We customers just sit back and let the torrent of astonishing cheap electronic devices keep coming, each generation more wonderful than the last. It’s all down to Moore’s Law: crudely speaking, the idea that every two years or so the amount of computer bang you get for your buck in fact […]
A significant UK court ruling allows agreements reached during marriage on the disposal of assets in the case of divorce to be legally binding. But not agreements reached before marriage. This reads oddly: Legal experts say the important ruling will lead to many couples deciding how to settle their financial […]
The Mumbai massacres tell us a lot about the way power works (and doesn’t) these days. This is not a classic terrorist atrocity, but rather a fairly sophisticated military attack: The Mumbai attack is something different. Foreign assault teams that likely trained and originated from outside the country infiltrated a […]
The Pedant General makes an observation on my posting about the Four Attributes of Economic Success: I think you have still missed one thing. Whilst the rule of law is the essential underpinning without which none of the four political aspirations can take root, the rule of law will not […]
It is always a pleasure to see a leading Singaporean politician in top form. See this elegant and ideas-rich speech to the Asia Society on 11 November by Singapore Senior Minister Mr Goh Chok Tong. Several lively judgements: For the last two hundred years or so, the international system has […]
One of the best things about writing a blog is that like an exotic plant it somehow grows in strange directions and shapes and thereby introduces you to all sorts of new people round the planet. Such as someone who saw my post on PM Qualities and posted a positive comment, Andrew Cooper. Check […]
Good question: Why do Asian investors depend on American capital markets? Given the near breakdown of key sectors of the American market, one might expect Asians to bring their money home. Quite the opposite has happened: Asian currencies have fallen sharply against the American dollar… What does America have that […]
A phrase which these days is hard to eradicate from bureaucratic discourse is ‘positive feedback’. It is used in the sense of asking around for views on an issue/paper/person and getting views ‘fed back’ (positive views, or negative views). Quiet how this scientifically precise phrase came to acquire this trite new […]
Remember the Mark Steyn trials testing the limits of Free Speech in democratic Canada? He has been acquitted. Which he thinks is a cowardly decision by the Tribunal concerned: Because we spent a ton of money and had a bigshot Queen’s Counsel and exposed the joke jurisprudence and (at the […]
I previously linked to Christopher Hitchens and Michael Totten analysing why the Kosovo case is quite different from the cases of either S Ossetia or Abkhazia, rendering spurious/dishonest Russia’s recognition of the latter two as new states. Here for good measure is former US Ambassador to Zagreb and Belgrade, my friend Bill […]
