Type “South Africa peaceful transition” into Google and over a million hits appear. There are references aplenty to statements such as this: South Africa’s peaceful transition to democracy was indeed a miracle that captured the imagination of people all over the world. Wikipedia has been spotted proclaiming that the post-apartheid Government of South Africa have made […]
Here I am at my desk, pecking away at the keyboard, hopping from website to website, wondering what to look at next. Millions of people round the world are doing the same. Yet how many of them are wondering what makes all this actually work? How does it happen that one types a […]
Even though this website vaunts my status as a qualified Mediator I have not had anything much to say on this subject up to now. This in part because I am still developing my experience in this fascinating but little understood area. This week I took the CEDR qualifying assessments involving two carefully […]
This nicely-turned essay by David Mamet has attracted quite a lot of attention. It describes him trying to link his changing political beliefs to the way the world appears to be in real life. Never a bad idea?
President Bush has given a speech on the fifth anniversary of the start of the Iraq intervention. Here is the full text. Of course all sorts of people think that this intervention has been nothing but a Disaster which needs all the adjectives from Dave Spart’s thesaurus to describe it. […]
If you have not read it yet, rush out and buy A Man in Full by Tom Wolfe. A big novel in all senses of the word, weighing in at 742 pages in my edition. It is crafted with sizzling style. Try this for syllepsis: "…long legs glistening with youth, lubricity and […]
Via Ed Driscoll (who has the best hat in the blogosphere) this account from Lileks of the 1943 Nazi version of Titanic, presented by those National Socialists as explicitly anti-capitalist propaganda. It’s all on YouTube in bite-sized chunks. Here is Part 8: the wicked capitalists continue their drunken scheming as […]
Sir Arthur C Clarke has died. I grew up on his short stories. One sticks in my memory nearly 50 years later. It shows how slow computers were in those days: a job which took four days could now be done by the chip in a singing birthday card almost […]
A lively debate unfolding on this subject at Samizdat. See plenty of comments on the original thoughtful post by Dale Amon, including now one from me too. This is the Great-Grandmother of Cause and Effect questions. My answer? Spread your bets…
Every now and again one sees something which casts light on an unexpected area of human endeavour. Such as this one about Poles returning to Poland from the UK in a way which redefines the idea of ‘free movement of labour’ in the EU.
