I draw your attention to this piece by Sam Rocha at Patheos (a site bringing together all sorts of different religious views and insights). It looks at the Zimmerman trial with a keen eye, and draws some wide conclusions based on reading many of the key court documents/statements (NB fascinating […]
My piece below on Cricket and Morality mentioned the problem of rulews crowding out principles and therefore judgement. Patrick Young of YoungMarkets replies: The deepest irony – and one of the many untruths spiralling around in the battle against finance is the myth of deregulation and principles-based regulation. 1) principles-based […]
Now and then an article comes along that has an energetic ranting amusement factor but combines that with searching wisdom, thereby achieving certain immortality (at least for a few minutes). Here is one such piece by Toby Young at the Telegraph, letting fly at this piece in the Guardian by […]
Every now and again an article comes along that assembles all one’s own inchoate half-thoughts into a free-flowing stupendous whole. This time Charles Moore delivers on the plight of wretched US über-leaker Edward Snowden: Acting in the name of a morality which disdains allegiance to the rule of national law, […]
I expect that very few readers here have heard of Helena Wolinska-Brus. Here she is. A Polish Jewish woman (or even a Jewish Polish woman) who narrowly escaped death in the Warsaw Ghetto and went on to become a ruthless post-WW2 Stalinist prosecutor, sending various Polish patriots to their murky […]
Over at PunditWire my latest piece, this time on how to use subtle framing and reframing skills of the sort used by mediators to create a subtle bad smell around people and policies you don’t like, all the while pretending you’re being reasonable and objective: Framing is all around us […]
Have a look at this magnificent AJ interview from late 2011 with Jin Liqun, head of China’s Sovereign Wealth Fund. The whole thing is impressive for Jin Liqun’s steely logic and sense of effortless authority. But it moves into overdrive at 11.40 or so when he starts to talk about […]
Back in Belgrade in communist Yugoslavia in 1984 or thereabouts, the then Ambassador and an unusually smart Ist Sec Econ pored over a diplomatic despatch that sought to draw attention to the dismal state of the state’s finances. The basic problem was that Yugoslavia did not have Honest Money. Yes, […]
So, there I was in Gdansk in August 2005 for some impressive ceremonies to mark the 25th anniversary of the 1980 August agreements that showed the Solidarity movement gathering strength to negotiate successfully with the Polish communist regime. The UK was represented by Deputy Prime Minister John Prescott, who growled […]
The FT has an interesting but perhaps rather mischievous piece (££) by Kishore Mahbubani (distinguished dean of the Lee Kuan Yew School of Public Policy at the National University of Singapore) that argues for President Obama learning from centuries of wise diplomatic practice by ‘picking up the phone’ to talk […]
