Lawyers for the son of the dictator of Congo-Brazzaville are trying to force our old friends at Global Witness to take some kompromat’ they have on him off their website. It looks like the son has been helping himself to the oil money – what did I tell you? – in order to fund his…
Read More Mirrorball: Global Witness and the President’s SonNecrocracy: government by the dead, for the dead. Thoreau@Jim Henley’s says s/he expects Dick Cheney to invoke executive privilege in relation to an act performed after he ceases to be Vice-President. It’s an interesting idea, but I’m going to raise the bar. I predict that Dick Cheney’s lawyers will attempt to invoke it in relation…
Read More Necrocracy!Says Terry Eagleton, in a Guardian Content..sorry..Comment is Free screed: For almost the first time in two centuries, there is no eminent British poet, playwright or novelist prepared to question the foundations of the western way of life. One might make an honourable exception of Harold Pinter, who has wisely decided that being a champagne…
Read More Eagleton: Intellectual SnobDavid Axe reports on various American officials moaning that the Dutch Army in Afghanistan is not sufficiently keen on burning the peasants’ crops, specifically the poppy crop. Now, Dave is currently engaged in something like the Four Days’ Fight of the Anglo-Dutch War, when the Royal Navy and Martin Tromp’s fleets got locked into a…
Read More Burn this filthNo. Three cheers. I don’t know if anyone else noticed, but while everyone in the political press was huddling around scraps of gossip from the United States, or pouring abuse on Harriet Harman, the civil service has had a great couple of weeks. Yeah, this blog snarls at Whitehall every time the bell strikes. Its…
Read More Two cheers for bureaucracyCognitive neuroscientists staged an experiment in which subjects were asked to make decisions on whether or not to invest money. It was the classic set-up that demonstrates risk-aversion bias: on each round, the subject could choose between keeping $1 and taking a 50 per cent chance of getting $2.50. Theoretically, you should always take the…
Read More I am the message centre and I am in controlDo we actually have a policy with regard to Afghanistan? The question wants asking. After all, we’ve just had a change of government, and Gordon Brown is apparently willing to appoint people from other political parties or none. But despite this, Des “Swiss Toni” Browne is left in place as secretary of defence, with the…
Read More Does Gordon Brown have a policy on Afghanistan?I finally realised what my Big Idea about the Triesman Scheme for National Phrenology was. It’s that British politics is afflicted with scienciness, by analogy to “truthiness”. Thinking about the obsession with biometric quackery, I realised that over the last 10 years we’ve been governed by people who like the idea of science, but not…
Read More Scienciness!This is an extremely worrying piece of late-Blairite thug politics. More than one Labour MP, it appears, has been briefed before appearing in the House for questions on the NHS National Programme for IT with what purport to be private e-mails from Ross Anderson, professor of security engineering at the Cambridge Computer Lab. Typically, this…
Read More Someone’s got it in for me, they’re planting stories in the pressThis is an image of the cockpit of the next-generation Russian air superiority fighter, the Sukhoi 35. (h/t Aviation Week) What strikes me about it is that user-interface design for combat aircraft has caught up with what computer-game programmers thought it was like in 1997. Sukhoi have clearly leapt ahead in the glass cockpit trend…
Read More GUI for Jets