socialism

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!

Remember this post on Maglev, managerialists, and creationist technology? Heavily-blogged Myers links to equally heavily-blogged article on the market for Kalashnikov rifles. Apparently, everything he reads only makes sense in the light of evolution. Funny that – think process. This is also why the Chinese textile industry wants to reopen an old mill in Wigan,…

Read More Kalashnikovs, trousers, squid, pies..

This post from PZ Myers raises a very important point about decentralisation and local accountability. What if the quacks get control? Families and schools are always a problem with regard to liberty – no-one has the right to experiment on the public without their consent, but youth is the one experiment that is performed on…

Read More Go to school, learn the rules, don’t be no faker!

It’s fairly usual that big infrastructure systems should be regulated or publicly owned if there is no realistic competition to them. Defining that is more difficult – Railtrack presumably thought it was competing frantically with roads, after all. I propose a different way of looking at it. What if the distinction were framed in terms…

Read More Rates of change

So Lord Browne is gay. Who knew? Well, I did, simply because people have googled and hit this site at a rate of 20 a day since March, 2004. Think digital privacy doesn’t matter? Think again. But let’s ask another question. Back in 2005, BP killed a dozen workers at its Texas City refinery, in…

Read More Morality