Progress update on fixing the Vfeed. Dubai Airport has done something awful to their Web site; where once flights were organised in table rows with class names like “data-row2”, now, exactly half the flights are like that, they’ve been split between separate arrival, departure, and cargo-only pages, they only show the latest dozen or so…
Read More oiling the steel to sharpen the blade to shave the yakOh yes, blog theme tune. Auto-suggestion psychology. Elimination policy. The military-industrial pollution of democracy. It’s what we stand for. Oh yes, and bifurcation. In order to honour the essentially dualistic nature of the blog, here’s another version – how David Holmes saw it.
Read More memetic post you can safely ignoreA question, inspired by this ruckus in Jamie Kenny’s comments. Is the notion of a manufactured controversy analytically useful? I can see that the ideas of fake consensus, or fear-uncertainty-and-doubt, are useful. But manufactured controversy presumes that someone is manufacturing the controversy. Presumably they are doing this to make a point of some sort, unless…
Read More manufactured controversyHere’s something interesting. I grabbed the last 6 months’ worth of national opinion polls from Wellsy’s and graphed the Tory lead in percentage points. On the tiny chart below, you’ll observe that the mean is 10 points; the hatched area shows one standard deviation each side of the mean, and I’ve plotted a linear trend…
Read More science!Yes, the Viktorfeed is indeed down. Dubai Airport has redesigned its Web site, and the parser is now not parsing, and the error handling has failed to handle an error where the target page loads but contains unexpected HTML. I’ve stopped the cron job to save filling up the system logs. There will now be…
Read More FAILHas there been anyone in British politics quite as depraved as Geoff Hoon? Can my readers help? Probably the worst defence secretary ever. (You have to realise that he was probably one of the Prime Minister’s two designated deputies for nuclear retaliation – Byers, not so much, and at least he got us the railways…
Read More neither Hoon nor Gove, and probably not Opik eitherA thought: Raj Patel can honestly say that the lurkers really do support him in e-mail. Something quite hilarious about the notion of a blogger getting deified. On the Internet, no-one knows you’re God.
Read More and finally…And we’re there! Chapter 6 – Key Questions for the future SDR – attempts to sum up the Green Paper and set some deliverable goals for the full SDR process. There are six key questions, which also get their own comments threads here; again, one of the salient features is how little there is about…
Read More Sunday SDR, Chapter 6 – Key Strategic QuestionsSo we’ve had the grand tour d’horizon; we’ve had the self criticism; we’ve had the very rapid skip over the nuclear issue; we’ve had a careful balance of general-purpose capability and counterinsurgent language. Now for some hardcore bureaucracy. It’s Chapter 5 of the SDR Green Paper – People, Equipment, and Structures. This kicks off with…
Read More Sunday SDR, Chapter 5: People, Equipment, and StructuresNext slide, please. At last, we’re there – Chapter 4 of the SDR Green Paper tackles the classic question of alignment with the EU, NATO, and the special relationships. And it’s a highly post-American document. Our current relationships are mutually reinforcing. NATO remains the cornerstone of our security. However, as Europeans, we must take greater…
Read More Sunday SDR, Chapter 4: Partnership