Exhibit One: Robert Baer, former CIA officer, looks at the the evolving world of organised assassination. Exhibit Two: Professor Kenneth Anderson praises President Obama’s efficient use of Predator strikes in and around Pakistan: … of all the ways it has undertaken to strike directly against terrorists, this administration owns the […]
An elegant essay by Theodore Dalrymple on legendary lofty US economist J K Galbraith. Needless to say, what caught my eye was reference to a book JGK wrote in 1958, Journey to Poland and Yugoslavia. As a fine, prosperous East Coast liberal from a democracy, JKG was disinclined to see […]
More from me (if you can face it) over at Business and Politics. On Iran – who is weak and strong in the Negotiations between Iran/USA/Russia/China: It all boils down to a simple proposition: you don’t win more in any negotiation than your objective strength deserves. In a struggle between […]
Ralph Peters praises the ruthlessness of this year’s Nobel Peace Prize winner who has authorised the expansion of ‘drone’ attacks on key terrorist suspects overseas: The Pakistani Taliban is losing CEOs faster than Detroit … This is another Amazon Space issue. The best (if not only) way to deal with individual […]
As we are talking of boats shooting over the edge, have a look at this eloquent – and scary – analysis of the current economic situation by John Mauldin. It takes as its theme the subtle issue of Confidence, drawing on a new book This Time is Different, by Carmen […]
Robert Lucas. Some readers will have heard of him. He won the 1995 Nobel Prize for Economics, in part for pioneering work in the field of ‘rational expectations’: One important implication of Lucas’s work, which was confirmed by Thomas Sargent is that a government that is credible—that is, a government that […]
A friendly reader asks: Thank you for producing such a thought-provoking and readable blog. I thought you may be interested in this link to a press release from the Swedish MFA. They plan to close 6 Posts and open 10. https://www.sweden.gov.se/sb/d/12653/a/138250 Several of these post closures are in the EU. […]
One of the pleasures of writing this website is that new e-friends appear, usually people who know all sorts of things I don’t know. Thus I am pleased to share with you this interesting contribution about Google/China and US/Switzerland as sent to me from a reader who closely follows IT security questions and […]
Some of you may have read my paper on the idea of Amazon Space. If not, please do so. The simple idea is that in a world divided between large areas of lawfulness and diminishing but significant spaces defined by their unlawfulness, new doctrines are needed for protecting the networks […]
Here is what is said to be (and looks like) extracts from an FCO memo warning of hard times ahead as Cuts come along: We know that next year will be a lot tougher than this year. This is partly because we just have less money (like all Departments we […]
