So, I wonder if there’s anything stupid going on at Richard “Who are you going to believe – me, or the fact the Israeli Air Force *apologised* for the strike-in-error?” North’s place….and guess what? There is! As CabaPhil (good to have him back in the ‘sphere) points out, Dick North is deeply conflicted here –…
Read More Richard North is Still WrongRemember this post regarding the trainwreck that is the NHS National Programme for IT? In it, we discussed the institutional factors that made it a trainwreck, and specifically the way demands for commercial secrecy made it impossible to involve the users in designing the system. Well, now there’s a discussion at Kevin Drum’s about how…
Read More HOWTO Build a Healthcare Computing SystemCan anyone honestly be crazed enough to suggest launching US forces into Pakistan? Well, the Washington Post – the Washington Post! – apparently is. Let us review the situation; there’s a wave of suicide bombings on, one of which may have been either jihadis or Baluch rebels – they don’t know – and targeted Chinese…
Read More A canter down some dark defileNecrocracy: 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 pressDoug Farah‘s book on Viktor Bout is out. You can read an excerpt in this month’s Men’s Vogue, which is certainly a fittingly Hunter Thompson-esque scene for him, and an interview. Salient points include this: I think one of the most startling moments for me was when we were talking to Treasury Department people doing…
Read More Book alert: Doug Farah vs Viktor BoutSo our fine Immigration Minister, Liam Byrne is going to launch an “international marketing campaign” in order to attract more immigrants. Does anyone now remember that David Blunkett launched a propaganda campaign to put immigrants off, emphasising fine British institutions like rain and railway disruption? Clearly Byrne doesn’t. But perhaps he’s hoping to target the…
Read More The stupid – it’s Byrne’s!What is it with sodding “electrosensitivity”? Why has it suddenly achieved escape-from-reality velocity this spring? What is it with columnists like the Obscurer‘s Jasper Gerard, who this week chose to announce that, if you include the long-term sick, the total number of unemployed people in Britain is over 3 million. Wasn’t it like that under…
Read More We’re so pretty…we’re vacant!So the cult of the amateur is killing our culture, right? What if I was to tell you that bloggers had accused someone of abducting Madeleine McCann purely on the basis that he spoke foreign and had associated with Bogus Asylum Seekers? You’d be shocked. Well, the national press did it. Robert Murat, the only…
Read More Your Professional National PressThere is still, still not going to be a war with Iran. Carrierwatch: Carl Vinson, Theodore Roosevelt, Abraham Lincoln, George Washington are all in deep refit. Enterprise and Harry S. Truman are still at the stage of doing CARQUALs, in the Big E’s case for reserve squadrons, Ronald Reagan arrived back in San Diego on…
Read More There will still be no war with Iran