There’s a good debate in Jamie Kenny’s comments about the political upshot of bin Laden’s death in Pakistan. For what it’s worth, I’m with Dan Hardie on this – it’s a very important political fact that the intelligence hierarchy a) couldn’t or wouldn’t catch bin Laden and b) couldn’t or wouldn’t protect him any longer.…
Read More obl isi faqHow did the Americans make sure their raid on Osama bin Laden wasn’t misidentified as Pakistan’s real enemy? This was surely a major planning constraint. It’s been suggested, plausibly, that the bulk of their radar assets are positioned along the international border and the LOC, but once you get to Abbottabad you’re not that far…
Read More A questionMore AV comment, from a colleague: I voted “no”. Why? 1. Arrow’s theorem. Getting democracy “right” is mathematically impossible. 2. Elections are not there to select the “right” government, but to confer legitimacy on that which is elected, and to enable truly awful ones to be removed. FPTP is good enough.3. Fiddling with the electoral…
Read More Even more AVThe log says AFRICOM wants to know what’s up with B.727 msn 22045, ex of Irbis Air and now with “Mega” of Kazakhstan. Last heard of in Shymkent in January 2010, before that in Djibouti in 2008. I’ve no new information to add.
Read More rewind to 2006OK, so I’d just about reasoned myself around to voting no. But every time I get there I run into some nightmarish turdpool of mendacity from the no campaign. I may just not be able to stomach doing anything that George Osborne, John Reid, Robert Edmiston, Dan Hodges, and “Tom” “Newton”-“Dunn” agree with. I’d abstain,…
Read More Even more AVIf you were asked to write 1,572 words for a national newspaper on the role of voluntary associations in the Labour Movement, and thank the Lord neither you or I is likely to meet this fate any time soon, would you manage to mention trade unions at least once? Not if you’re Maurice Glasman. I…
Read More Glue Labour: how you can miss out the coalition and come up in 2015!Best lobby metrics (lobbylyzer? lobster, for LoBbying Social Topology ExploreR?) result yet. Today I implemented my gatekeeper vs. flakcatcher metric – it averages the edge weights of all the neighbours of a minister, and returns a ratio of the difference between this and the average weight and the difference between the minister’s weighting and the…
Read More lobbyists lobbying for lobbyingI was wondering what “Ingeus UK” was – it’s the 15th heaviest lobby in the kingdom with degree 0.17, just behind HSBC and ahead of GlaxoSmithKline, Microsoft, and LOCOG – but now we know.
Read More for those non-cooperative with the systemThis project begins to want a name.
Read More Another lobbying thingAfter this post and the outstanding response to it, I’ve just been working on the lobby project’s underpinnings, specifically to backport some data cleaning from the analyser script into the original scraper, and to fix the one-edge-per-row version of the scraper. As a result I’ve had to flush the datastore and also search out some…
Read More Routine maintenance