Derek Tonkin makes plenty more smart points in emails to me which he is pleased to see made available to a wider audience (edited and reorganised slightly by me for this format). See especially his wise concluding sentence. Thus: Sanctions In 1999 the UK Government completed a general study of […]
My mind turns to Myanmar/Burma (Burma hereinafter, as it’s shorter). A faraway country of which I know nothing. Burma is larger than Ukraine in geographical terms and (with some 50 million people) than Spain in population terms. So comfortably towards the top of global country rankings on both counts. But […]
Back from baking amazing Dubai. Impressions to be recorded separately. Check out this superb piece of work from Frances Coppola, ‘one-time professional banker’, on the difference between between being ‘illiquid’ and being ‘insolvent’. The key point to grasp is that you are 100% bust if you can not pay your […]
More strange things going on in the USA about President Obama’s origins and identity. As you know, all sorts of crazed Republicans ran the claim that Obama was not qualified to be US President as he had not been born in the USA, whereas (as any fule kno) he was […]
You remember biorhythms, the theory that our bodies operate according to varying biological cycles that periodically coincide, for better or worse? The Wikipedia page on Biorhythms absurdly suggests that this idea is all pseudoscience: Critics state that biorhythms are based only upon numerological associations. The plausibility of biorhythmics is contested by mathematicians, […]
Update That one didn’t take long. Chen has left the Embassy with the US Ambassador, heading for a medical facility. It obviously suited both sides to cut some sort of quick deal, including the Chinese expressing strong dissatisfaction with the US willingness to take Chen in, and (according to the […]
While our political elite descends into fevered squabbling about who did what to which newspaper and vice versa, the United States and China are slugging it out in a battle for psychological (and military and commercial) dominance in the Pacific and South China Sea. Knowing next to nothing about that part of […]
Former Reagan speechwriter Peggy Noonan turns a beautiful insightful phrase – and is impossibly grand. She also knows a thing or two about public speaking: An example of the power of plain words: In late 1996 the writer Tom Wolfe made a speech in New York in which, according to a […]
British readers may not yet be up to speed on the canine aspects of the US Presidential race. Basdically, Democrats have been sniping at Mitt Romney for a long car journey he made years ago with his dog unhappily on the car roof (car woof?). Republicans have seized on a […]
Here is my latest Telegraph blog piece, this time on the dilemmas in negotiating with a country such as North Korea where the usual options of Persuasion, Carrot or Stick seem to make little impact: Many humans (and even some governments) aren’t donkeys. So another layer of analysis applies. As […]
