Check out this new car mirror designed by a very smart mathematician in the USA to help drivers see what is happening in the ‘blind spot’: Hicks’s driver’s side mirror has a field of view of about 45 degrees, compared to 15 to 17 degrees of view in a flat […]
Isn’t this just about the best summary of Europe’s problems you’ll see? Beyond briliant: … the unsustainable "bubble" is not student debt or subprime mortgages or anything else. The bubble is us, and the assumptions of entitlement. Too many citizens of advanced Western democracies live a life they have not […]
Ann Althouse reminds us of a fascinating account of what was going on in President Gerald Ford’s mind when back in 1976 he made his ruinous observation (at least probably ruinous for his election chances) that there was "no Soviet domination of Eastern Europe": JIM LEHRER: Let’s go back at the […]
And here’s my new Telegraph Blogs piece, another one raking over the ‘solidarity’ issues of the #Eurozone: Uber-Europhiles insist that the right answer to that is get rid of pesky national-level voting, and indeed pesky countries – only an EU-level polis makes sense once economic risk-management is transferred to the […]
Derek Tonkin makes plenty more smart points in emails to me which he is pleased to see made available to a wider audience (edited and reorganised slightly by me for this format). See especially his wise concluding sentence. Thus: Sanctions In 1999 the UK Government completed a general study of […]
Here is a gushing and perceptive article from Spiegel Online on the wonders of Poland since the end of communism and the serene beauty of today’s Germany/Poland relationship. Nice ending: If old clichés have any traction at all anymore, it is in the vast Polish countryside, which lags behind urban […]
Over at the FT it is revealed that the EU has plans for tackling the bank/Eurozone crisis: Under the plans, when a bank is judged to be failing and at the point of collapse, regulators will assume emergency powers to sack the management, restructure the bank’s assets and write down […]
These caught my eye. First, the Indy’s Ben Chu on the tasty fare on offer to EU leaders at their latest Summit: What would that transformative menu look like? Well the first course would be an acknowledgement by the self-righteous leaders of northern Europe that, with the sole exception of Greece, […]
Over at the Guardian in the Business section the penny drops: The idea that the European leaders who have been like rabbits in the headlight for the past two years can mastermind a clean break for Greece is utterly fanciful. The crisis will be messy, painful, prolonged and probably terminal. […]
You no doubt are wondering what has been happening to my articles for DIPLOMAT. The answer is that their website has been having some issues, so I am behind at linking to them. But here is my latest, a timely little number on Intelligent Euroscepticism: Broadly speaking, the idea of […]
