Looking at Ann Althouse’s marvellous site I spy the following Instant Poll: When should you testify with a squirrel in your cleavage? When you’re telling the truth, and you want to be believed. When you’re lying, and you don’t want to be believed. When you’re telling the truth, and […]
Is here. At Philobiblon, often Green, always feminist. A couple of links caught my eye. Can a blogger be a credible candidate for Parliament, or are there likely to be too many free-thinking hostage to fortune quotes on the blog for oponents to dig out? Libertarian Lib-Dem Charlotte Gore reckons […]
I am tasked to prepare some ideas on the problems which may arise between civilian and military ‘cultures’ in trying to help fragile or failed states. See the Center for Global Development on the subject. The basic problem is that things are what they are. Fragile states are fragile, because […]
This is a legal maxim: No-one gives what he does not have. The basic idea is that if you do now own eg a car but you pretend you do and sell it to someone else, that person can not acquire ownership of the car through that transaction. OK, there […]
It seems that we are to have a new national Cyber Security Strategy. The excellent Spy Blog asks some pertinent questions about operational accountability, showing some sharp insight into the way things work or not in practice: Does either the Office of Cyber Security or the Cyber Security Operations Centre […]
What would you think if you were told to work for someone else for half the year, then allowed to work for yourself? Sounds a bit like serfdom? Yes: A freeman became a serf usually through force or necessity. Sometimes freeholders or allodial owners were intimidated into dependency by the […]
The main practical argument for skewing the law to protect a blogger’s anonymity in such cases as the Night Jack one is that honourable anonymous or pseudonymous bloggers working within public service might be silenced. And the public would lose a flow of helpful insights. True enough, in some distinguished […]
Here (h/t Samizdata) is a good review of H G Wells’ ever more calamitous and influential ideas as they evolved over some forty years. His great idea was contempt for the masses, who needed visionary, purposeful leadership from visonary, purposeful people. Such as himself. At first he did not like […]
Polly Toynbee in the Guardian laments the anti-politics mood in the UK. But the problem is not politicians and their crass policies and greedy expenses-grabbing. It’s voters, ungrateful for all the good things Government bestows upon them. As for bloggers: The blogosphere could have been a source for better information, […]
BBC director-general Mark Thompson is baffled: The figures showed that the BBC’s 50 highest-paid executives earned as much as £13.6million last year, with 27 paid more than the Prime Minister. In addition, they spent tens of thousands of pounds’ worth of public money on entertaining each other, staying at top […]
