The world takes another step towards the Internet Cloud as Google launches its new browser Google Chrome. We, the vast mass of mere users, have almost no idea of what is happening to deliver these miracles of networked cleverness. Here (via Charles Johnson) is as simple an explanation as we might hope […]
The Times has two noteworthy pieces on Georgia and its ramifications today. Bronwen Maddox weighs in on the EU’s defiant chihuahua-like stance: … even though the EU should rightly settle for the lowest common denominator on such important questions of its own identity, the proposals were weak beyond parody. “The Union […]
That fellow Spengler sure has a way with words: Senator Barack Obama’s acceptance speech last week seemed vastly different from the stands of this city’s Invesco Stadium than it did to the 40 million who saw it on television. Melancholy hung like think smog over the reserved seats where I […]
I have opined about the Rules purporting to lay down what diplomats can and can’t say once they leave the FCO. See eg here. Now my former colleage Sir Edward Clay has reiterated his concerns about the FCO Rules: The rule requires former diplomats to consult about any proposed public […]
Back in quite deep Oxfordshire from Orlando, via a horrible early morning experience today at T4 at Heathrow. The sheer shabbiness there is bad enough when compared to the hi-end bright and clean Orlando/Newark terminals, but I had never before encountered in the UK a 100m plus queue to get to passport […]
Prompted by Karadzic’s transfer to ICTY, here in the new issue of Total Politics is a piece from me on my encounters with two other Bosnian Serb leaders convicted by ICTY for crimes against humanity. What are these people like? Are they obvious monsters? If not that, at least patently weird? […]
A lively piece of US-style political analysis: Sure, Hillary’s fat and waddly and screechy and gives pantsuits a bad name. Sure, she’s the kind of gal my dad’s generation knew back in college in the Sixties, the one who wore granny dresses and never shaved her legs and slept with […]
Busy ploughing through Lonely Hearts by John Harvey. The hero of this series of well praised detective stories is Detective Charlie Resnick. He has a Polish background which makes a lugubrious appearance now and again. But if Arrow Books are going to do detective stories with a Polish angle, they ought to get Poles to […]
More on the feisty Report by the HoC Public Affairs Select Committee report which came down heavily on FCO rules purporting to limit what diplomats might say after they leave the Service. Craig Murray calls these regulations ‘near-fascistic’: The idea, of course, is that only the ministers’ version of truth will […]
Remember the heroic fight for freedom by Ezra Levant in Canada over his publication of the dreaded Danish cartoons of Mohamed? He has won! Sort of. He didn’t say I was free. He said I merely met his censorship standards, so I may go. Those are two completely different things. […]
