As this blog battles parochialism, I feel obliged to tell the world that Keighley Cougars have started their doomed bid to stay in the Northern Rail Division One by beating Whitehaven 17-16. Can we win by a cheeky dropgoal? Yes. We. Can! Never mind, the future’s uncertain and the end is always near. Which at…
Read More this will mean nothing to most of youThe Ministry of Defence has published its strategic review Green Paper online as a WordPress blog for public comment. I will, of course….eh? The MOD just published a major policy paper as a weblog for anyone to scrawl on? The British Ministry of Defence? Things must be bad. I snark, of course. I should, of…
Read More gentlemen, start your enginesCan we, can we, can we have better thinktanks already? I’m not so sure whether the worst bit is the fact they got the number wrong by a factor of four, or that they didn’t know that the National Rivers Authority doesn’t exist and hasn’t for 14 years, or just that it’s so obvious that…
Read More a decline into local navel-gazingStumbling Chris notes that, unusually, productivity has fallen sharply in the UK during the recession, and works through various possible explanations without really hitting on anything. He wonders if real-business-cycle theorists might have a point, and the recession be triggered by a real underlying fall in productivity. In the comments, I suggested that if there…
Read More in which we accidentally rediscover KondratievThis has done the rounds and been roundly done for all the right reasons. There is almost nothing the Obama administration does regarding terrorism that makes me feel safer. Whether it is guaranteeing captured terrorists that they will not be waterboarded, reciting terrorists their rights, or the legally meandering and confusing rule that some terrorists…
Read More Authoritarianism Does Its ThingSo mainline British political blogging is a horrible reality TV show, a eurobox estate crammed with CCTV cameras everyone welcomes and plays up to for the amusement of a tiny audience of media wankers and professional partisans. How about a bit of Viktorfeed data visualisation? Last weekend I wrote a little program to generate statistics…
Read More fun with statisticsJamie Kenny complains that nobody reads his Chinese blogosphere roundups and, more seriously, that nobody else in the British blogosphere writes about anything Chinese. He has a good point (and I’d strongly recommend them to anyone who reads this who doesn’t read them). Come to think of it, a hell of a lot of British…
Read More looking over the edge of the teacup