The animation movie Wall-e depicts in stunning colours a silent abandoned Earth buried deep in towering human garbage, with only a perky little garbage-crushing robot plus a friendly cockroach moving about. An environmentalist metaphor for human destructiveness! Wrong. BBC radio today carried a story about tinned food, mentioning in passing […]
Via Samizdata, this Reuters piece describing how young French people are embittered by the system which makes employing people so expensive that employers take on new young staff only on temporary contracts: "There’s a war of generations and strong competition between the different age groups," he added. In the fourth […]
Here is Bagehot at the Economist on why the Internet’s role in UK politics is mainly destructive: But it, and especially YouTube, are at least becoming an important destructive element in British politics, able as they are to cultivate that most poisonous and final of political responses: ridicule. Take three […]
Lots on this subject. Some US conservative thoughts. Newt Gingrich says President Obama is a huge success, in his own terms at least: In just 100 days, President Obama has been devastatingly effective in moving forward swiftly the most radical, government-expanding agenda in American history. At home, in everything from his economic […]
Recent media reports have it that my old FCO ‘line manager’ Nicola Brewer has stepped down as CEO of the Equality and Human Rights Commission to replace Paul Boateng as High Commissioner (Ambassador-equivalent in a Commonwealth country) to South Africa. The credibility of this Independent report is wrecked by claims that […]
Can you have too much of a good thing? In some instances, yes. But not when it comes to my Oral Career History as recorded for the British Diplomatic Oral History Programme (part of the Churchill Archives Centre at Churchill College, Cambridge). Here is my entry. It looks to be […]
The latest BBRU tersely hosted by Matt Wardman is posted. Various handy links, including this to the vividly designed Andrew Ian Dodge website which in turn links to a fatuous EU Quiz. As Andrew points out, the eccentric questions are loaded in a trivially anti-libertarian way. Or is the EU […]
A posting by me earlier today about the Frank Lampard / James O’Brien story was just wrong in important respects, so I have deleted it. Thanks to those who so promptly let me know. Apologies. It is easier to perceive error than to find truth, for the former lies on […]
Update: Welcome readers from Mark Steyn and Deborah Gyapong. This issue – can Western Civilisation be defended? – is aired a lot these days. A big part of the answer lies in one’s assessment of the value of that civilisation – and its intrinsic strength/resilience. If you think that something is […]
Here is a fine article by Richard Fernandez on the T-word. He takes up an article by Jeff Jacoby which points up the moral dilemmas in all this: Suppose the CIA had been denied permission to use brutal interrogation tactics, and Al Qaeda had consequently gone on to murder thousands […]
