‘Chris Clancy’ Archives
The “Punk Rockers” of the PreCapitalist Era
BY CHRIS CLANCY Amazon recently announced that sales of their e-books were now greater than combined sales of both their hardcover and paperback books. Bad news for the traditional book publishing industry. “With Kindle, it has eliminated the industry middlemen who come between the writer and reader of a book — from agents to [...]
Cut Loose at Fifty: Chapter Eighteen – Groucho Hits Wuhan!
BY CHRIS CLANCY Thiti found settling in to China fairly easy – to begin with at any rate. We had a few major arguments along the way – but, as mentioned already, this was to be both expected and welcomed. While I was busy teaching etc. she divided her time between finding out where everything was on the campus and whipping the apartment [...]
Chapter 17: Pick a Leaf, Any Leaf
BY CHRIS CLANCY A week or so after returning from Thailand the new semester began. I got back into the swing of things very easily. Two girls who I’d taught the previous semester agreed to come and clean my place once a week. Their English names were Becky and Alien. After a few weeks they’d whipped the apartment into some sort of [...]
Be Afraid Liberals, Be Very Afraid …
BY CHRIS CLANCY Former UK Prime Minister Harold Wilson once famously remarked: “A week is a long time in politics.” How about six months? I wrote an article last August which had the title Bitter Sweet: Facing the Economic Precipice. At that time Mr. Obama was still attempting to be the President of the United States of America. [...]
Cut Loose at Fifty Chapter Sixteen – A Boat Ride With “Charlie Allnut”
BY CHRIS CLANCY February 6th 2007. Phil and I arrived at Bangkok International Airport sometime in the evening. It was warm and humid – very different from Wuhan. The plan was that we’d stay in Khaosan Road for a few days until Kell arrived. Then we’d head for Ko Samui Island in the Thai Gulf. The journey from the airport into Bangkok [...]
Cut Loose at Fifty: Chapter Fourteen — A Journey Within a Journey
BY CHRIS CLANCY Late June 2006. I had a few free days between the end of teaching and marking exam papers. Much as I hated traveling long distances, I needed a break from Wuhan. I headed for a place called Gulangyu Island. It’s in Fujian province, southwest of Xiamin City. So many students had recommended it — and I wasn’t [...]
Romney’s “Slip”?
BY CHRIS CLANCY When I was a kid I remember a teacher telling us that whilst democracy was far from perfect it usually produced the “right” result. How did this happen? He explained as follows: For a two-party system, the democratic process only needed an “informed” minority of electors in order to get the “right” result. [...]
Chapter Twelve – Trouble Brewing
By Chris Clancy The presentations began in week three of the second semester I knew from past experience, that if students are told to give a presentation and then left to get on with it by themselves, the result is normally a mess. This is to be expected. A good team presentation, especially one lasting more than thirty minutes, takes time [...]
Chapter Eleven – Telling An English Joke in Chinese
By Chris Clancy The second semester got off to smooth start – a good job as well - because the first half of it proved to be a very hectic affair. This was all my own doing. First degree courses in China are normally spread over four years. When students enter their third year they become “junior” students and then “seniors” in [...]
Chapter Ten – Something Completely Different
By Chris Clancy January 2006. The first semester at ZUEL finished. I was told that the department was very happy with my performance. As a reward I was given a pay rise of 500 RMB per month. I was now earning the same as I had got at DJK, but for a lot less hours. I was happy with this considering that I didn’t think my performance had [...]
Chapter Nine – Not Much Beats a Good Story
By Chris Clancy Chapter Nine – Not Much Beats a Good Story Here’s a question for those of us in the West who went on to higher education. When you look back to your time at university, no matter how long ago it was, what are the first thoughts that come to mind? For most of us I doubt if it would be things like “academic [...]
Chapter Eight – “Take It Easy Chris, Just Take It Easy”
By Chris Clancy Chapter Eight – “Take It Easy Chris, Just Take It Easy” When I got the job at Zhongnan University of Economics and Law (ZUEL) there were a few things I did not fully appreciate. The first was just how prestigious the accounting department was. The second was the calibre of the students I would be teaching. And third, [...]
Cut Loose at Fifty — Chapter Seven
By Chris Clancy Chapter Seven – The Calm Before the Storm I arrived in Wuhan in the first week of July 2005. The FAO met me and brought me to the place which would be my home for the next year. It was in a hotel on the campus. Two rooms had been joined into one to make a self contained flat which was very clean and comfortable – [...]
Ignorance In Action
By Chris Clancy It’s not unusual for liberals to defend stimulus spending by saying that things would have been even worse without it. This is what is known as a counterfactual argument. To make matters worse they then go on to say that the real problem was that the stimulus spending was not big enough in the first place! It’s enough to [...]
Cut Loose at Fifty: Goodbye DJK
By Chris Clancy China Series: Chapter 6 Someone once said to me that when an employee starts thinking about his pension, he’s had it. He might as well hold up his hands and say, “I surrender.” There’s a lot of truth in this. I remember reaching this point, back in the UK, when I was one year off my fiftieth birthday. [...]
Cut Loose at Fifty: Spring Festival
By Chris Clancy China Series: Chapter 5 My first semester in China drew to a close. I went to see the Foreign Affairs Officer (the FAO). I asked him if he could give me a bit more variety in the second semester – I really didn’t want to spend another one doing nothing but repeat lessons. He said he’d see what he could do and then [...]
September 8th 2011: A New Direction or More of the Same?
By Chris Clancy On September 8th President Obama is going to make a speech. The content of that speech is going to have a profound effect on all of us, one way or the other. If it’s a new direction then we have some hope. If it’s “more of the same” we pass the tipping point. This essay tries to explain why “more of the [...]
Cut Loose at Fifty: Part 4
By Chris Clancy Chapter Four – The Girl in the Garden There are many reasons for coming to teach in China. Money, however, is not one of them. Given the conversion rate between RMB and other currencies there’s little point in saving your earnings unless you intend to stay here. Most foreign teachers only stay for one year and just [...]
Cut Loose at Fifty: Part 3
By Chris Clancy Chapter Three – Three Weeks in and One Day Out! September 2004. Hubei Province. China. Three weeks in. I was sitting in the back of a van with the other foreign teachers – in total there were six of us in Dan Jiang Kou (DJK) that year. Three had already worked in China before coming to DJK. The first was an American [...]
Cut Loose at Fifty: Part 2
By Chris Clancy Chapter Two – Getting On With It There are good starts, bad starts and great starts. A bad start may be difficult to recover from. A great one usually has to stay great. Therefore, of the three, "good" is probably the best. My start in China was good…ish. Coming here to live and work had never entered my head six [...]
Bitter Sweet
By Chris Clancy I remember someone once remarking, that there isn’t much point in getting older if you don’t, at the very least, become a little bit wiser. As we go through life, one of the pearls of wisdom we should learn, is that when you’re down, the chances are that you’ll get a good kicking. Not nice - just a fact of [...]
Cut Loose at Fifty
By Chris Clancy It was May 1st 1976 – I was at university. To kick the May Day festivities off the student union organized a three-legged pub crawl. A map was provided detailing ten pubs – the last being a student bar in one of the Halls of Residence. The rules were that every male must drink one pint of beer at each pit-stop. Females [...]
Riding the 2012 Election Snail
By Chris Clancy What a futile, deceptive and wasteful process it all is. Both the Dems and the GOP have moved seamlessly, and shamefully, into election mode. Here’s an example of a shamefull bit: “My job over these first two years has frankly been to clean up a big mess,” Mr. Obama said at a $10,000-per-ticket event at a gated [...]
Libya: Making Sense of the Intervention
By Chris Clancy We’re nearly two months into it now. Like most people I was left scratching my head when the UN announced that it would intervene in Libya. The history of such interventions is clear. “It is useful to be reminded that revolutions in the modern sense are also, in fact, civil wars. If other nations want to make a [...]
The Magic Pig Analogy
By Chris Clancy Imagine, at some time in the future, that a new world fiat currency was about to be born. Let’s call it the OMEGA! Imagine too an old professor arguing against it to his students. “It will go the way of all fiat money,” he says directly, “reckless debasement and inevitable collapse. A day will come when the whole world [...]
The Fiat Money Wotsit
By Chris Clancy Commodity prices, especially food prices, have risen by 28% over the last six months. They are the root cause of the demonstrations, riots and uprisings taking part right now in various parts of the world. Why are they rising? What’s the cause? Of course, there’s no single answer to these questions. Some will point to [...]
Egypt: A New Chapter or More of the Same
By Chris Clancy It took nearly three weeks but Mubarak has finally taken the hint. The military is now in control. The Internet has played a crucial role in events – doing what the invention of the printing press did in the past - but at an exponential rate. It has allowed us to find out what is really going on and to learn from people [...]
North Korea: Waiting for the Endgame
By Chris Clancy When socialist revolutionaries come to power, they have to set about putting their grandiose talk of creating some kind of worker’s “utopia”, into practice. This is the beginning of a descent into ad hoc madness and, at times, high farce. “Castro asked which of us was an economist. I thought he'd said ‘communist’, so [...]
Welfare Dependency: It Didn’t Just Happen
By Chris Clancy A quote attributed to Margaret Thatcher goes as follows: "The problem with socialism is that eventually you run out of other people's money." Before welfare states there was help available for those who were in dire need. It was provided voluntarily by charitable people and organizations. Any such help given could be described as [...]
