Tim Worstall takes a typical piece of headline-grabbing journalistic fluff … Within 10 years, the Gates Foundation is projected to have a GDP bigger than 70 per cent of the world’s nations. … and proceeds to work out what if anything it might mean. Not much, it turns out.
This morning I appeared on LBC‘s Nick Ferrari Breakfast radio programme. I was invited to join Mehdi Hasan (New Statesman) to talk about the forthcoming visit to the UK of Pakistan’s President Zardari. Mehdi led off, unexpectedly (for me!) praising David Cameron for speaking out about the fact that elements in Pakistan […]
Over at Business and Politics is my latest piece, on the BP oil disaster in the Gulf of Mexico. It looks in a roundabout way at issues of information flow, risk management and ‘corporate culture’: Perhaps our hard-pressed rig operator makes the mistake of fact, misinterpreting the information being pushed to […]
Part of the lonely life of the long-distance blogger is the furious battle waged behind the scenes to stop idiotic spam overwhelming the website’s comment area. In my case the website uses the Intense Debate comments facility. I receive an e-mail notification that a new comment has been posted, whereupon […]
My piece analysing David Cameron’s high-profile speeches in Turkey and India has attracted some attention, and various well-taken comments. Part of the problem for a speechwriter for a top politician is to work out who the audience is, and craft the words accordingly. Most speeches of any consequence by (say) […]
See the wild reaction on the streets of Karachi, as angry but illiterate crowds protest against the British Prime Minister’s remarks about Pakistan and terrorism Tsk. It should either be Loo’s or Loos’. See also the distinguished role being played in the drama by HM High Commissioner to Pakistan, Adam […]
In case you want even more on this business about Cameron/India/Pakistan (or even if you do not), read this businesslike piece by Hasan Suroor in The Hindu. It reminds us helpfully of one footling British diplomatic error after another: This is not the first time that a British leader has […]
Years ago when I was at Harvard University on a sabbatical midcareer break, I experimented for the first time with voice recognition software. In those days, the technology had already advanced pretty well. That is to make the system work, you had to load the program on to your PC, then read […]
An ever-alert reader notes that on the B92 website in Serbia I am described as Carls Kroford. Huh? On Charles, the cyrillic alphabet has its own separate letters for our ch sound, one for a ‘hard’ ch and one for a ‘soft’ ch: very roughly the difference between choose-day and Tuesday. […]
My recent piece about the feebleness of Peter Mandelson’s speechwriters looked ahead to the coming international tour of David Cameron to see if his people would do a better job. NB folks, what follows is not about policy as such. It’s about speechwriting and diplomatic technique, and the way messages are […]
