Looking at Ann Althouse’s marvellous site I spy the following Instant Poll: When should you testify with a squirrel in your cleavage? When you’re telling the truth, and you want to be believed. When you’re lying, and you don’t want to be believed. When you’re telling the truth, and […]
The BBC website picks up the musty tone of David Miliband’s recent speech on Europe in a headline which strongly suggests a direct quote from something or someone: Iran ‘must free UK Embassy staff’ The ensuing piece about an EU Foreign Ministers statement on the arrest by Iranian police of […]
It seems that we are to have a new national Cyber Security Strategy. The excellent Spy Blog asks some pertinent questions about operational accountability, showing some sharp insight into the way things work or not in practice: Does either the Office of Cyber Security or the Cyber Security Operations Centre […]
Polly Toynbee in the Guardian laments the anti-politics mood in the UK. But the problem is not politicians and their crass policies and greedy expenses-grabbing. It’s voters, ungrateful for all the good things Government bestows upon them. As for bloggers: The blogosphere could have been a source for better information, […]
The main practical argument for skewing the law to protect a blogger’s anonymity in such cases as the Night Jack one is that honourable anonymous or pseudonymous bloggers working within public service might be silenced. And the public would lose a flow of helpful insights. True enough, in some distinguished […]
Some interesting thoughts on that subject in the Guardian (always a pleasure to see the word desuetude) and Sharpe’s Opinion: Reading between the lines of ‘Smeargate’ (can we really not have a better name) and the expenses scandal, we see Maximus Decimus Meridias removing his helmet and standing up to Commodus. […]
A final thought on that David Miliband speech in Poland. It’s his use of the words ‘must’ and ‘need’. This is what he says the EU ‘must’ do. It must: adapt once again to the changing geopolitical context we face set itself a goal of creating a single, low-carbon, energy […]
Few people know that I hosted Michael Jackson at the Residence in Warsaw, not too many months before he died. I had not had the pleasure to meet him previously, but despite his evident battle with ill-health we and some of his close friends had an excellent lunch as he told […]
A question is asked re my previous (peevious?) posting on the Foreign Secretary’s visit to Poland: On david’s grandfather, are you sure he fought with the red army? Are you referring to ralph’s father samuel? Good question. How do I know? I wasn’t there. But rummaging around through Google finds […]
My first thought on the Foreign Secretary’s Warsaw speech was that the opening ‘historic passages’ were clunky. This is what happens. The speechwriter is pretty familiar with the broad rhetorical lines of policy on EU issues. But knows nothing about Poland or the UK’s relations with it. So s/he does […]
