One of the whole points of Government always has been … to raise money for Government. Which, as the wonderful book Seeing Like a State explains, is why we have surnames and agreed weights and so on. To raise its money easily Government needs to measure, and it is much easier to measure things […]
The Times leader on President Sarkozy’s insistence that the ‘European’ economic model must now prevail over the ‘Anglo-Saxon’ model: This is economically illiterate populism. No policymaker in the English-speaking economies believes in totally unconstrained and unregulated capitalism. You need to go to some fairly obscure corners to find anyone at […]
Let’s start at the top, with Climategate. A great mass of original material is hacked or leaked from a key UK Climate Research Unit. Those who want urgent action of different sorts on climate change are exhibiting unease, insisting that it is all a fuss about next to nothing […]
One of the most baffling features of modern Western civilisation – more accurately the UK/US version of it – is the way honesty has been downgraded to something contingent and ‘relative’. This applies particularly in education, where generations of pupils are being insulated against the unbending honesty of the reality […]
Back from training EU officials in Mediation techniques, with an eye on the role of mediation at the international level. One of our role-play examples featured an attempt by an imaginary Head of Mission in an imaginary country trying to mediate between his Deputy and a younger Political Officer over […]
The latest developments on the Torture issue – the speech by MI5 chief Jonathan Evans and then the High Court decision in favour of release of secret US material concerning Binyam Mohamed – are (in their different ways) further important steps towards clarifying how if at all we deal with […]
One of the typical BBC-style clever retorts to those who say that our language is not declining goes thus: Languages evolve, as we all know. They have to. Duh. English now is far removed from the language of Henry I. If technology and texting and the rest are causing English […]
Just back from manoeuvres in Liverpool, addressing this years’s Headmasters’ and Headmistresses’ Conference (the gathering of leading public schools, primarily for boys) most ably led this year by Andrew Grant from my old school. My zany theme was Why Stupidity Should Be Taught In Schools, a subject on which I felt […]
A reader despairs of the teaching profession, citing this Teachmeet video as an example of the dumbed down way some teachers now communicate with each other: Meanwhile I am working on a presentation next week about Education, with a special look at language learning (I myself having had a good […]
Guido lauds the Spectator as the first UK current affairs magazine with an iPhone app: This is the future of journalism, the sooner the mediasaurs grasp this truth the more likely they are to survive into the future. I checked out the iTunes link and the only review of the App says […]
