Slimy gray plot machine: love it.

Personally, I can’t stand his writing - he’s so needlessly acerbic.

In my mind, Dawkins is the atheist equivalent of the Christian who thinks the earth is 6,000 years old and explains the existence of dinosaur bones by saying, ‘Satan planted them there to test our faith.’ Both camps start with a preconceived idea of how the universe operates and then set about finding the ‘evidence’ to back them up.

(This only really works if Richard Dawkins is as big in the US as he is here . . . you ever hear of the Selfish Gene?)

Conversely Michael if you think about the odds required for the universe to spawn a slimy plot machine at this precise moment when the market is ready for it you should feel very special, and also incredibly insignificant. Oh. That didn’t work out as cheery as I meant it to.

The marketplace has some morality — it’s been imposed on it, though, and the past eight years have been like the last days of freekin Rome, but we’ll get it’s knickers pulled back up. That whole peanut butter thing is a classic example of the drunken idiocy we handed our business structures off to since Reagonomics became the gospel.

Remember, economies operating with any degree of free-market capitalism will always have peaks and troughs. In the long run, the system will correct and expand.

And, as Keynes said, in the long run we’ll all be dead.

Cheers.