Necrocracy: government by the dead, for the dead. Thoreau@Jim Henley’s says s/he expects Dick Cheney to invoke executive privilege in relation to an act performed after he ceases to be Vice-President. It’s an interesting idea, but I’m going to raise the bar. I predict that Dick Cheney’s lawyers will attempt to invoke it in relation…
Read More Necrocracy!This is an extremely worrying piece of late-Blairite thug politics. More than one Labour MP, it appears, has been briefed before appearing in the House for questions on the NHS National Programme for IT with what purport to be private e-mails from Ross Anderson, professor of security engineering at the Cambridge Computer Lab. Typically, this…
Read More Someone’s got it in for me, they’re planting stories in the pressThere is no British netroots, and God forbid there ever will be. Why? Well, the original thing is/was an effort to mobilise the grassroots support of the US Democratic Party, to shove in the underpinning of a mass party that it doesn’t really have. This was intended to a) supply activists and donations, and b)…
Read More I never wanted the love that you showed meThe Ministry is doing a ministerial dead pool for the post-Blair era. Strange concept. I have to say I’m not that impressed by his pre-resignation. Not only do I have the feeling it won’t be over until something like the Czech joke about Bilak’s widow going to visit Husak in jail to tell him how…
Read More Dead PoolThe Falklands War represents a big part of the Thatcher mythos, to the extent that it’s become part of the media’s operational code that you can’t divide the two. This is founded on a couple of facts, and more myths. The fact is that it undoubtedly helped her win re-election from a fairly ugly starting…
Read More Myths of the Falklands 2: Thatcher’s WarI didn’t grok the significance of “Debi Jones”, a Tory councillor quoted by the Sindy‘s latest WLAN pseudoscience scare piece, until I checked in on this row at the Ministry. In a box-out that doesn’t appear on their website, Jonathan Owen quotes “Debi Jones, Tory councillor for Hightown in Somerset” as saying that: “It seems…
Read More Digital Dave signs up to WLAN psuedoscienceThis tale of Google Earth being used to monitor violence in Darfur, as well as this, raises an interesting point. In his memoirs, Richard Holbrooke tells of how the Bosnian War parties were hugely impressed by the mapping software running on computers the US State Department brought to the conference – they could pull up…
Read More Diplomacy by visualisationWell, the decisions are in on the plan to break up the Home Office into the Ministry of Justice and the Ministry for Counter-Terrorism, National Security, Border Control, and Unauthorised Ball Games. And the snark in that link remains applicable. The only interesting news is that it’s even worse than I thought. Not only does…
Read More Political GOTO considered harmfulThere’s been a lot of fisking on this blog lately. More than I am happy about – I try to get back to something more positive and discursive, but then, someone comes along and pisses in my pool. Usually a government minister. This trend keeps up. Paul Farrelly MP, Labour member for Newcastle-under-Lyme, recently brought…
Read More You didn’t stand by me – no, not at allThe plan to break up the Home Office and let John Reid keep the macho bits is permitting us a rare glimpse of the core executive in action. Consider this story in teh Grauniad. First of all, note the close symbiosis of the Cabinet Office and the intelligence services – historically, the Cabinet Secretariat evolved…
Read More Deep rumblings in the deep state