Ronald Reagan was responsible for some spectacularly nasty things. He was also (as I have noted here before) hugely misrepresented by the media. Mark Steyn glosses over Reagan's nastiness, but makes clear that the real guilty, back in the days of my youth, were those who glossed over the evil of Reagan's, and our, enemies. […]

At Castle Normenstein Eve Garrard dissects Amnesty's inanities rather more subtly than I did.

Excuse my lack of coherence in this post, but this is the kind of thing that converts my brain tissue to water vapour and drives it out of my ears under high pressure. Some months ago, Amnesty exceeded the clear tems of its own statute by printing thousands of posters opposing the Iraq war, posters […]

Mark Steyn cheekily suggests that there might be some lack of balance in reporting of the respective behaviour of US and UN peacekeepers: “The 2002 Save the Children report on the UN’s cover-up of the sex-for-food scandal in West Africa provides grim details of peacekeepers’ demanding sexual favors from children as young as four in […]

This story from the Chinese state newsagency presents us with so many layers of irony that we should wonder if the editor checked first with the Chinese authorities how many are permitted.

Normzilla has a long and excellent quote from Jose Ramon-Horta up on his site.

In descending order of international detestation: You are an Arab-Israeli double agent and have been playing each side against the other for months, squirrelling away your profits in a Swiss bank account. Your cover has been blown and you are on the run. The door to your hiding place is being beaten down by armed […]

Blimey, Fidel’s been so bad lately, even the BBC is being rude about him.

Having had an excellent dinner at which at least one highly educated person was a little too sympathetic to some old myths, I enjoyed coming back to read Anthony Cox’s post about conspiracy theories at Black Triangle.

A lot of us are currently trying (again) to point out the people on the Left that Iraq is not Vietnam. It’s also important to point out to people on the Right that Al-Qaeda is not the KGB. You know those forms you fill in as you fly into JFK, where you tell US Immigration […]

I’m in a particularly hawkish mood today so I invite you to listen to another proud cry from Victor David Hanson‘s eyrie. No, the term isn’t exclusive to eagles, and the Chambers says so. [The former linked page suffers from that curse of the contemporary Web, tiny font sizes, specifically designed, I suspect, to force […]

Even the BBC man described the shift in the Spanish vote as being “a disturbing development” in European democracy this morning. Then Foreign Secretary Jack Straw put in a clumsy performance when he was interviewed about those same elections by John Humphrys. I wish Radio 4 had interviewed Mark Steyn instead. We’re on the plane. […]

At work today, Wiqqi and I had a chat today about the ongoing Goodhart debate. (Is there a reasonable Left liberal case for arguing that multi-ethnic societies are inherently divided?) Then we pondered the question of exactly how mad Muammar Gaddafi, the Michael Jackson of World heads of state, is. (Does this mean Kim Chong-il […]

I am an über-skeptic. (Yes I prefer the American spelling because it’s righter.) So, even though I disagree with most of this article, its logic appeals to me in a deep and disturbing way.

Will the terrible fallout from the War on Terror never end?

The numbers of dead and injured as a result of the earthquake in Iran are now looking even more terrible than before. It’s this kind of thing—rather than, say, a lousy program on ITV—that people should refer to as “appalling”.

Courtesy of Maoi I have been reading Twisted 6, a collection of newspaper articles by Filipina newspaper columnist Jessica Zafra. Maoi has annotated the text in her beautiful handwriting so that I can understand Zafra’s native references and lingo despite my ignorant Anglo background. (For example, I’m not sure if the adjective from “Philippines” has […]

As I read the BBC’s summary of the Arab world’s responses, I must admit that the capture of Saddam Hussein brings a new danger: the danger that I will laugh myself hoarse.

My dad rang me at lunchtime to tell me about this possible development from last Friday’s strangeness.

Things go wrong with democracy all the time, but at least there’s some hope that they can be fixed. Here’s the latest from The Philippines and India. Some other systems, however, are just broken. I understand we tried feudalism here for a while ourselves, but you need a lot of oil to make an inherently […]

Call me a conspiracy theorist, but I’m beginning to wonder if the Pakinstani and North Korean leaders’ unfortunate hairdos are just to hide the scars where Jiang Zemin has been messing respectively with Pervez Musharraf’s and Kim Jong-Il’s heads.

I normally avoid linking to links from the ‘Blog Instapundit because you’ve already seen them, right? But this is an outstanding piece by anti-war writer Geoffrey Wheatcroft.

It seems Nelson Mandela is (temporarily) off the U.S.A.’s list of terrorists. How long before these “militants” are on the BBC’s?

I didn’t mention the non-coup in the Philippines at the time, but Maoi’s fellow countrywoman, Jessica Zafra, has some amusing reflections on the “tumultuous” events, quoted over at Casual Savant.