Here is President Obama’s speech at the UN. Too long and in places even rambling, but it makes a broad cogent case for intelligent realism. On style, the speechwriters as ever strain for over-obvious rhetorical effect and drift into fatuous mixed metaphors. Look at these awful lines: Today, we see […]
My latest piece for DIPLOMAT tackles the morality of the #Eurozone crisis. What happy days they were, when that was all the EU had to fret about! Thus: When the Cold War ended and the eurozone was set up as a massive stride forward in European integration, one of the […]
Remember my piece at DIPLOMAT late last year? Once a state effectively loses control of some parts of its territory to local violent extremists, how long does it take for the mass of citizens to start to challenge state authority, if only because they fear for the results if the state […]
+++ Update+++ Is this one now off? The West Brom Chairman has gone very public explaining why Mr Berahino will not be moving any time soon: “I have informed Saido that he will not be transferred during this summer window and that he is staying at the club” said Peace […]
Labour leadership candidate Jeremy Corbyn wants to discuss gender apartheid – but only with women, of course: Corbyn said: “Some women have raised with me that a solution to the rise in assault and harassment on public transport could be to introduce women only carriages. “My intention would be to […]
I am pleased to say that work is in hand to produce a new print version of my book Speechwriting for Leaders, now being reworked and improved as Speeches for Leaders. In that book I talk about ‘authenticity’ and Boris Johnson: The British politician Boris Johnson shows how to do […]
My latest piece for Commentator looks at Jeremy Corbyn’s hankering after witchcraft: Collectivist socialism takes it for granted that the fuel of disciplined individual creativity which creates society is like the milk from a cow that can be milked without limit. It assumes witchcraft. When the cow finally keels over, exhausted and […]
Football transfer negotiations are fascinating as examples of Technique. Alas we mortals never knows the detail of how the negotiations go or the specific clauses in the final contracts, but the tensions between different ways of doing the business are often obvious enough in the final outcomes. Take, for example, […]
UPDATE: More! * * * * * How to explain the fact that Hillary Clinton is still afloat politically? Or not in jail? This is a handy round-up (my emphasis added) of her accelerating woes over her private email server that she used for much of her work (most of […]
As Mark Steyn (and others) have noted, the future belongs to those who show up. For the next century or so, those people largely fall into two categories. Africans and Indians. With added Arabs. The UN’s Population Division churns out all sorts of numbers about global demographic trends. They used […]
