Polly Toynbee makes the quixotic points one would expect her to make about Baby P: Surprisingly few children are murdered, given how many parents are drug addicted, psychotic, violent or profoundly inadequate; 29,000 are on the child protection register and another 300,000 are reckoned to be "in need", with concerns […]
As someone said: The free market is just a measurement, a device to tell us what people are willing to pay for any given thing at any given moment. The free market is a bathroom scale. You may hate what you see when you step on the scale. "Jeeze, 230 […]
An interesting discussion last night with someone looking hard at Values in British public life. It seems that senior civil servants are now brooding on the existential aspects of their relations with Ministers in an attempt to identify the Core Values of public life, which latterly are thought to have […]
Just say you vote for a politician who has campaigned on a plan to raise business taxes and so compel firms to lay off workers. Should not the workers who voted for that politician be the first ones to be fired? I mean, that’s fair isn’t it? And while you are at Poor […]
This from Right Coast sums it all up: Thus I have tried to pay attention carefully as Obama and his many proxies have explained what his actual plans would be. These are much more comprehensible. With some gratitude I realize that all the talk of Hope and Change can be distilled […]
Back home after some busy days a-training some sassy young diplomats, straight out of the egg and buzzing with cheery optimism until I arrived. I also have been visiting an elderly friend in hospital. Beyond a certain age most of one’s friends and maybe even one’s close relatives have died. […]
As I peruse the statistics for the readership of this Blog, I see that most people who swing by do so for less than 30 seconds, but a non-trivial number of people stay for an hour or more. It is boring scrolling back through archived blog material on any site. […]
If you had a camera that took pictures at a stunning 250,000 frames per second, what’s the first thing you’d film in ultra slow-motion? Yes, that’s right! Fungus plants on dung-heaps, shooting out spores. The ‘fastest thing in nature’. Now, at last, filmed. And set to opera.
Is one answer to gloabal energy problems for us humans to do what electric eels do to generate electricty? But better?
More on leak technology. Here is SpyBlog on an earlier example, asking rather shrilly how it is possible that a civil servant can walk out of a key British Government building carrying a sensitive Secret document. Well, it’s simple. Short of strip-searching all employees every day as they leave the […]
