My latest piece for the Commentator looks at the way we have relied either on gold or politicians to give us Honest Money down the ages (almost invariably with disastrous results in the latter case), and wonders whether the time is coming to create a new form of money based instead […]
Last week I had the pleasure of going to Blenheim Palace to watch Poland’s Foreign Minister Radek Sikorski deliver a powerful speech about Europe – and the UK’s increasingly unhappy role in it. Here is the full text. Some extracts: While you are an important market for the rest of […]
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. […]
A super resource for looking at demographic trends as between 1950 and 2100 – a graph that allows you to follow the trends in 50 countries and world regions and easily make comparisons. Thus (say) in 1950 Egypt and Pakistan combined had some 60 million people, not that many more than the […]
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 […]
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 […]
My various postings and pronouncements on the rights and wrongs of the UK government’s ‘threat’ to remove the diplomatic immunity of the Ecuador Embassy in London to enable J Assange to be nabbed have prompted Brian Barder to weigh in. And when Brian weighs in, he does so thoroughly. His […]
Fed up? Need a smile on your face and a new swing in your step? Sorted:
Here is my latest piece at Telegraph Blogs: Our Ambassador to the United Nations Sir Mark Lyall-Grant has come out strongly against this further Russia/Chinese veto: “Russia and China are failing in their responsibilities as permanent members, they are failing the people of Syria … The effect of their actions […]
Part of the general problem we face these days is knowing what anything is. As we get better at looking at things on quite different scales, down to sub-atomic tininess, different patterns emerge. What looks like a solid, recognisable, definable thing turns out to be system of systems of systems. A lot […]
