Amazingly detailed discussion of how to label legal dope, at Mark Kleiman’s. He’s binned the Torah discussion group posts, but sometimes it’s hard to tell. The Social Market Foundation graphs the economic debate or rather the respectable and therefore uninteresting bits of it. You can save your effort by putting your hand over the entire…
Read More InterestingSo I’ve been reading Clausewitz. In the original German. It took me months – *humblebrag*. Anyway, if the government were to fall next week, what should Ed Miliband do right now? It seems to me that quite a lot of thought is going into the long term. There’s a complex of ideas around changing the…
Read More A quick hits agenda, with ClausewitzNick Sommerlad of the Daily Mirror, with some help from the GMB research department, has a hell of a scoop: a full third of the Right to Buy properties are owned by private landlords. And a very substantial chunk of those, in some London boroughs, are owned by Charles Gow, the son of the government…
Read More British KakistocracySpeaking of the Simple Plan, I am assured that the Liberal Conspiracy piece is coming Real Soon Now. Meanwhile, I’m seriously considering offering it to Conservative Home.
Read More UpdateOK, so Jake Berry MP, a recent butt of ours. Strangely, in the last couple of weeks, that post has drawn massive amounts of traffic, over a thousand unique readers in four days, none of them leaving referrer strings. Weird. Anyway, I noticed this piece of his from just before he put down the shameless…
Read More In which we attempt to redeem Jake Berry MPWell, I’m on record as saying that since June, 2010, I’m all in with Team Desiccated Calculating Machine. And wouldn’t that be a good name for a blog. So, here’s a bland and technocratic thing. The Health Service Journal reports Andy Burnham’s NHS speech, and seems to think it’s pretty good. The key points are…
Read More Sensible ideas.The Daily Mirror mocks Lord Freud’s overhoused condition and quotes Owen Jones: We’re told this is about bringing down the £21billion housing benefit bill. But we’d save much more if we stopped using housing benefit to line the pockets of private landlords charging absurd rents. Building homes would create jobs, and if we brought rents…
Read More house music all night long.In which the otherwise estimable Danny Dorling makes the mistake of arguing with someone on the basis of Nicholas Watt’s reporting of their words! The real segregation that Labour failed to tackle was economic. Rich people in rich parts of the country became richer. Poorer parts and poorer people saw far slower improvements in their…
Read More the problem isn’t that immigrants can’t read English, it’s the national press…F-Secure Labs’ blog points to Cyberwar is Bullshit. I say yes! And I point you to Evgeny Morozov‘s cracking 10-step guide to cyberwar fearmongering. Follow his simple plan and you’ll be able to spread arrant drivel to the underbriefed with the best of them. I especially like: 2. Begin the story in Estonia, with a…
Read More HOWTO be a Cyberwar ExpertIf you are reading this and you can vote in the US election, and you have yet to make up your mind, please read this. George W. Bush must go. I will avoid taking a position on the culture war issues, and simply concentrate on performance. Both as a domestic politician and as Commander in…
Read More If you haven’t made your mind up…