I venture to Brussels tomorrow on Eurostar from St Pancras. I hope not to endure the agony which Tim Worstall suffered recently. Odd how so many things in principle are both more flexible and inflexible simultaneously, for no evident reason?
I venture to Brussels tomorrow on Eurostar from St Pancras. I hope not to endure the agony which Tim Worstall suffered recently. Odd how so many things in principle are both more flexible and inflexible simultaneously, for no evident reason?
Daniel Finkelstein eloquently spells out the already eccentric view that the honest way to describe a Disaster is not to proclaim a Triumph: There is room for plenty of argument about whether the crisis could have been averted by better management. But this is almost beside the point. What matters […]
Can this stuff be for real? Or is it a spoof site trying to make North Korea look ridiculous by emitting spoof communistic nonsense, a sort of uber-Commie Postmodern Generator putting Marxist phrases in random order and thereby making no difference to the senselessness of the outcome? Thus: Pyongyang, October 13 […]
Insofar as anyone thinks about it all these days, the UN just sort of ’emerged’ after WW2, at that conference in San Francisco, didn’t it? Dan Plesch at SOAS has been looking deep into the history of those times and is pulling together a goodly bunch of fascinating material showing […]
Foreign policy is – at root – simple. Identify a clear and fair-minded position. Then use all available sticks and carrots to pursue it. And don’t give up quickly, lest you lose impetus and credibility. Thus one might think that Russia’s August power-play to slice off parts of a fellow […]
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 […]
Many people do. It took a while, but I have finally caught up with Rickrolling. Nick Lowe had the last word to say on this subject, as on most others:
I have been rambling on for some time about how Government is failing in good part because it can not cope with Complexity. Thus the preoccupation with Objectives/Targets/Strategies and the rest is, I unhumbly suggest, theoretically meaningless, ergo operationally harmful. In the light of the utter mess now unfolding within […]
Feuding as he already is with his lead FCO department, Craig Murray sits down to write a strong speech on Uzbekistan human rights issues. He sends a draft to London, to FCO Human Rights Department led by his old pal (and mine) Jon Benjamin – himself something of a post-Sovietologist […]
A neat summing up of attitudes round the region as Macedonia and Montenegro recognise Kosovo. Key argument: It also helps that Montenegro supported a Serbian initiative in the UN seeking a ruling by the International Court of Justice on Kosovo’s February independence declaration. The General Assembly adopted that resolution on […]
