A very smart article by Tom Smith over in San Diego, pointing out how Government scrambles to assert to itself an inordinate share of private success but breezily overlooks all the failures it’s caused: It’s difficult to even explain how pervasive, expensive, frustrating and sometimes just plain insuperable the regulatory […]
I have linked before to the magnificent economic analysis of John Mauldin – freely sent to your Inbox once you sign up. We mere voter-taxpayer drones have no real idea of what is needed to save the Eurozone or indeed us, given the startling multi-dimensional mess the whole system has […]
What a dire article over at Bloomberg by one Catherine Hickley, comparing the issues of the possible break-up of the Eurozone with the collapse of the Soviet Union. Here’s how not to write such things. First, it seems to me to stretch things a bit to describe the post-Soviet space […]
Here are the answers I have given to some questions about Russia, over on the Russia Insights website: What are 3 positive things you would say about Russia? Russia’s sense of itself – a quite different idea of scale, and what that means both for national policy and in historical and […]
Here at Commentator is one I did today recalling (again) the infamous scheming actions of Harold Macmillan and other British soldiers in sending thousands of Yugoslavs to be murdered by Tito. Why did they do it? And what does it still mean?
Ukraine is a complex place. Large country. Poised politically, culturally and psychologically between ‘Europe’ and ‘Russia’. Here is a piece by Democratist who thinks that all is not well: President Yanukovich is in the process of creating a highly personalized style of government. According to our sources, all revenue streams have […]
Here is another DIPLOMAT piece, this time on ‘transitions’ from communism in Europe: Back in the mid-1980s I was the Foreign Office speechwriter working for Sir Geoffrey Howe. Exciting times. Mikhail Gorbachev was leading the Soviet Union in what looked like a strongly positive new direction. In Poland the Solidarity […]
In a result unexpected by me at least (I am not following Serbia’s goings-on too closely these days, and the polls suggested that Tadic would win again) Tomislav Nikolic as leader of the Serbian Progressive Party has won Serbia’s Presidential Elections today by a clear nose, ousting former President Boris […]
This a superb example of one form of Addictive Stupidity – people who have lulled themselves to sleep on the ambrosia of past glory, demanding that Reality apply to anyone but themselves, fine and upstanding New York Times journalists as they most certainly are. You’ll need a heart of stone not to […]
You remember biorhythms, the theory that our bodies operate according to varying biological cycles that periodically coincide, for better or worse? The Wikipedia page on Biorhythms absurdly suggests that this idea is all pseudoscience: Critics state that biorhythms are based only upon numerological associations. The plausibility of biorhythmics is contested by mathematicians, […]
