OK, so they invited some “milbloggers” to see the commander guy, and what did Defensetech find to ask him? Sweet fuck all of any consequence. Too busy gawping at teh White House crockery. Hell, I suppose I should have expected this; the creation of Wired‘s Danger Room essentially stripped it of talent, with David Axe,…
Read More Defensetech is obsoleteRemember this post regarding the trainwreck that is the NHS National Programme for IT? In it, we discussed the institutional factors that made it a trainwreck, and specifically the way demands for commercial secrecy made it impossible to involve the users in designing the system. Well, now there’s a discussion at Kevin Drum’s about how…
Read More HOWTO Build a Healthcare Computing SystemBring back the Office of Technology Assessment, say the Hoofnagles at Scienceblogs. Good point; for about thirty years, the US Congress had its own staff of scientists and engineers whose task it was to provide the legislature with independent technical advice, until it got zapped by Newt Gingrich. I’m sure it would do them some…
Read More Office of Technical AssessmentAnbar? Here’s your salvation. This frankly terrifies me; didn’t anyone think to restrain the commander guy? This was about the only counterinsurgency success they’ve had, and it’s been pissed away for the sake of a good TV picture-with-the-sound-off. Seriously. Once Bush shook hands with him on live television, he was as dead as if he’d…
Read More WhackedSalvador Dali described his work as making use of a paranoid-critical method. Like a paranoiac, he attempted to find meaning in the associations of entirely unrelated images, an analogue to Freudian free association. Tate Modern currently has an exhibition on Dali’s influence from and work for the cinema; perhaps as well as the Looney Tunes…
Read More Paranoid CritiqueSo, Barack Obama is now an evil warmongering bastard like all the others who wants to invade Pakistan or a girly man who doesn’t want to nuke Pakistan, depending on ideological preference. The reason was a speech on foreign policy he recently gave, and subsequent reporting. You can see how it happened. It spooked me;…
Read More Reading the Documents: Obama vs PakistanSo, Challenge Cup semi-final weekend; a good one, too… Bradford got the worst of it, of course. Despite regularly being one of the best clubs in the country since 1996, they always struggle to make it stick. That was precisely their problem today – despite making chances, they never quite had the sort of quick-smart…
Read More Blogging Rugby League: Bradford-St HelensCan anyone honestly be crazed enough to suggest launching US forces into Pakistan? Well, the Washington Post – the Washington Post! – apparently is. Let us review the situation; there’s a wave of suicide bombings on, one of which may have been either jihadis or Baluch rebels – they don’t know – and targeted Chinese…
Read More A canter down some dark defileOK, this is it. Not only must the Home Office go, so too must the Association of Chief Police Officers, the newest political party on the block. Its president, Ken Jones, now wants not just 90 days of detention without charge, but unlimited detention without charge. After all, it worked so well in Northern Ireland.…
Read More ACPO Must GoI don’t like the “contraction and convergence” approach to stopping climate change. Why? Well, I have a number of reasons. C&C states that we should set a global CO2 target lower than present (contraction), and that poor countries should be allowed to expand up to it while rich ones cut down to it (convergence). The…
Read More Criticisms of Contraction and Convergence