If you have not heard behaired US shock-jock Howard Stern in full flow, now is the time to start. He asks various African-American voters (overwhelmingly Obama supporters) whether they support Obama or Romney and why. It turns out that some of them are, ahem, rather light when it comes to detailed […]
An interesting and instructive visit to Riga for this year’s Riga Conference. Thoughts. First, Riga itself. Latvia took an enormous (and partly self-imposed) hit as the Euro zone crisis began, opting for radical austerity measures. Views now differ. Yes, the economy is growing once again at a pretty good rate. […]
My latest Commentator piece tries in very broad terms to explain exactly why it is foolish to say that Libertarians and Socialists are ‘bedfellows’: Basically, there are only two forms of government: (a) Those (very few) deriving explicitly from the US Declaration of Independence: Governments are instituted among Men, deriving […]
Here is my Telegraph Blogs piece on the terrible attack of the US Ambassador to Libya, Christopher Stevens: There is no easy diplomatic response to such atrocities. Blaming the host country for poor security does not go far – usually they are as appalled as the rest of us at […]
Off tomorrow to this year’s Riga Conference, the distinguished Northern Europe security and wider policy forum. My first time at this event. Plenty of meat on the menu, including legendary Polish economist and intellectual Lesek Balcerowicz on the subject of the Eurozone. I appear in full hoot at Night Owl […]
Y’all are sitting there pondering one of the great Left issues of the day. Is Facebook part of the class struggle? Are people on Facebook a class, and if so are they exploiting or exploited? Why are new forms of social media so dangerous? Yes, it’s the American Left in […]
Anyone reading this blog regularly will know my views on the Bosnia story and the underlying struggles it epitomizes. But as there is never enough of a good thing, here is a new longer piece from me over at TransConflict: Basically, Yugoslavia was a set of sui generis contradictory and […]
One of the problems with teleprompters is that you the speaker can’t improvise easily. You’re stuck with the pre-agreed script loaded on to the machine. Those words scroll inexorably across your screen, and if you deviate from them it is not easy for the person doing the scrolling to fathom out what […]
Here is an unusually astute piece by Aaron David Miller at Foreign Policy looking at key negotiation mistakes made at the 2000 Camp David Peace Talks which he followed at first hand. You’ll need to read the whole thing to get the breadth of his argument. What is good is […]
