I often miss chunks of the humour at the Stiftung because I would rather do almost anything than watch US business-spot TV news. If you wanted to hide something from me, you could do worse than put it next to a TV tuned to CNBC. But I think I experienced something of the culture the…
Read More talking without speaking; speaking without talkingVia Jamie Kenny, Tim “The Tory Blogger for Tories Who Actually Read Blogs” Montgomerie approvingly quotes someone who thinks the world financial crisis is all down to people living together without the approval of either a) your friendly local shaman or b) the State*. The argument, if this is the right word, runs like this;…
Read More fun with drivelI am in awe of this. Surely this must be some sort of brilliant artistic prank? Where is Chris Morris? The story behind it is that he’s a simulated refugee in an event held during the WEF. Many jokes are of course possible regarding the fact that the people pretending to be refugees are themselves…
Read More peck!This really is getting strange. The Tories look worryingly convinced of the wisdom of a plan to build a gigantic airport in the North Sea, split between two separate islands, because you never need to change the runway a plane is going to depart from…right? At the same time, the Government is considering a gigantic…
Read More the latent content of this airport, however…Jason Scott tells a sad tale of how AOL eliminated a whole mass of little Web sites and then erased all traces of their content. (Readers with long memories will recall the shutdown of Dave Winer’s blog farm.) What follows showed the best and worst of Internet culture – Scott called for volunteers to start…
Read More a small object lesson on the past decadeSo, there’s this rumour-surrounded gadget that GIYUS wants people to install on their computers as part of the War on Terror. Obviously, I wondered exactly how it worked; did it analyse the Web sites you visit semantically, so as to target its talking points precisely? Did it use some sort of social recommendation mechanism? Also,…
Read More give IT yahoos United States (dollars)I’m increasingly annoyed by official-media consensus that young people will suffer more than anyone else from the recession. Not that I especially doubt this; I doubt the reasoning, which appears to be that they’ve all gone soft and they’re not like we were in my day. As a general principle, I believe this is usually…
Read More you can’t blame the youth of todayAnd then I was fool enough to look at another newspaper. So, with Labour you can at least hope they’ll look after us in the recession, right? No, they want to give bailiffs the right to restrain people, and to charge interest on social fund loans. And they’re blowing hot and cold on the Jaguar-Land…
Read More anger is an energyWell I didn’t expect that – it looks like the Canadians have found a rather serious exploit in Westminster 2. And as far as I can tell, it probably affects Westminster 1 through 3 as well. Yes, we’ve got a class break on our hands! Now, to understand this we need to realise that a…
Read More A Zero-Day Class Break!The Rude Pundit has a very good point. You can’t even picture Obama pardoning a fucking turkey. Sure, he’ll probably do it. But unlike Bush, who approached such obligations with dunce-like glee, for Obama it’ll be like a kick in the groin. As usual with Rude, there’s a serious point here, sneaking past the guards…
Read More a short film about killing turkeys