This is interesting; the US Army in Afghanistan has an official Twitter account. The interesting thing is the explanation: If prevailing wisdom about “population-centric” counterinsurgency holds, why is the U.S. military using Twitter to post body counts? Apparently, it’s about maintaining the support of the population back at home. In a must-read article, Michael Phillips…
Read More twittering the home frontWhat is all this whining about MPs doing constituency work? It seems to be conventional wisdom across the more fogeyish commentators (Simon Jenkins, Vernon Bogdanor etc) that members of the Commons are spending too much time representing the interests of their constituents; no article on the upshot of the great expenses row is complete without…
Read More For constituency workReader “Ajay” has a theory that aviators are uniquely unfitted for government. There are a considerable number of data points in his favour. However, here’s a possible counter-example. Ernest Millington has died; he was one of three MPs for the brief Common Wealth Party, a radical leftist group that emerged during the second world war,…
Read More party of oneThe impact of terrorism; new research demonstrates that people who survive terrorist attacks think more highly of themselves. Terrorism causes arrogance. Meanwhile, I enjoyed this Bartholomew’s Notes post, in which a self-made terrorism expert who is currently doing the Nazi-memorabilia circuit with his Barack Obama-is-a-foreigner act turns out to have been a pusher of 1990s…
Read More the science of drivelThere should be a special term for the phase in the adoption of an idea between the point at which everyone accepts its desirability, and the point at which it wins over other ideas politically. This isn’t the same as the point of implementation; it’s quite possible for your idea to go into practice, but…
Read More shooting bits off the zombiesRuth Sunderland of The Observer (aka Decent Pravda) is on a campaign for more women on the boards of big companies. It’s a worthy aim in itself, but I don’t believe for a moment it will address any of the things she thinks. In fact, the problem is that it’s nowhere near radical enough. For…
Read More meet the new boss…25 years; the strike was the first political event, indeed one of the first events, I actually remember. At least I remember power cuts and TV news broadcasts with the number of weeks the miners had been out counting up. After that, I recall Chernobyl – they set up a radiation monitor in the car…
Read More alternative YorkshireThis 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…Reduced blog; I’ve been working on a version of FixMyStreet for Symbian S60 devices. If you want snark, how about this? I always thought that the BMW not-minis were telling in themselves. Objects are an ideology made manifest. The original Mini was a minimal car, one designed to be even cheaper than the ones sold…
Read More no-one ever gets the truth from plastic manOK, the last post wasn’t totally serious. But is it too much to say that John Redwood is back? He’s been given a committee to chair, which sounds like a kick to touch, but we live in committee times. The Government is handling the economic crisis through a combination of outside committee-ists and a civil…
Read More the time has come to shoot you down