In our family the period immediately before Christmas Day is taken up with the annual ritual of home-made Christmas cards. This tradition started when Crawf 1 appeared and has developed over the years as successive Crawfs have appeared and grown. Originally simple coloured drawings with some sort of family theme […]
The Browser hosted an excellent first birthday party last night in London. The Browser is a good-looking attempt to set up a smart person’s online content aggregator organised in helpful but manageable categories – somewhere between the eclectic and leisurely Arts & Letters and the Economist. It is getting a […]
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 […]
Part of Conservatism is respect for Tradition and Continuity. Which is fine, but sits uneasily with the whirlwind of innovation today, which turns even our most cherished ways upside-down. Disruptive technologies and all that. For example.
Welcome Iain Dale readers Just to add that if you don’t have time to go back to that early 2008 posting of mine, do take a couple of minutes to read Isaac Asimov’s peerless The Last Question. Way back in 1956 it still says all that needs to be said on […]
Partly because it was designed not to work precisely in the normal way we might think of precision. I think. Huh? Yes folks. Welcome to this excellent piece by Joel Spolsky from way back in 2002 about Leaky Abstractions. I don’t understand it. But it is elegantly written. What a […]
The more the government tries to change our behaviour to address ‘climate change’, the less the UK public incline to believe them. Funny, that. It of course all depends on the precise questions being asked. Does human activity have an impact on the planet? Of course. Is it easy to […]
When it comes down to it, what is a Blog? Not much more than personal musings, often with links to other websites which in one way or the other serve to reinforce the point one is trying to make. Some sites aim higher – to become places where intelligent people […]
Former senior diplomat Sir Christopher Meyer is busy describing what he sees as a decline in the influence and technique of British diplomacy: New Labour’s obsessive reliance on the alchemy of consultants has infected much of Whitehall. The culture of targets, set by the Treasury, has acquired the madness and […]
Here is the Comment I have posted on OutsideLeft’s site: I have lived for most of my life in countries grappling with different forms of socialism (communist Yugoslavia, apartheid S Africa) or trying to escape from it (post-communist Russia, post-war Bosnia, post-Milosevic Serbia, post-communist Poland). So I feel qualified to […]
