A pretty good piece comparing the MMR scare with the Reinhart-Rogoff paper. I think there are a couple of interesting points that don’t make the cut, though. First of all, there’s the power of plot and story, tragedy and comedy. Anyone, after all, can have an Excel fart, and I doubt you’ll find many people…
Read More Attack of the monetarist vaccine clownsWell, ha ha. Godfrey Bloom, ‘kipper (and subject of a TYR profile back in 2004) is concerned that his party is full of obsessives, weirdos, and people with terrible amateur schemes. Bloom’s rant is worth quoting: My experience thus far is that as soon as more than 2 people get in a room progress completely…
Read More “Buying policy off the shelf”: the last political partyMy initial response to today’s Labour policy rollout was as follows: @labour_partisan also, another way of hating the young. — Alex Harrowell (@yorksranter) April 7, 2013 Thinking about it, though, this isn’t necessarily so. Presumably the idea is that people build up additional entitlement by paying their class III National Insurance contributions over the years…
Read More Labour market efficiencies from the Roses to the X factorSo I’ve been reading Clausewitz. In the original German. It took me months – *humblebrag*. Anyway, if the government were to fall next week, what should Ed Miliband do right now? It seems to me that quite a lot of thought is going into the long term. There’s a complex of ideas around changing the…
Read More A quick hits agenda, with ClausewitzUpdate: in this post, I wanted to know which questions were asked in an ICM poll. ICM has now released the full tables. The question was: You may have seen or heard that Britain slipped into a new economic downturn during the last quarter of 2012. Which do you think was the single most important…
Read More Update: ICM economy questionChris Dillow says: “In this sense, short-term fiscal conservatism might create social norms more supportive of social democracy” But this is just contrarianism. We can actually observe the opposite happening. After all, wouldn’t it be more likely that prolonged high unemployment, degradation of the public sphere, encouragement of dodgy coping-strategies like pretend self-employment, and perceived…
Read More The transition towards a low-trust societyOK, 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 ThingWell, 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 Tory