Ben “Badscience” Goldacre gets stuck into Patrick Holford’s rampant quackery like a big hot meal: Drilling down, the first thing we came to was the circuit board. This, we noted with some amusement, was not in any sense connected to the copper coil, and therefore is not powered by it. The eight copper pads do…
Read More leaves the bowl sparkling clean continuouslyResponding to Dan Hardie’s latest BNP screed, I think there are several important points here. First of all, Dan Dsquared is half-right that BNP voters don’t matter. There are not enough of them ever to get elected to run anything, and their candidates usually manage to teach their own electors a lesson about voting for…
Read More Dan predicts a riotI can’t help thinking that if this LA Times story is accurate, those BGIA planes need a searching. In one of the most troubling trends, U.S. officials said that Al Qaeda’s command base in Pakistan is increasingly being funded by cash coming out of Iraq, where the terrorist network’s operatives are raising substantial sums from…
Read More Just another planeload of cashThis post from PZ Myers raises a very important point about decentralisation and local accountability. What if the quacks get control? Families and schools are always a problem with regard to liberty – no-one has the right to experiment on the public without their consent, but youth is the one experiment that is performed on…
Read More Go to school, learn the rules, don’t be no faker!Here’s part two of Wired‘s interview with John Robb on the occasion of his book. It’s cracking stuff – they got Kris “Alexander the Average” Alexander to grill him. But the really interesting thing here is the curious way Robbo and his arch-rival Thomas Barnett are increasingly locked in violent agreement. Consider Robbo’s positive recommendations:…
Read More Violent agreementFlying from Sharjah to Bagram AFB today is an aircraft operating for “British Gulf International Company” as opposed to British Gulf International Airlines, using the ICAO code BGI rather than BGK. Why should this be interesting? Well, back in the beginning in 2003, BGIA was supposed to be a company from Sao Tome that had…
Read More The airline that wasn’t is backIt’s fairly usual that big infrastructure systems should be regulated or publicly owned if there is no realistic competition to them. Defining that is more difficult – Railtrack presumably thought it was competing frantically with roads, after all. I propose a different way of looking at it. What if the distinction were framed in terms…
Read More Rates of changeOK, part three of the Falklands 25th anniversary series. The others are here, dealing with command, and here, dealing with Margaret Thatcher. It’s been quite a common idea since the war that the Falklands represented some sort of throwback to the empire, or alternatively a rejection of Europe in favour of it. This is usually…
Read More Falklands Myth 3: An Imperial War?The Ministry is doing a ministerial dead pool for the post-Blair era. Strange concept. I have to say I’m not that impressed by his pre-resignation. Not only do I have the feeling it won’t be over until something like the Czech joke about Bilak’s widow going to visit Husak in jail to tell him how…
Read More Dead Pool“Whoever dared paint markings on a plane’s wing was a swine,” said one of Pierre Clostermann’s comrades the night of the 8th of May, 1945. Latest reports from Sudan suggest you can do pretty well painting them out, too. The Sudanese government has been caught using various Antonov-26 aircraft to bomb villages in Darfur, having…
Read More Desert Viktory