self-refuting dave is self-refuting
Meanwhile, Dave from PR reckons his own spending cuts aren’t tough enough. All election campaigns go into the surreal phase eventually.
Read More self-refuting dave is self-refuting2010
fail
Quietly, as the election campaign goes on, the NHS IT programme has gone from “heading for the rocks” to “sailing into the cliff”. Has NPfIT put us back 10 years? asks the NHS chief in Rotherham, who’s taken the recently announced option to bail out of the project and deploy something of his own choice.…
Read More failkiller meme watch
Apple’s internal security team may be scary – and especially the name (Worldwide Loyalty Team). But they are as nothing, in terms of creepiness, to this Microsoft web page, which provides the criteria against which MS employees are assessed for their use of humour and the targets they are given to improve. You will not…
Read More killer meme watchIPPR: I agree with…
The Institute for Public Policy Research has issued a report on the correlates of BNP membership and support (pdf). Fascinatingly, they reckon that there is very little or no correlation between BNP support and key socio-economic indicators like GVA per capita, growth, unemployment, immigration, etc. It’s as if a typical BNP supporter was, well, a…
Read More IPPR: I agree with…it’s called “power” for a reason
This story from Rajiv Chandrasekharan about two rival approaches to sorting out Kandahar’s electricity supply is informative, but not just about its apparent topic. Basically, the US Army wants to go for a quick fix, installing a lot of mobile generators and trucking in the diesel fuel, in order to get the lights on as…
Read More it’s called “power” for a reasonthey’re protecting us, but we don’t know who they are
Jamie Kenny mentions Thailand’s “black clads”. Who they? Reuters has an excellent article that gets into this question. WHAT DO WE KNOW ABOUT THE MEN IN BLACK? Witnesses and grainy video footage revealed armed men with assault rifles and M-79 grenade launchers appeared under cover of darkness on April 10 during a heated standoff between…
Read More they’re protecting us, but we don’t know who they areFrench bloggers, Scud missiles, etc
There’s a new strategy blog about, this time a French one. They have an interesting discussion about the suggestion/rumour/story that Hezbollah might be trying to acquire Scud missiles. They’re dubious about it, although open to the suggestion that the organisation might be developing its own inter-service politics, with the big rocket people perhaps constituting the…
Read More French bloggers, Scud missiles, etcproject failure
I’ve been reading Bruno Latour’s Aramis, or the Love of Technology, a postmodernist account of the failure of a massive French project to develop a Personal Rapid Transit system. Latour’s book contains chunks of fiction, interviews, historical documents, and authorial comment, broken out by the typography – the experience is more like reading a long…
Read More project failureself-compulsion notice: diplomats
I have been scraping things with Scraperwiki this weekend. Which made me wonder about this post on Spyblog about that Israeli diplomat who one of the Milibands told to pack his bags. Mark quotes from the official London Diplomatic List, which turns out to be issued every month as a PDF by the Foreign Office…
Read More self-compulsion notice: diplomatsFurther adventures in globalisation
So you might remember that Thai demonstrators invaded the brand-new airport there a while ago, establishing a huge Ballardian protest-camp among the glass walls and retail space and soft-xray terrorist detectors. Their movement went on to spray the prime minister’s house with their own blood, collected in buckets by their medical wing. Clearly, they have…
Read More Further adventures in globalisation