Strange signs and wonders are visible in the sky. Catalans Dragons beat Wigan. And Felix Salmon becomes an autogestionniste, in the auto industry to boot. Now the VEBA, according to the WSJ, is a union-run trust – which means that the UAW now controls more than enough money to buy GM. Of course, the VEBA…
Read More 2007: the subversion beginsSo what are the lessons of the Liberal conference? First up, get a bloody autocue already. We could have a blogger whipround. Out of all the speakers I saw on TV, excepting Ming’s big finish, all of them were very obviously reading off a bit of paper. Danny Alexander’s entire TV appearance consisted of him…
Read More Lessons from the Liberal conferenceOK, so professional War On Terror bullshitter Alexis Debat worked for super-War On Terror bullshitter Amir Taheri. Those of you who use this blog’s Updated category to check corrections will have noticed that I have corrected some posts about Pakistan that used material from his writings. But I’m struggling to make out the pattern; Debat’s…
Read More Cunning tricksterA question that the Chinese-hacker thing brought to mind: why are so many countries that censor the Internet for political speech also riddled with commercial, or just vandalistic, network abuse? Russian Business Network, the well-known all-purpose dodgynet, is a case in point. My own theory is that, especially in China, this may reflect a choice;…
Read More Communication of the unconsciousThis Spyblog post, regarding the Grauniad’s splash story yesterday that the TITAN RAIN inquiry into alleged Chinese hackers attacking the US government had spread to attacks on the Foreign & Commonwealth Office, raises some interesting questions. For a start, like all Chinese-hacker stories, it’s based heavily on semi-military sources and quotes from doctrinal publications. What,…
Read More A Mystery, Wrapped in Cat-5 Cable..This row over at Tim Lambert’s, also here, reminded me of something I’ve noticed around the blogosphere. There was this, too, and also this. They’re all arguments from meta-analysis of some sort, and they’re all wrong. They’re all wrong in the same way, too; the first, David Kane’s beef with the Lancet survey of mortality…
Read More Scienciness, againSays Terry Eagleton, in a Guardian Content..sorry..Comment is Free screed: For almost the first time in two centuries, there is no eminent British poet, playwright or novelist prepared to question the foundations of the western way of life. One might make an honourable exception of Harold Pinter, who has wisely decided that being a champagne…
Read More Eagleton: Intellectual SnobI finally realised what my Big Idea about the Triesman Scheme for National Phrenology was. It’s that British politics is afflicted with scienciness, by analogy to “truthiness”. Thinking about the obsession with biometric quackery, I realised that over the last 10 years we’ve been governed by people who like the idea of science, but not…
Read More Scienciness!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 pressJohn Reid, we hardly knew you.. It’s not looking good for him, is it? His strategy, on taking over the Home Office, appears to have been one of pre-emptive disclosure, trying to get the toxic waste out in the open as quickly as possible and get it over with. You poor fool! Wait until you…
Read More The politics of permanent crisis