My latest piece at Punditwire, where I note with horror that the Milibandistic dry rot of filling speeches with meaningless – but also intellectually shifty – musty/needs exhortations has spread all the way across the Atlantic to President Obama’s speechwriters: … his [Obama’s] recent well received speech in Israel, where […]
Here is an interesting (but not altogether clear) piece about Cyprus and ‘national insolvency’ by Stephen Kinsella at Harvard Business Review: … national borrowing on the modern scale really only began around the seventeenth century. Before that in the monarchical era, so-called “court bankers” provided cash-strapped sovereigns with loans and […]
My new piece at Commentator on how these new press ‘regulations’ might or might not tackle ‘egregious practices’: So we have no lack of sanctions in this area, formal and informal. Just as we have the strictest laws against killing people. Yet in a country of some 60 million people […]
Further thoughts on the speech by President Obama in Israel (scroll down to see the earlier post from my PunditWire piece below). This time prompted by analysis over at Foreign Policy. First, Hussein Ibish who thought that he did a terrific job: The psychological, communication and political skill that was […]
Swing by National Review Online to catch up on conservative views on President Obama’s visit to Israel and what do you find? Not much. In fact almost nothing. Which goes to show just how strikingly well Obama did in behaving warmly towards Israel. Yes, the ‘optics’ of Obama appearing under […]
Back from sharing with the Croatian Diplomatic Academy some training thoughts on Lobbying and Negotiating in the European Union. With the Cyprus drama helpfully unfolding before our startled eyes. These fiendishly complex financial/banking negotiations are impossible for normal people to follow, although anyone following my Twitter feed will have seen […]
Here’s my Telegraph Blogs piece this morning on the news coming from Brussels that mirabile dictu the EU Budget may in fact not grow over the coming seven year financial cycle: The French have made the usual belligerent noises, feigning to champion increased spending that they too can’t afford. As […]
Over on Twitter I have been having some 140-character exchanges with erudite writer and thinker Bryan Appleyard @BryanAppleyard on the fascinating subject of how far if at all it is right to ‘gloat’ about the catastrophic plummet from grace of Chris Huhne. Bryan seemed to think that this was not […]
Here is another Commentator piece from me on a subject with moral content, namely how far is it appropriate to take into account the ethnicity (or ‘race’) of would-be adopting parents? Is it right to put a child from a ‘minority’ community into a ‘white’ home? Thus: … those who […]
Here is my Telegraph Blogs take on The Speech: The core Cameron calculation turns on his probably shrewd calculation that the centre of gravity of the British people’s position on “Europe” is that they want Some EU, but Not Too Much. He therefore has promised them a referendum on a […]
