I return from Spain to a truly dismal amateur-hour rant against ‘free marketeers’ by Will Hutton in the Guardian. It prompted me to opine over at Commentator: “The collapse of a belief system paralyses and terrifies in equal measure. Certainties are exploded. A reliable compass for action suddenly becomes inoperable. […]
We are off to southern Spain for a week – last year’s summer holiday. So profound thoughts from me may be even sparser than usual, depending on the wifi. In the meantime, read this one about Risk and Money: To claim that New Deal stability as a whole (as opposed […]
Wouldn’t it make life a lot easier and generally more wonderful if police people could see through your clothes to tell if you are carrying a knife? Incoming.
If you like words and like to think, kiss your life goodbye and get the Spelltower app. Basically, it’s an 8×12 grid (on one’s iPhone), where a range of letters start across the bottom of the grid. As you complete words by linking adjacent letters in as complex a pattern […]
The great American jurist Robert Bork has died. Here is an eloquent summary of his influence – and the shameful attacks on him by Ted Kennedy among others – by Roger Kimball. I once had the great pleasure to meet Robert Bork and his wife. He told me about his […]
An aspect of Mount Everest that has stayed well away from my sphere of reference – until now – is what happens to those who die in the effort of making it to the top and back down again The harsh conditions far up the mountain make it impossible to […]
If you shoot a pellet at an oncoming train it won’t make any perceptible difference to the train’s speed. Obviously. But what if you shoot tens of thousands of pellets? How to work out how many might in fact stop the train quite quickly? Luckily we have the answer. And […]
We went to visit this wonderful place in Cornwall today. It’s a treasure of civilisation, a natural space – part garden, part deliberately created exotic forest with plants from all round the world – that was taken to fine heights by the Victorian family who owned it but then slumped into chaos […]
Here is a handy summary of the evolution of young women talking about their ‘first time’ on political ads, thereby linking voting to, er, sex. From Australia to Putin to Obama. How the Obama campaign can have thought that this ad helps their cause defeats me. Unless, that is, young […]
I have quoted Australian satirist Tim Blair here now and again. He is famous (justly) for Blair’s Law: … a theoretical construct that claims an alliance or shared empathy between far right and left groups and extremist Islamists. Blair describes this perceived alignment as an "ongoing process by which the world’s […]
