Adam Elkus has an excellent post on the fundamental reasons why analytical blogging and journalism are useful. Obviously, being the heir to Abu Muqawama, he’s talking about people who either come up with silly movie-plot threats or else want to invade Syria with an arse full of armies. The point, though, has very wide applicability,…
Read More MachbarkeitswahnMichel Goya is outstanding among the otherwise excellent French military blogs. The Chakrabortty points out that if the economists have learned nothing from hte crisis, this is as nothing to the absence of anything original about it from sociology or political science. Fission fragments: another person drops off the coalition project, making it possible to…
Read More Uncategorised linksJust a couple of points about the British wing of Snowden. First of all, what function does it serve to go begging to the Americans for sums of money that aren’t especially big in the context of a Β£1.8bn single intelligence budget? Well, the money is a costly-signal that UK cooperation is valuable to the…
Read More two points on Snowden in the UKhttp://t.co/WhC091O2ie > The Sun will soon know where you buy your cans of lager. probably also a guess at your local #creepy #bigdata — Alex Harrowell (@yorksranter) July 31, 2013 So, the Sun is on the move. This was a bit of a surprise to me, what with News reorganising to separate the UK papers…
Read More Get involved.TYR’s 10th blogday was the 10th of June. My birthday is this week. Is anyone interested in a pint this weekend?
Read More 10 years of TYR, 33 of YROK, so Lynton Crosby is all better now so long as conditions. What are these conditions? After all, they define the limits of acceptable behaviour in our society. It looks like he’s not allowed, or won’t be allowed, or shouldn’t have been allowed to take part in ministerial meetings or sight government documents. The interesting…
Read More Lynton Crosby briefs the Cabinet. Vomit now, it will save timeDo I have readers here?
Read More Freie und Hansestadt HamburgWe are ignorant and we are wrong and even pathologically ignorant. Or perhaps, following Dan Davies, we can’t do percentages. Either way, the Royal Statistical Society poll is bracingly depressing. I occasionally talk about the “deficit model of ignorance”. In the light of the poll, I thought I’d set it out more clearly. The deficit…
Read More The ignorant cannot be given fact pills. We’d better deal with itWith luck, the image of Asiana Flight 214 burning out on the end of Runway 28R at San Francisco International Airport should become an icon of our future. I just crash landed at SFO. Tail ripped off. Most everyone seems fine. I'm ok. Surreal… (at @flySFO) [pic] β https://t.co/E6Ur1XEfa4 — David Eun (@Eunner) July 6,…
Read More #ifIhadglass I’d probably crash the aeroplaneDavid Goodhart responds to Jonathan Portes and it’s as bad as you might expect. To focus, remember he said 50% of schoolchildren in Bradford have special educational needs? Here’s the tape: Bradford has just opened two more schools for children with Special Educational Needs,β he writes. βOn some measures nearly half of all children in…
Read More The Bradford mutants strike back.