So what about that Office for Students and the twat, then? I promised Paul Bernal off the twitter a blog post, and here it is. The thing is, it wasn’t just the ‘social media vetting’ that was the problem with Toby Young. Anyone with an ounce of knowledge about him knew he was wholly inappropriate…
Read More Everyone Hates the Phone Company: The Purpose of the Office for StudentsSo, to summarise this post a bit, here are some insights: 1) The Curzon Foundation website has been up since February 2010. The various Curzon companies have existed for the same period of time, one succeeding the other as they successively failed to file accounts and got struck off. It looks very much like each…
Read More 10 insights on the Biryani ProjectIn the light of this it’s fairly clear that open data as a project is now over. (Hey, it was the week it turned out the government wants to just throw away the Forensic Science Service’s archive, you know, just hire a skip because who wants a load of old stuff, right?) Tory plans seem…
Read More the Conservatives really do hate you as much as you fearedExtremists. I can’t help but think this is a contribution to the ongoing debate about hero-of-the-blog Diego Gambetta’s work on engineers and terrorism. If stuff is upside down before you start the riot, fire, explosion, etc., your extremist cell could probably do with more engineers. Meanwhile, the SELF THOUGHT SPIRITUAL SCIENTIST guy next to him…
Read More mildly amusing roundupWhat is the legacy of the so-called “loony left”? The conventional wisdom is clear; it was all their fault, for panicking the swing voters and preventing a sensible, Newish Labour solution emerging earlier. Well, how did that work out? And it has always seemed disingenuous for the Labour Party establishment to blame local councillors for…
Read More Loonies 2.0OK, remember this post on the Labour Party’s “Faith Task Force”, academies, and the PR man to the Saudis, BAE, and HIV-quack dictator Yahya Jammeh? For a start, it’s drawing referrals from the Conservative Party’s network. This story in the Torygraph gives more detail: it’s the PM’s pet priest, Michael Seed, who introduced Bailey and…
Read More Cash rules everything around meAh, those fine Blairite institutions. South Maidstone is apparently to be blessed with a school where some rich person gets 51 per cent of the votes for 20 per cent of the money, but something has gone terribly wrong. Specifically, the Tory-run Kent county council is trying to do something unfashionable. According to our sources,…
Read More AcademiesScienceblogs.com has rapidly become one of the best things on the Web, and today I saw this post of Pharyngula’s regarding a crazed god-nut college in the US where you can be disciplined for “making eye babies”, touching a person of the opposite sex (your own is fine, though homosexuality is a big no-no), or…
Read More Optical intercourse