring cool belt disagreement
The Slog 