Weather for Freiberg, Germany -11°C | °F Mon Tue Wed Thu Clear Wind: E at 11 km/h Humidity: 38% -11° -20° -11° -15° -7° -20° -2° -17° Amazingly, I’ve decided not to walk 5 km along the road to go and look a second hand cars today.

The new LDV members’ survey is now live. So if you are one of the c.1,300 registered members of the Liberal Democrat Voice forum — and any paid-up party member is welcome to join — then you now have the opportunity to make your views known. Questions we’re asking this month include: what you think

If there has to be peaceful protest, let it all look something like this! These women are protesting the fact that women have an extremely small share of the representation at the table both at the World Economic Forum (WEF) in Davos and at the table in governments around Europe. Ukrainian feminists protesting at the WEF (Warning: some frontal nudity) H/T Theo Spark Become a fan of The Political C...

This is one of the more ridiculous incidents of security theatre that I have read. I know it is preaching to the converted to post such a link to Samizdata, and the increasingly farcical nature of the United States government surprises no one who reads here, but the post deserves to be spread far and wide. Reading Mike Masnick's account of how the knuckleheads providing "security" at the US C...

Mr. Sachs here performs the equivalent of, say, accusing someone who advocates sobriety of thereby being indifferent to other values such parental responsibility, financial prudence, and neighborliness. But just as being sober in no way precludes – and likely promotes – other values such as parental responsibility, being a libertarian in no way precludes any of the values and c...

TGIF this week is dedicated to a mystery politician! This may not be very difficult to figure out, but here are the clues: This man has served time for cocaine possession after being videotaped smoking crack, was sentenced to probation for tax issues, was arrested for stalking and was front and center when Congress took control of D.C. government due to fiscal mismanagement. But, as we have recent...

Romanian Justice Minister Cătălin Predoiu said his country had made unprecedented efforts to reform its law enforcement system, suggesting that Bucharest wanted to see the EU monitoring mechanism put in place five years ago removed by the summer. More »

Spring semester 2012 at the Patterson School is upon us. My Defense Statecraft syllabus more or less done, my Airpower syllabus pretty much done,  podcasts up and running, the blog could use an update, but you go into battle with the website you have, not the website you want et al.  Twenty students in the former course, seven in latter. Ready to c...

The eurozone has been hit with a number of credit downgrades by Standard & Poor's, France and Austria both lost their AAA credit ratings and were reduced to AA+, and the credit ratings of Italy, Spain and Portugal were cut by two notches each. Germany, the Netherlands, Finland and Luxembourg have maintained their triple A ratings for now. In plain English, what the means is that the c...

Was Ed's Big Speech worth the extended wait? Not really. It wasn't a stone-cold terrible speech, but neither was it the rambunctious, attention-grabbing number that his leadership could do with. In fact, we could have saved ourselves the effort by simply reading his New Year's message again. That was considerably shorter, and covered almost all of the same ground. Squeezed middle? C...