Let’s look on the bright sider and assume that this year the ghastly North Korean regime implodes, leading to pell-mell reunification. Then what? In particular, who pays the huge bill to start to put right the mess: More than a dozen reports by governments, academics and investment banks in recent […]
Either the citizens own the state, or the state owns the citizens. In the latter case there are no citizens. Only serfs. The modern state tells us what not to do and sets conditions on what we can do. But it so far has not sought to demand that contracts […]
Another Browser link, this time to a fascinating interview with Stephen Lucas, a heavyweight expert on Soviet Law. This is well worth reading since it casts some light on an area largely neglected in Western analysis of Communism, namely the way the Soviet regime tried to give legal effect to […]
A busy few days for old-fashioned diplomacy, with China taking no obvious notice of British and other pleas for clemency in the case of Akmal Shaikh, and the Tehran regime hauling in the British Ambassador Simon Gass to issue dire warnings about a ‘slap in the face’ from Iran. Some thoughts. First, […]
Who said this? In 1989 I made a trip to England. I was hosted by Prime Minister [Margaret] Thatcher at her residence at Chequers for official talks and she invited me personally up to the attic. There, in the attic of this ancient, ancient palace, there were many antique relics […]
The Summit starts. Has the hacking/leaking of all those mails made any difference? Some pro-Summit people are saying that it must have been done ‘deliberately’ to try to mess up the Summit. By … sinister music … the Russians? Yet that argument makes sense only if it assumes that the material […]
Prompted by the story of how (not) to reward effort, a reader tells us another story: This is a truly massive failure called the American healthcare system. Dreamt up by laissez faire Capitalists over sixty years ago, the American healthcare system costs twice as much as the NHS whilst leaving […]
Leaving aside possible criminal charges involving attempts to avoid FOI requests, there are all sorts of legal options in the UK and US alike for people wanting to challenge the way public funds have been invested in academic work on Climate Change which (it seems) fails to meet respectable standards […]
Is the true issue about all those leaked climate emails that the underlying data sets used to make far-reaching UN and other climate predictions are so badly done that they are unable to withstand intelligent expert scrutiny? And that that’s why the scientists concerned were worried about FOI requests and other […]
A Polish friend sends me this: An economics professor at a local college made a statement that he had never failed a single student before, but had once failed an entire class. That class had insisted that socialism worked and that no one would be poor and no one would […]
