Just back from this year’s Churchill Public Speaking Competition for schools at glorious Blenheim Palace. The format is interesting – and oddly difficult. Each school has a Chairperson, Speaker and Questioner. Within a timeframe of some ten minutes the Chair has to introduce the school and the team, then hand […]
One recurring theme of this website is Consequences, and where they come from. My main conclusion after scrutinising the human race for some 50 years is that this is the hardest of all ideas to understand: (i) that, yes, there was a time when what you see around you did […]
This account by William J Dobson over at Slate of the miserable failure of Hugo Chavez is the best one I have read so far. It has some splendid lines: The political ideology Chávez left behind, Chavismo, was a demonstrable failure for the Venezuelan people, but it is not as […]
Preparations chez Crawford are intensifying for next week’s fine Churchill Public Speaking Project event at Blenheim Palace at which schools compete to deliver powerful presentations on a number of possible themes. Here’s the list of subjects. Events like this help motivate children (and, ahem, their parents) to look at the […]
So there I was down at Bristol University at the weekend for the latest Bristol International Development Conference. An event impressive for the 200 or so people (mainly students, and overwhelmingly female) who turned out on a Saturday to mull over the practice and politics of development assistance under the […]
Ref my post below, check out this magnificent and chilling video. Perhaps this really is Pandora’s Box time.
Remember this? … let’s also agree that we are at a technological and civilisational turning-point. For now these high-precision UAV/drones and their supporting networks are still controlled by a handful of states. Good. But the technology will leak and get cheaper and better. Not so good. In due course the […]
Over at Backbencher Lee Jenkins takes a look at some issues surrounding ‘international intervention’ from a libertarian-inclining standpoint: Yet international relations is a sphere refreshingly free of ideology. States are motivated less by values and ideals, and more by a narrow set of objectives and interests… Once you acknowledge what motivates a country’s […]
My piece for The Commentator on the PM’s UK/EU speech as a speech: … Those sentences, like the opening blather about the origins of the European Union, are intended to send a strong signal to other European capitals: You won’t get a better UK Conservative leader than me who has […]
Before the Internet how would we ever have been able to read a magnificent analysis by James Daily of the contract presented to Bilbo by the dwarves? The contract in the book is short and to the point. The film version (for padding) is far longer and a lot more […]
