Almost there with my ebook. Thanks for your patience. We recently noted two consecutive movie speeches offering very different techniques for engaging with an audience. Yes, I mean Black Dynamite! I have been pointed to this other superb pair of consecutive movie speeches, this time offering substantive policy and moral […]
Events in Russia’s economy are accelerating in the wrong direction. No doubt at some point things will pick up again. But for now the trends are ghastly. Amidst all the analysis of what is ‘really’ causing the rouble to slump, this one by James Miller reads well: What is the […]
Here is my new piece for PunditWire on Vladimir Putin’s State of the Nation speech. I previously added some other glosses on it here, with special focus on its sprawling mustiness: Otherwise the speech showed that a Russian president is no different from his Western counterparts when it comes to […]
The Internet offers endless hours of amusement watching Russian (and to be fair others’ too) car crashes. Russia seems to be especially well endowed with footage of these startling episodes, as its drivers like to carry a karkam, a small forward-pointing video camera on the dashboard. This is useful if there […]
Here’s a question. If country X grows its economy 1% faster than country Y over ten years, what’s the difference in outcomes? I previously looked at Serbia and Zimbabwe in this sense, trying to calculate the True Costs of Stupidity: Thus the Cost of Milosevic(ism) can be accurately measured. It is […]
I’ve been writing my new piece for PunditWire on Vladimir Putin’s long State of the Nation speech. I’ll link to it when it goes up. The speech was a full 1500 words longer in the English version, showing how the Russian language is good at using endings of words to […]
My new piece for the Telegraph is on immigration. It turns on the distinction between people who enter the country by following the rules, and those who don’t: Immigrants into the UK fall into different broad categories. Rich people buying an exclusive UK pad. Foreigners ready to invest their money […]
Tomorrow at LVS School in Ascot I am giving a presentation to the public on the general subject of Spies. Always a fascinating theme down the centuries. Plenty about the subject here on my website, including my piece for DIPLOMAT in 2010 that looked briefly at the differences between HUMINT, […]
Attentive readers will recall my Near Death Experience in an NHS hospital back in 2011, and the thoughts it prompted on how a large UK hospital works: In one banal way of looking at it, the NHS is a huge quasi-shop. It has ‘customers’ who need ‘products’, so the key […]
The magnificent, consistently funny blaxploitation spoof movie Black Dynamite is an unexpected source of sophisticated public speaking insight. The hero of the film is Black Dynamite himself, a laconic unstoppable African-American kung fu master who is enraged when hard drugs even get into the orphanage – yes, the orphanage – […]
