If we look at Iranian cities, we won’t find a single billboard publicizing a book. IRIB [Iran’s state broadcaster] doesn’t advertize any books. The national media doesn’t advertize even a single book shop from all across Iran, but there are advertizing posters on the walls across the city inviting people […]
Perusing Hacker Factor I found this notable device, a Gender Guesser programme for (yes) guessing the gender of a writer from 300 or so words of prose. Worth a try. So I cut and pasted this passage from a recent blog entry of mine: The strength of the Iranian protest […]
Reader Norman Fraser in his amazement despises this site: I am amazed at how intellectually short-winded most of your posts are… Yet mothishly he flickers to and fro around its warm glow. See his latest comment on my posting below about those climategate email Source Code Hiccups: Still kidding yourself in ever […]
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, […]
The popular rising in Iran against its revolting regime is gaining momentum. But will that be enough? A good WSJ piece on the Big Picture: Much has been written about the fact that Iran’s democratic movement today combines the three characteristics of a velvet revolution—nonviolent, nonutopian and populist in nature—with […]
Here is Baroness Ashton laying out her stall for EU collective foreign policy, in an ill-drafted text piling on one wordy cliche after another: I believe that a lot can be achieved with quiet diplomacy. We need people who can listen as well as talk, and who can work behind […]
Time is short. We can’t fret about the world and its awful problems 24/7/365. So, the question: how to allocate one’s moral energy? Some people campaign on the risks to small remote tribal communities threatened by a tidal wave of modernisation. Others demand reparations for real or asserted massive wrongs […]
Update: Welcome Iain Dale readers. Just to add that at the funeral of Zoran Djindjic Robin Cook represented the UK. He privately told some of the assembled foreign dignitaries how we was about to resign from the government two days later over Iraq, as indeed he did. Robin Cook did not resign […]
…a post that demonstrates the real power of the blogosphere, in which the sharpest insights are not to be found in the highest profile blogs but the ones just bubbling underneath. Charles has an excellent piece on how the inner inner ring of the British establishment is now punishing Tony […]
Luckily for us, Daniel Simpson has been lucky enough to get the full transcript of a Nobel Prize acceptance speech which President Obama won’t deliver. It is well worth reading this Top Secret text, as it elegantly describes in Obama-style language a parallel universe which might exist but does not […]
