When you come to think about it, isn’t it just a bit old-fashioned that when you buy a jacket you are required to accept with it the boring insulating material chosen by the manufacturer? The Archbishop of Canterbury wants us to be reacquainted with our own capacity to choose. And lo, […]
My posting Manzi On Money wrongly attributed an article by Jim J Manzi to my former college friend Jim P Manzi. Thanks to Jim J himself for pointing that out. Anyway both Jim J and Jim P (and for all know many other Jim Manzis) are smart people. Here is […]
Ar a time of such uncertainty, even danger in the planet’s financial system (the oil keeping the global engine running) it is always comforting to hear from the Archbishop of Canterbury as a shining source of Moral Insight and Spiritual Leadership. He invariably shows us the right path to follow. […]
Remember Jethro Tull? They were the first rock band I ever saw, back in Oxford in late 1974 or thereabouts. One hit was Too Old to Rock ‘n’ Roll, Too Young to Die. Now we have the largest European banks being "too big to fail, but also too big to […]
Iain Dale makes a trenchant observation: According to Woodward and his Cabinet colleagues, the banking crisis is almost entirely down to the effects of globalisation and the US sub prime mortgage market. I completely acknowledge that this is at least in part an entirely reasonable argument. But if you don’t […]
The article accompanying the Total Politics UK Political Blogs Top 50 argues that "the right-of-centre hegemony, which has dominated the UK blogosphere for several years, seems to be at an end". Why? Because, according to TP, over half the top 500 political blogs incline to the left. That’s as maybe. Pity so […]
When one is an idle student messing around with studentish things, it is hard to imagine the other idle students as future leaders of vast importance. No, it’s not hard. It’s impossible. My student years had some people who would go on to do remarkable big-scale things. At Oxford University during […]
My previous piece on the ECFR Report about the EU’s growing ineffectuality at the UN quoted this: … The assembly kicked off this week in New York with the west bracing itself for another debacle. Serbia is to use the session to demand a vote on the "illegality" of the secession […]
A long report by the ‘European Council on Foreign Relations’ describes how the EU is losing ground at the UN in terms of mobilising support from other countries for votes on human rights issues. A summary is here. See also the Guardian account. The general problem? Thus: "The EU is suffering […]
A fine post by Guido, quoting Warren Buffet back in 2002: When Charlie and I finish reading the long footnotes detailing the derivatives activities of major banks, the only thing we understand is that we don’t understand how much risk the institution is running. And if you can’t understand that, then […]
