An interesting article in the Guardian about the use of hi-tech tracing technology to help put pressure on Uzbekistan to stop forced child labour in the vast Uzkek post-Soviet cotton fields: "We became aware of real problems in Uzbekistan," said Alan Wragg, Tesco’s clothing technical director. "Government-organised forced child labour […]
Danny Finkelstein argues well in the Times that politics are getting more fragmented and less controlled: In his book The Long Tail Chris Anderson points out how the market for, say, books has in the past been constrained by the shop shelf space available to display. Online shopping has abolished this […]
Back from Sweden. There the blogosphere is a mighty force in Swedish society. In a country of a bit more than 9 million people there look to be nearly 250,000 blogs. It looks as if the government there are struggling to work out how to deal with this formidable citizen […]
Oh Lordy. Craig Murray has called me the leading FCO sock-puppet on the Internet. Read his characteristically muddled piece for yourselves. Here is the reply which I have posted on his site (Note: links added for ease of reference): Craig, Dear. Oh. Dear. Are you really insinuating that somehow I […]
Here is Bagehot at the Economist on why the Internet’s role in UK politics is mainly destructive: But it, and especially YouTube, are at least becoming an important destructive element in British politics, able as they are to cultivate that most poisonous and final of political responses: ridicule. Take three […]
The animation movie Wall-e depicts in stunning colours a silent abandoned Earth buried deep in towering human garbage, with only a perky little garbage-crushing robot plus a friendly cockroach moving about. An environmentalist metaphor for human destructiveness! Wrong. BBC radio today carried a story about tinned food, mentioning in passing […]
Here is a fine article by Richard Fernandez on the T-word. He takes up an article by Jeff Jacoby which points up the moral dilemmas in all this: Suppose the CIA had been denied permission to use brutal interrogation tactics, and Al Qaeda had consequently gone on to murder thousands […]
Sorry readers. An exhausting couple of days clearing out the parental garage. This old radio of mine emerged – a hefty but magnificent Pye Cambridge International. One of these cost a huge 42 guineas in 1954, the auspicious year of my birth. Not easy to say with any certainty what […]
President Obama has called for a world free of nuclear weapons. But he accepts that it might not happen in his lifetime. Why it is so difficult to scale back these systems once they are there? Basically, nuclear weapons are ghastly because they can not be used on any scale […]
Former diplomat Simon Dickson has some positive things to say about FCO bloggers following a seminar he attended: How do they assess their success? For a couple, they are among the first bloggers in their respective countries, which should score a few credibility points for UK plc. Some quote instances where […]
