Over in the USA an extraordinary and horrible trial has ended with a cascade of Guilty verdicts for Penn State University’s former football coach Jerry Sandusky on 45 separate accounts of abusing young boys. As Sandusky trudges off to what may not be a happy rest of his life in […]
We mere Britishers tend not to follow in detail the goings-on in the USA, where a new literary genre has appeared – the Fantasy Autobiography, often wildly feted in the name of progressive causes. Here is Mark Steyn’s handy round-up of some superb examples which include, ahem, President Obama himself: His Kenyan grandfather was […]
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 […]
As you know, this blog takes the view that in a globalised world a terrorist threat to the networks that support modern life are a threat to us all. And that international law doctrines of self-defence and ‘national sovereignty’ need to be redefined accordingly: if a state wants the benefit of modern […]
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 […]
Greg Pytel (GP) returns, asking me to post a comment to my post below, which of course I have done. His further observations are interesting. I do not think it was fair to put up a running commentary (Especially as you well know that all I really wanted was to put […]
You are probably wondering what is my finest piece of writing about diplomatic life. I ask myself that question. The answer is here. A description for DIPLOMAT magazine of the astonishing sub-culture of Diplomatic Barnacles, those primitive life-forms that cling tenaciously to the local Diplomatic Corps and can never be […]
You remember biorhythms, the theory that our bodies operate according to varying biological cycles that periodically coincide, for better or worse? The Wikipedia page on Biorhythms absurdly suggests that this idea is all pseudoscience: Critics state that biorhythms are based only upon numerological associations. The plausibility of biorhythmics is contested by mathematicians, […]
Should we all be ‘altruistic’? And if so, why? Some observations from me on this ever-fascinating subject over at Commentator: Think too about the force of a morality founded in self-respect and free trade between free people. What’s the alternative? The beggar says: “I exist, and I have misfortune. Please […]
Former Reagan speechwriter Peggy Noonan turns a beautiful insightful phrase – and is impossibly grand. She also knows a thing or two about public speaking: An example of the power of plain words: In late 1996 the writer Tom Wolfe made a speech in New York in which, according to a […]
