Pairing a bumbling, oddly employed male lead with a hot can-do woman is the current rage in Hollywood.

The Ben Stillers and Adam Sandlers gradually brought it to the big screen, but this summer Judd Apatow seems to have elevated the trope to a new level of success.

First there was the June release of Knocked Up, a film that matched a successful TV interviewer to a man whose primary working relationship was with his bong.

Then, teen couples in the August hit SuperBad were too young to mismatch careers, but unless porn consumption counts as extracurricular credit, their college tracks were assuredly divergent.   more »

The credibility of President George Bush's policy on Iraq has suffered another devastating blow. It is all the more powerful for having come not from a political enemy but from someone who was showered with plaudits by the administration.

Alan Greenspan is the high priest of American capitalism. For 18 years he was the chairman of the US Federal Reserve – the central bank of the world's most powerful economy – and he is widely admired by free-marketeers and right-wingers.

The White House has been shaken by his declaration that the true motive for the war in Iraq was that Saddam Hussein was seen to pose a threat to the security of US oil supplies in the Middle East.   more »

The discourse of ‘evil’ is totalizing and absolutistic, allowing no ambiguities or contradictions. It assumes a binary logic where ‘we’ are the forces of goodness and ‘they’ are the forces of darkness.

Such discourse legitimates any action undertaken in the name of good, no matter how destructive, on the grounds that it is attacking ‘evil.’ The discourse of evil is cosmological and apocalyptic, evoking a cataclysmic war with mythical stakes.

In this perspective, Evil cannot be just attacked one piece at a time, through incremental steps, but it must be totally defeated, eradicated from the earth if Good is to reign.

This discourse of evil raises the stakes and violence of conflict and nurtures more apocalyptic and catastrophic politics, fuelling future cycles of hatred, violence, and wars.   more »

When those responsible for the American war in Iraq face a public reckoning for their colossal crimes, the weekend of September 15-16, 2007 will be an important piece of evidence against them.

On Friday, September 14 there were brief press reports of a scientific survey by the British polling organization ORB, which resulted in an estimate of 1.2 million violent deaths in Iraq since the US invasion.

This staggering figure demonstrates two political facts:

1) the American war in Iraq has produced a humanitarian catastrophe of historic proportions, with a death total already higher than that in Rwanda in 1994;

2) those arguing against a US withdrawal on the grounds that this would lead to civil war, even genocide, are deliberately concealing the fact that such a bloodbath is already taking place, with the US military in control.   more »

After hubris, nemesis. Last week, Northern Rock, Britain's fifth biggest mortgage lender and the former darling of the financial markets, was forced to turn to the Bank of England for cash because no City lender would support it for fear the company was about to go bust.

When the announcement broke overnight on Thursday, ordinary savers followed the City's lead - jamming the company's switchboard and queuing outside branches to take as much as £1bn out in a day.

This is a full-blown run on a bank, something we have not seen on such a scale since the 19th century, and a measure of the depth of mismanagement, non-regulation and structural dysfunctionality of today's financial system.   more »