UK Foreign Secretary William Hague is in Moscow. Some thoughts. One of my earliest blog postings from back in 2008 described some of the issues arising from the Russian authorities’ beastly treatment of the British Council. It recorded something said to me by a senior Russian diplomat in 1996 […]
Are North Korea’s leader, Jack Straw, Neil Kinnock and Fidel Castro by some chance related? Of course. Why? Because they are all part of socalist political family hierarchies, featuring a successful father whose fame and power and influence help propel their relatives to new glory. We all know about Kim […]
I am fed up. No, I really am. How many more times do I need patiently to explain to this country that Football Fascism is unacceptable. What is Tim Montgomorie doing supporting the idea that the state should loot specific items of private property so that local MPs can show […]
Over at Business and Politics is my nob unsuccessful attempt to bring trendy retail chain Joe Browns to explain why they think it is OK to sell clothes with communist images. They do try to wriggle out of a tight corner, and seem to accept that Che committed atrocities: The […]
Jonathan Freedland keeps popping up in the Guardian on the subject of the dishonesty and falsehood of equating Soviet and Nazi crimes. Here he was in October last year. And now again today: For one thing, the equation of Nazi and communist crimes rarely entails an honest account of the former. […]
Awesome Guardian piece on the Cuban regime’s bold plan to stop paying people nothing to do nothing: Authorities announced yesterday they will lay off more than 1 million state employees in the island’s biggest economic shake-up since the 1960s. Cuts begin immediately, with 500,000 jobs due to go by March. […]
My analysis of this phenomenon, ably brought to our attention by eclectic Lefty Keith Ruffles in a comment on my latest BBRU, is over at Business and Politics: But where does ‘real influence’ come from? Only from the systemic discipline which comes from people having the chance to vote both […]
An interesting piece by James Kwak about how his economics students tackled a problem supposedly about fairness in business practice: Today in class, the professor posed the first question from the paper: “A hardware store has been selling snow shovels for $15. The morning after a large snowstorm, the store […]
Via Tim Worstall, this magnificent essay by Michael Lewis in Vanity Fair about the cultural and other problems which have led Greece far down the road of folly. It’s quite long, but all the more devastating for that as the writer follows the mysteries of corruption and tax-cheating into almost unbelievable […]
What was Kim Philby really up to when he started working for the Soviet Union? Boris Volodarsky follows the complicated story: Stalin had decided that one of the ways to solve the ‘Spanish problem’ would be to assassinate Franco. In 1937 Soviet military intelligence, the GRU, sent several operatives on […]
