Some good news from Cuba. If the EU wants to do something useful in ‘foreign policy’ it should start strongly promoting this sort of latent networked democracy and so promote and prepare for Cuban Regime Change. That would have two results. It would help end the current misery there faster. And it woiuld […]
Some good advice via Guido from Dizzy on how civil servants can blog with reduced chance of detection. An interesting area. One of my first blog posts referred to a case of deliberate leaking by an FCO official which reached the courts where the case crashed. Does blogging = leaking? Not […]
Why are governments increasingly ineffective at running things? Partly because they are besieged by complexity – every problem turns out to be connected to every other problem, hence there is no way to measure success or failure, hence ever more neurotic official attempts to ‘set targets’. But they also operate […]
At least one person is doing the right thing in the New York sex scandal.
On the subject of the leaked FCO SpAd document (if that is what it is), Guido makes the following point: "… a document produced by a civil servant, in office hours at the taxpayer’s expense should by rights not be the property of the Labour Party." A similar issue came […]
Guido helpfully draws our attention to a briefing on Europe apparently prepared by a ‘Special Adviser’ in the FCO. But if this document is real it is SpAd work and in principle does not expose the poverty or otherwise of ‘FCO analysis’, as Guido’s headline reads. Let’s be accurate in such […]
They said that if President Bush were re-elected we would see a ruthless clamp-down on dissent and freedom of speech. And they were right!
When I set up this site I naively thought that some people with an interest in international affairs would stumble over it and that a few of them might like to submit fair-minded comments, so a bit of grown-up dialogue on different policy issues might take place for general edification. One […]
More human tragedy in the USA for the Presidential candidates to consider.
One of the many Stalinist Very Big Lies still echoing on down the ages is that there can be no attempted equivalence between Nazism and Communism, since Nazism (as Extreme Rightism) was an explicitly racist ideology whereas Communism (as part of general Leftism generally) utterly repudiated racism. This is not a dead […]
