Busy anti-circumcision Left ‘activists’ UK Uncut last night tried to protest against Bono at Glastonbury! An event replete with (in?) delicious post-modern irony. The more so when U2 ‘security guards’ pounded in to seize and destroy the pretty protest balloon. Leftists! Defend private property! Readers recall my one and only encounter […]
Here’s the comment I have just posted at CiF: There are two ‘deep’ problems here. Complexity and Legitimacy. The EU has been pushed too far in both widening and deepening – the core Europhiles insisted on institutional ‘deepening’ as the price for bringing more countries into the fold. This has […]
You all know where these came from: Art never expresses anything but itself All bad art comes from returning to Life and Nature, and elevating them into ideals Life imitates Art far more than Art imitates Life Lying, the telling of beautiful untrue things, is the proper aim of Art […]
Autonomous Mind kindly gave a link and supporting comments to my recent piece about Negotiation Training. And, via Twitter, he asked for More on the Carrot/Stick negotiating paradigm. So, here it is. The psychology of diplomatic negotiating is a vast, interesting and almost unanalysed subject. A couple of years ago […]
Here’s a lively little number over at The Commentator, if I say so myself: There is now little joy in this fast unfolding fiasco for any political tendency or EU member state. Everyone has got what they wanted. Yet it is not working out so well, just as in the […]
Ha ha ha! Serbia has been shoved to the top of the diplomatic rubbish-heap by the Russian Foreign Ministry when it comes to issuing extra money for hardship postings! This piece by RFE/RL notes that Serbia with Kosovo (sic) is now in the same category as Iran, North Korea, Sudan, Georgia, […]
Update Link not working previously – now fixed. Apologies. When I rummage around in this blog I find all sorts of good stuff I have forgotten I ever wrote. This is one such: a good practical example of a policy and personal dilemma for any civil servant to which there […]
My article in DIPLOMAT about Diplomatic Loyalties has been recycled by Grassroot Diplomat, a site run by Talyn Rahman. She opens with this ambitious statement: Imagine this. You are a diplomat representing your birth country, but your heritage lies with two other states from your parents and you are married […]
This is a brisk piece of work from Guy Sorman, a French economist philosopher who looks at global energy issues with a beady eye. He concludes that the main victim of the Japanese nuclear disaster after the tsunami will be not nuclear power but Green Ideology, at least in its luxuriant […]
Anne Applebaum does a convincing job in demolishing what remains of the reputation of Mikhail Gorbachev who led the USSR to its own collapse: … the evening served to underline the strangeness of Gorbachev’s fate. Here was the man who had launched glasnost and perestroika, who had presided over the […]
