I previously posted on one way in which our government decides that many people should be killed for the Greater Good. This essentially philosophical question – how to measure Costs v Benefits of policy – is what government is all about. Especially when it comes to grand scale environmental policy. Which counts the […]
The claim by the defence of Radovan Karadzic that he had a deal with Richard Holbrooke ("This is it – leave public and political life in Republika Srpska and you won’t have to go to the Hague." "OK…") is back in the news again. Back in mid-1996, only a few months […]
Craig Murray is included on Brian Micklethwait’s list of UK libertarian bloggers and, ingrate that he is, starts moaning about the list – emphasis added: In the vast majority of cases, libertarian here plainly means "right wing conservative" or "neo-con" … The peculiar thing is, that these neo-con "Libertarians" have, by […]
Danny Finkelstein argues well in the Times that politics are getting more fragmented and less controlled: In his book The Long Tail Chris Anderson points out how the market for, say, books has in the past been constrained by the shop shelf space available to display. Online shopping has abolished this […]
Craig Murray has an interesting post trying to make the case that receiving information extracted or suspected to be extracted via torture is the same as receiving child pornography. I have posted this comment which tries to look at the key dilemma: what is the best way for democracies to […]
Eeek. According to Nick Cohen in the Observer the Cameron Conservatives are heading for the Outer Darkness: After the European elections, British Conservatives will leave the company of Angela Merkel, Nicolas Sarkozy, Fredrik Reinfeldt and the other moderate centre-right leaders who gather under the banner of European People’s party. Although […]
Here (h/t Instapundit) is an analysis of why US trains are slower now than they were decades ago: The aforementioned Montreal Limited, for example, circa 1942, would pull out of New York’s Grand Central Station at 11:15 p.m., arriving at Montreal’s (now defunct) Windsor Station at 8:25 a.m., a little […]
Having railed against President Bush’s terror-suspect interrogation policies, the Democrat leadership in the USA is struggling to explain why at one point they quietly endorsed them. Read about this hopeless performance by N Pelosi. Or even better watch it – the nervous swallowing is most instructive, as is the babbling once the confident […]
Over at anticant’s arena I find an awesome sentence with both my name and that of Camille Paglia in it which just transcends all understanding, or at least mine: “It is this animal craving for something simple and, I daresay, edenic that undergirds our hyperaestheticised pornography in /all/ of its post-modern dimensions. One need […]
An Independent reader opines with eloquence on my work as HM Ambassador in Warsaw as described here: It all seems reasonably clear. Charles Crawford is a gutless little tosser who clearly knew that Poland was being used for the illegal torture and interrogation of prisoners – but he did nothing about it. And now […]
