Author Archives: odeboyz

A CIA spy enters the Soviet Union

Posted on February 10, 2020 by odeboyz

The CIA spy was fluent in Russian, had perfect Cyrillic handwriting and could drink buckets of vodka. He was dropped on the outskirts of Moscow and spoke to a man in the street, “Hello comrade, can you direct me to … Continue reading →

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Book Review: Abhijit V Banerjee and Esther Duflo ~ Good Economics for Hard Times – Better answers to our biggest problems (2019)

Posted on February 10, 2020 by odeboyz

It’s easy to feel intellectually intimidated by a book by two Nobel Prize winners and perhaps that’s the right response sometimes. On this occasion it isn’t.* This is a readable and homely book written in an accessible way. The ‘biggest … Continue reading →

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Washington, Nixon, Trump

Posted on February 6, 2020 by odeboyz
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The price of paranoia

Posted on February 6, 2020 by odeboyz

“On Friday, we received a 911 call from Ronald Cyr’” a police spokesperson told reporters in Van Buren, Maine, “who said that he’d been shot. Officers arrived at his house, along with Van Buren Ambulance Service, and the US Border … Continue reading →

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Theresa May’s hypocrisy

Posted on February 3, 2020 by odeboyz
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Book Review: Robert Harris ~ The Second Sleep (2019)

Posted on February 3, 2020 by odeboyz

Harris leaves me gasping. He’s so prolific and intelligent that it’s almost intimidating. The Cicero trilogy was a triumph on which his entire reputation could have stood but, of course, there’s more, much more. The Second Sleep is a reverse … Continue reading →

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The generosity of billionaires

Posted on January 30, 2020 by odeboyz

Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos made headlines earlier this month with his donation of $690,000 to the Australian wildfire relief effort- a sum roughly estimated to equate to less than five minutes* of his earnings. * For someone on £40,000 this … Continue reading →

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Are Constituency MPs Obsolete?

Posted on January 30, 2020 by odeboyz

The 2016 Brexit referendum was unlike a general election in that every vote was equal: there were no wasted votes in safe seats. The referendum and Boris Johnson’s cull in September 2019 of 21 Conservative MPs destroyed the alleged importance … Continue reading →

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Always listen to teacher

Posted on January 27, 2020 by odeboyz
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Education divides society by wealth

Posted on January 27, 2020 by odeboyz

Economists have found that many elite US universities – including Brown, Dartmouth, Penn, Princeton, and Yale – take more students from the top 1% of the income distribution than from the bottom 60%. To achieve a position in the top … Continue reading →

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