This account by William J Dobson over at Slate of the miserable failure of Hugo Chavez is the best one I have read so far. It has some splendid lines: The political ideology Chávez left behind, Chavismo, was a demonstrable failure for the Venezuelan people, but it is not as […]
I am pleased and honoured to tell you that I have been accepted as part of the Punditwire team. Punditwire is a US website featuring the views of many top American speechwriters on current events.The list of contributors is daunting. A group of fine people from many different shades of […]
Read this fine article at by Derek Thompson at The Atlantic on how the cost of flying has fallen so far over the decades: … consumers have enjoyed an amazing (and unsustainable) three decades in cheap flying while the price of fuel, which accounts for more than a third of […]
Sorry not to have been here much. Sitting at home mesmerised by this. It doesn’t matter how many times you watch. It just gets better each time.
So there I was down at Bristol University at the weekend for the latest Bristol International Development Conference. An event impressive for the 200 or so people (mainly students, and overwhelmingly female) who turned out on a Saturday to mull over the practice and politics of development assistance under the […]
Ref my post below, check out this magnificent and chilling video. Perhaps this really is Pandora’s Box time.
Remember this? … let’s also agree that we are at a technological and civilisational turning-point. For now these high-precision UAV/drones and their supporting networks are still controlled by a handful of states. Good. But the technology will leak and get cheaper and better. Not so good. In due course the […]
I return from Spain to a truly dismal amateur-hour rant against ‘free marketeers’ by Will Hutton in the Guardian. It prompted me to opine over at Commentator: “The collapse of a belief system paralyses and terrifies in equal measure. Certainties are exploded. A reliable compass for action suddenly becomes inoperable. […]
We are off to southern Spain for a week – last year’s summer holiday. So profound thoughts from me may be even sparser than usual, depending on the wifi. In the meantime, read this one about Risk and Money: To claim that New Deal stability as a whole (as opposed […]
Here’s my Telegraph Blogs piece this morning on the news coming from Brussels that mirabile dictu the EU Budget may in fact not grow over the coming seven year financial cycle: The French have made the usual belligerent noises, feigning to champion increased spending that they too can’t afford. As […]
