OK, so Jake Berry MP, a recent butt of ours. Strangely, in the last couple of weeks, that post has drawn massive amounts of traffic, over a thousand unique readers in four days, none of them leaving referrer strings. Weird. Anyway, I noticed this piece of his from just before he put down the shameless…
Read More In which we attempt to redeem Jake Berry MPYou know Save Our Thing. It happens every other year in every British community. Some sort of public service is moving, or closing, or reorganising, and someone is agin it, and we are all asked to roll out, get fell in, and demand that they Save Our Thing. Some people, reliably, are convinced that if…
Read More Against Save Our ThingBest talk between songs ever: This song is from is my mom’s favourite out of the four records. Because I don’t scream on it. My dad prefers it when I scream but my mom prefers it when I…sing pretty. So this song is my mom’s favourite. It’s called “Damaged from the Start”. (And later in…
Read More DryHave we talked about James Reason? I don’t think we have. So he’s a Manchester University cognitive psychologist, best known for the Swiss-cheese model of accidents, which he developed in the context of aviation human factors research. Imagine a block of Swiss cheese. To get to an accident, we need to pass through it; the…
Read More Would we know if a financial crisis nearly happened tomorrow?Alex Massie may be a Tory, but on this one, he kills: Is there anything more pathetic, more risible than rich and privileged Britons whining that their cadre fails to receive a fair shake in the matter of admissions to this country’s most prestigious universities? Oh, sure, I suppose there must be but the smugness…
Read More more pathetic, more risibleRemember Kam Air, fabulous Afghan airline, repeatedly blogged here? Sure you do. The U.S. military has blacklisted Afghanistan’s largest private airline, alleging it is smuggling “bulk” quantities of opium on civilian flights to Tajikistan, a corridor through which the drugs reach the rest of the world. Kam Air was barred this month from receiving U.S.…
Read More Kam AirWell, I’m on record as saying that since June, 2010, I’m all in with Team Desiccated Calculating Machine. And wouldn’t that be a good name for a blog. So, here’s a bland and technocratic thing. The Health Service Journal reports Andy Burnham’s NHS speech, and seems to think it’s pretty good. The key points are…
Read More Sensible ideas.Remember the magic lie-detector voice analyzer? It’s baaack. Also, Cornish Tory councillor Fiona Ferguson is a mensch. Here’s the story; it seems the council hired Capita aka Crapita to put the fear of God into people claiming single person’s council tax discount (THE BASTARDS!). Capita, which is the sole UK distributor of 100% guaranteed pure…
Read More Not this shit again. In which I praise a ToryCold War nuts should follow Mike Kenner’s Twitter feed if they’re not already. His key shtick is getting interesting documents under FOIA and tweeting them bit by bit. This week, he’s got the national war instructions for the police, from 1977, codenamed POLWIN. This is some pretty bleak stuff, obviously; I can’t imagine instructions on…
Read More …and give reasons in writingSo, Create Streets. Inside Housing has the story, pointing out that the thing campaigning for knocking down high-rise social housing in south London is basically a group of Tories. But there’s a bit more, or less, to it than that. Their wesbite won’t tell you whether they are a company, a charity, a lobby, or…
Read More A slightly less simple plan.