I have linked here before to Johann Hari’s deliberate/incompetent/negligent – who knows? – misreading of one of the key passages in Atlas Shrugged: Thus Johann: … her contempt for ordinary people extends so far that when a railway worker in ‘Atlas Shrugged’ decides to punish the wicked socialist government by […]
Busy anti-circumcision Left ‘activists’ UK Uncut last night tried to protest against Bono at Glastonbury! An event replete with (in?) delicious post-modern irony. The more so when U2 ‘security guards’ pounded in to seize and destroy the pretty protest balloon. Leftists! Defend private property! Readers recall my one and only encounter […]
Anne Applebaum does a convincing job in demolishing what remains of the reputation of Mikhail Gorbachev who led the USSR to its own collapse: … the evening served to underline the strangeness of Gorbachev’s fate. Here was the man who had launched glasnost and perestroika, who had presided over the […]
A snappy young Serbian woman with two degrees from universities in the USA comes back to Belgrade to live and work. She gets a good job in a major Serbian bank on the corporate communications side. She gives a presentation to the bank top brass on how the bank can […]
Always good to be reminded that Europe is not just the wimpy EU or neurotic Balkans. There’s also Ukraine, and where (if anywhere) it fits in to the Bigger Picture. Luckily we have Odessablog’s Blog on the case, watching things with an astute British eye from balmy Crimea. Here’s a […]
Off to Belgrade tomorrow for a conference on Thursday hosted by the Belgrade Forum for the World of Equals as supported by Russian partners. The theme is European Security in the Light of 2012 Elections. Notable speakers include Dragan Todorovic of the Serbian Radical Party, whose programme asserts Serbia‘s rights over […]
My recent piece about the Amazing Vanishing Referendm in Republika Srpska was picked up by RFE/RL (in Serbian/Bosnian) and so got a rather wider Balkan readership than it otherwise might have done. Any normal person reading it might have thought that it (albeit in perhaps a sardonic and annoying way) […]
Here’s a piece I have written for The Commentator picking up a baffling Guardian piece yesterday by Martin Kettle, in which he rightly attacks Labour’s horrible proliferation of new regulation and criminal offences as "an insult to a society of free people", but then bewails the efforts of the Coalition […]
Just when you thought that the Canadian elections had brought to power people making some claim to be ‘conservatives’ (and therefore, perhaps, taking individual liberty seriously) along comes a new draft law which inter alia makes you a criminal if you post on your own site a link to a […]
Do any diplomats out there recall anything from their careers about the amazing story of South Korean actress Choi Eun-hee, who was kidnapped in 1978 by the North Korean regime but managed to escape in 1986 and seek political asylum at the US Embassy in Vienna? It’s this latter event […]
