In the Times Dominic Lawson is unimpressed by the tone of UK Foreign Secretary David Miliband in talking about Iran and China: Our diplomatic war of words with Iran is brewing nicely. Last week the foreign secretary, David Miliband, condemned as “disturbing” the Ahmadinejad regime’s “lack of restraint” in its […]
As the myriad delgates wend their various snowy ways from the Copenhagen Global Warming Summit, what is the overall assessment? Not UN, but UM. Unambiguous Mess. Key aspects of the whole thing were a priori perverse from a Basic Diplomatic Technique point of view. Let’s audaciously and even hopefully assume that the science is […]
One of the whole points of Government always has been … to raise money for Government. Which, as the wonderful book Seeing Like a State explains, is why we have surnames and agreed weights and so on. To raise its money easily Government needs to measure, and it is much easier to measure things […]
The full text of that President Obama-Bush Nobel Peace Prize speech is here. Some good strong passages here, not least the strong reference to the E-word and its linking to al-Qaida: I face the world as it is, and cannot stand idle in the face of threats to the American people. […]
A reader points me to this delicious YouTube conversations between two gushy American women gushing profusely over the just oh-so-wonderful way Cuba has adapted its energy needs to the end of all those Soviet subsidies, including by organic gardening: I gave up after the first few minutes, when they had […]
Americans have such an energetic writing style: Is he just a rookie in the political big leagues, hoodwinked by Beltway old-timers? Or is the vacillating, ineffectual servant of banking interests we’ve been seeing on TV this fall who Obama really is? … There’s no other way to say it: Barack […]
Luckily for us, Daniel Simpson has been lucky enough to get the full transcript of a Nobel Prize acceptance speech which President Obama won’t deliver. It is well worth reading this Top Secret text, as it elegantly describes in Obama-style language a parallel universe which might exist but does not […]
On US blogs I keep seeing the word rube appear. As here: For all the talk of Sarah Palin being a rube, just a backward waif from Wasilla, Alaska, few seem to appreciate that she, more than any other rumored 2012 Republican nominee, has mastered the cutting edge art of […]
More on European Foreign Policy – and Physics (or maybe Maths). Take two tennis balls, A and B. A is twice the size of B. By which I mean that the diameter of A is twice the diameter length (the straight line across the widest part of the inside of the ball) of […]
Via Samizdata this link to a magnificent address by C S Lewis back in 1944, The Inner Ring (scroll down towards the bottom to find it). This masterpiece is all about the idea that whever you are – school, work, art, politics – there is always an ‘inner ring’ of people […]
