Here is part of a comment on a previous posting of mine on Western policy in the Balkans: It isn’t the US’s or the UK’s business to "achieve stability or long-term solutions" in the Balkans, the Middle East, or anywhere else. The sooner these two moralising countries (whose own morals […]
Here is John Simpson of the BBC opining on Iran. He used to be a good journalist before he got himself tangled in knots trying not to be judgemental about tyrannies, forgetting his grammar in the excitement: This was not, of course, the result the West was hoping for. But political chaos […]
Welcome to BBRU 226. First things first Can you bake a good cake? Misssy M is struggling. Does the Objectification of Women via the explosion of pornography really lead to bad outcomes for women? Not at the Himmelgarten Café. Update: And, to get us into the swing of what follows, a magnificent example from Liberal England of European […]
Is the British National Party primitive and racist? Or (worse) sophisticated and racist? There are quite a few websites out there which in one way or the other give cover/sympathy to the BNP or at least its arguments against ‘elites’, yet which are evidently written by educated people. See eg […]
Here is the text of UN Security Council Resolution 1874 condemning North Korea "in the strongest terms" for its nuclear test on 25 May 2009. The UNSC tried to tighten the embargo on material and skills needed for nuclear weapons activity from reaching North Korea: 11. Calls upon all States […]
There is a lot on this site about the problems we and the people of the former Yugoslav region face in where precisely the borders of new states should be, and how those new states should be defined. Try this. Or this. Former US Ambassador to Bulgaria, Croatia and Serbia/Montenegro […]
For my birthday I received the DVD set of the BBC’s Little Dorrit adaptation. At first sight this falls some way short of the utterly wonderful BBC Bleak House. Little Dorrit is too feisty and (perhaps because the convolutions of the original plot were just too convoluted?) there are some clunky […]
Here (h/t Long Tail) is an interesting saga of newspaper circulation wars in Denmark, where the arrival on the scene of a new nationwide free newspaper delivered to homes caused turmoil in the market. Except what I do not understand is why Chris Anderson opens thus: …the chilling story of […]
My successor as HM Ambassador in Warsaw is in the Daily Mail being asked about the FCO’s policy to ‘promote’ Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual And Transgender (LGBT) rights. This question was put: Asked whether he would raise the rainbow flag at the British embassies in Iran or Saudi Arabia, Mr Todd […]
Back in 1998 at Harvard I wrote a paper on the Bosnian situation and the ‘deep’ contradictions of the Dayton Peace Agreement. Here is one passage from it: … any attempt to negotiate a democratic Bosnia and Herzegovina solely with Presidents Tudjman and Milosevic and Bosnian leaders (Bosniac, Serb and […]
