Mark Mardell, BBC North America editor, looks at the problems the Democrats are having in the USA in explaining their policies to an inceasingly unhappy electorate. He’s not taking sides. No sirree! But read this awesome passage (emphasis added): There is little doubt that the Obama administration is widely perceived […]
Every now and again I swing by Instapunk, a powerful and unrelenting site which is part of the Boomer Bible phenomenon: … muddled politics, neither left nor right, designed to confuse and deliberately offend readers Yup, that peevish and baffled Amazon lead-off review about sums it up. For something a bit more […]
The latest BBRU is hosted by Trixy. She links to Jack of Kent who has examined in some depth a strange case of a man handing over to the police a shotgun he said he had found and then being prosecuted. Having watched various trials as a budding barrister, I […]
I live not too far from Swindon. Its council announced last week that free Wi-Fi broadband, enabled by hundreds of access points in lamp posts, will be made available to all residents. With thousands of computers connected by millions of virtual synapses, might this not be where the first artificial […]
"Move along folks, nothing to see from all those leaked climate emails" say various people, such as these. And these. Well some people want to linger to look more closely at the wreckage. Where they seem to spot three serious issues: moves to prevent publication of rival views manipulation/massaging of data […]
What makes writing good or bad? Not always easy to tell. But if the writer is known to be a Great Writer, does it matter? Try this gripping sentence: The apartment was small, with slanting floors and irregular heat and a buzzer downstairs that didn’t work, so that visitors had […]
Here is a trenchant analysis of the tendency of Bosnia to split in two, written by Matthew Parish, a lawyer who has worked in the divided Bosnian city of Brcko and knows what he is talking about. His basic argument is that step by step Republika Srpska is heading towards […]
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 […]
Tim Worstall nails a nice one here. MPs are moaning that the amount of textile waste (ie old clothes) in council tips has shot up. This, they say, shows that we are becoming addicted to wasteful throw-away fashion. Except that it doesn’t. If we recycle lots more glass/paper/plastic/cardboard away from […]
In a startling development which is likely to change the very method of scientific enquiry, mainly for the better, hackers have grabbed from prominent UK scientists (Hadley CRU) a huge mass of material going back years about Climate Change – and published it online. See the New York Times. And […]
