Well, this is interesting, both on the Bo Xilai story and also on the general theme of the state of the art in contemporary authoritarianism. It looks like a major part of the case is about BXL’s electronic surveillance of Chongqing and specifically of top national-level Chinese officials: One political analyst with senior-level ties, citing…
Read More Canalising the marshes: tidying up the peopleSo I did a business-class review of Daniel Kahneman‘s new book over at the Fistful. Of course, AFOE is a very different blog to this one, being all liberal euro-technocratic and whatnot. Therefore I thought I’d write a different review. I therefore give you, in this week of Rupert, Kahneman for Thugs – which is…
Read More Kahneman for Thugs: some bullet pointsSo, that Total Defence plan. Not long after blogging about the weird way becoming an NHS Foundation Trust member is mostly about the staff discounts, my Google Alert tail-warning receiver lit up. Specifically, it caught the fact that the Haringey Clinical Commissioning Group was going to have a public meeting, so off I went with…
Read More Report back: CCG meetingOver at Fistful of Euros, my review of Daniel Kahneman’s Thinking, Fast and Slow. Coming up here, far from the eurocratic business-class lounge of AFOE, my action-oriented Kahneman for Thugs post, at least when I get away from debugging Project Lobster scripts. Am I on crack, or does ScraperWiki’s datastore do an implicit cast to…
Read More Shameless self promotionLook what he’s up to now. It’s amazing how common the “that hillside is full of warbirds/jeeps/whatever” story is, and how geographically widespread. I worked on a north-west Australian cattle station that included an abandoned WW2 airfield, and more than a couple of people had wasted time and money digging into bits of it looking…
Read More magic beans, Spitfires, etcEd Miliband joins Total Defence! Labour councils across England will act as the “last line of defence” against the controversial health act, Ed Miliband said as he pledged to overturn its “free market, free-for-all principles”. Speaking at the launch of the Labour local election campaign in Birmingham, Miliband said Labour councils would use the public…
Read More Clearing out the link pileHere’s some “why the Bradford West result means we should support my politics” that supports my politics: Next Generation Labour. Don’t take support for granted We have to realise that the wars still matter Mobilised youth are a polical force to be reckoned with Labour has to examine its relationships with Muslim communities Austerity needs…
Read More we pretend to campaign and they pretend to vote for usIt looks like Daniel Davies’ plan to classify the world into people who file their accounts with Companies House on time, and people who don’t, may be less eccentric than it seems. News International missed, and asked for an extension. Obviously a dodgy lot of bastards. Anyway, check this quote out. Coincidentally, News International’s company…
Read More Companies House Webcheck, fount of moral judgment. And a full list of USSD code numbers, at lastRealClimate reviews a 1981 attempt to forecast the climate impact of CO2 emissions, and finds that it’s basically pretty good (see also The Register eating their words slowly). Which is what you’d expect – the physical processes involved aren’t that complicated at that sort of low-earth orbit viewpoint, and the only things that could really…
Read More Shouty letter-writing egghead winsSo, this post was picked up by SHWI survivor Randy McDonald‘s blog, who says that: great efforts are being made to keep new Chinese soldiers depoliticized I don’t think this gets it. Great efforts are being made to keep them politicised, so long as the politics inculcated in them is what the Party wants it…
Read More The politics of the apolitical