More on this subject via Instapundit who compares the bloody quagmire in Chicago to violence in Mosul, Iraq: Still, they’re different: One has crooked officials, violent gangs with their hooks into government and law enforcement, and a culture of corruption that has resisted the central government’s effects to clean it up, and the […]
As previously discussed, one of the Problems with Government these days is its philosophically confused preoccupations with targets. Yet HMG did not start this madness. Back in the 1930s one leadership set ambitious targets, and told its functionaries to go forth and meet them. Which they did.
Arncha sick of all those articles about ‘fat cats’ in the City and elsewhere, proclaimed to be ripping us off right and left? The Daily Mail has them. The Independent urges revolt against them. A soon-to-be disgraced former Minister says that they should be ‘made’ to hand over their money. […]
After leaving the FCO in a noisy cloud of sparks, my former colleague Craig Murray has made a name for himself as an activist promoting all sorts of Progressive Causes. This BBC account from 2004 does a good job in summarising some of the professional issues the Murray saga threw up […]
A long self-promoting piece by David Edgar on how generations of ‘renegades’ have left the Left is worth a quick glance, if only to see how some privileged people can end up in a severe state of confusion. Edgar names many renegades. Thus: [C]ommentators Nick Cohen, David Aaronovitch and Andrew […]
The St Valentine’s Day Massacre in gangland Chicago back in 1929 was an unusually awful event which shocked a nation. But what about a busy weekend in Chicago these days? Have our expectations of how people should live and behave been dumbed down? If so, why?
As Zimbabwe’s weekly/daily/hourly/minutely inflation rate soars into unimaginable numbers which portend possible mass starvation, normal people may be wondering how that exotic phenomenon actually works in practice. Where do all those pretty new banknotes for a bazillion Zimbabwean dollars each in fact come from? From Europe, of course!
One of the very worst aspects of returning to the UK after many years abroad is the sense of a serious loss of respect for the quality of public spaces. Plenty has been written about the dirty disorganised WCs at some of our airports. When I left my posting in Warsaw in September […]
Greetings, readers from EU Referendum, who have seen the interesting comment there by Helen (I assume Szamuely) on one of my earlier entries about different national negotiating styles. Helen calls me on whether the Russian approach to negotiating in fact works, giving some examples where the picture at best is mixed. […]
The Sunday Times today writes about expensive Sunningdale courses for civil servants on how to comport themselves and look nice. The case for the defence? A spokesman for the school said: “Many senior politicians have had training in how they present themselves, right back to Margaret Thatcher and Bill Clinton. […]
