I vaguely remember meeting him.

Cooperation at the national level has often been underscored as particularly relevant for fostering synergy, because it is at that level that perceptible implementation occurs.

In a world increasingly dominated by grievances against immigrants, bankers, Muslims, liberal elites, Eurocrats, cosmopolitans, or anything else that seems vaguely alien such wise words are rare. Leaders worldwide should take note.

Nor did Hayden suggest any national security concern that might justify spying on the EU (there is none). Instead, he sought to dismiss the entire issue by hinting vaguely about intelligence gathering by some EU member states.

If Brown is to gain legitimacy, he must offer something new but he can do that only by distinguishing himself from the Blair legacy in clearly perceptible and therefore fairly radical ways. This will be a difficult trick to pull off.

A perceptible hardening of China s stance toward India since then is also reflected in other developments, including Chinese strategic projects and the country s military presence in the Pakistani held portion of Kashmir, a region where the disputed borders of India, China, and Pakistan converge.

We may agree that our goal ought to be promoting happiness, rather than income or gross domestic product, but, if we have no objective measure of happiness, does this make sense? John Maynard Keynes famously said I would rather be vaguely right than precisely wrong.

From the late 1930 s onward, however, this argument faded as the market economies of the West grew rapidly in the post World War II period and income distributions became more equal. While there was a business cycle, no perceptible tendency toward chronic demand weakness appeared.

So, yes, there are plenty of vaguely plausible reasons why the euro, despite its drawn out crisis, has remained so firm against the dollar so far. But don t count on a stable euro dollar exchange rate much less an even stronger euro in the year ahead.

In fact, the only perceptible change is that instead of the legitimate authorities of the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Commandant Jérôme has been collecting import and export taxes as part of his quasi governmental authority that the Group has described in previous reports as a pre financing scheme.

Likewise, the US worries that China may use the AIIB to advance China s economic and political interests. But anyone who is even vaguely familiar with the US approach to multilateral lending knows that no other country has been as adept at exploiting its power and leverage for strategic gain.

That so called is appropriate, because the project, despite being only vaguely defined at this point, is most certainly not intended to create a single European capital market. Indeed, European Union leaders know better than to announce such an ambition, which would require a new treaty no one is prepared to open up that can of worms.

But their turn away from multiculturalism is not what prevented the emergence of a Islamic pillar in Dutch society. The main problem with this idea was that people from Turkey, Morocco, and the Arab countries, some deeply religious and some quite secular, and all with perceptible animosities towards each other, would never have agreed on what should constitute such a pillar.