I have joined the team of commenters and MPs and others over at Dale & Co, Iain Dale’s new current affairs mega blog, providing some of the best political, media, social and sports commentary on the net. Here’s my first contribution, about (what else?) the Eurozone: The point, of course, is that […]
Remember the Bonn Powers for Bosnia and Herzegovina – the supposed authority bestowed on the High Representative by the ‘international community’ to allow him/her to remove recalcitrant Bosnians from office or otherwise ‘move forward’ the ‘peace process’? The impressive thing was that as far as I could see the Bonn Powers […]
Fascinating and important piece by FT’s Clive Crook on the deep moral assumptions underpinning the USA’s latest public spending dramas: Prof Haidt finds that liberals are driven mainly by intuitions about fairness (who gets what) and harm to victims. Conservatives are guided by those intuitions too, but also by intuitions […]
Nosemonkey praises the energetic start of the Polish Presidency, not least a feisty speech by Polish PM Donald Tusk. The text of this important speech is not (as far as I can see) on the Polish Prime Minister’s official website, even in Polish. So we have to do with some […]
Poland now assumes the six-month Polish Presidency for the first time. Foreign Minister Radek Sikorski sets the scene: “EU success story” gets some 600 Google News hits. “EU crisis” gets 14,000 hits. What has gone wrong? Some people have a blunt answer: “Too much Europe!” EU structures and policies are […]
Check out this exchange where a Fletcher School graduate tries to correct a Reuters fact-blunder in a story, Reuters putting the School as part of Boston University (it in fact is part of Tufts University). What’s interesting is this part of their explanation: Regarding your request, please see the resolution […]
As the Greek Parliament votes another impossible-to-implement austerity package and the world’s financial centres and European banks hope for the best, have a look at these nice chess examples of ‘Greek gift sacrifices’ (if you click the buttons you can watch the moves unfold on the screen). The idea echoes the […]
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 […]
You all know where these came from: Art never expresses anything but itself All bad art comes from returning to Life and Nature, and elevating them into ideals Life imitates Art far more than Art imitates Life Lying, the telling of beautiful untrue things, is the proper aim of Art […]
Here’s the comment I have just posted at CiF: There are two ‘deep’ problems here. Complexity and Legitimacy. The EU has been pushed too far in both widening and deepening – the core Europhiles insisted on institutional ‘deepening’ as the price for bringing more countries into the fold. This has […]
