Let’s start 2009 on a high note with free-thinking occasional Guardian contributor Tim Worstall: It’s one of my favourite truisms about economics that we don’t actually have solutions, we only have tradeoffs. Yes, we can make some things better but it will be at the cost of making some other things […]
A day spent poring through my year’s Blogoir output trying to choose some coherent entries for the 2009 Orwell Blog Prize. It turns out that links in earlier postings disappear for various reasons, rather reducing the effect/impact of that work months and years later. Especially poignant to see that links […]
Tim Worstall and Dennis the Peasant are having it out with Richard Murphy on tax issues and economic theory in general. Good stuff if you want to see lively minds hammering away (albeit often crossly and at cross purposes) about Basic Principles. Richard Murphy seems like a Man with a […]
A company asks you to buy them out for $15m. No way! So you end up buying them some years later – for over $6 billion. Probably a lesson in that somewhere.
What is morality? In good part it is a form of taxonomy: identifying and classifying differences. Hence my objection to Pinterism. This anti-morality takes the fact that gold and excrement are equally made of atoms, and proclaims no difference between them. Thus the USA is up there with the all-time […]
Matthew Parris writes eloquently about the role of Christianity in African development: In the city we had working for us Africans who had converted and were strong believers. The Christians were always different. Far from having cowed or confined its converts, their faith appeared to have liberated and relaxed them. […]
Here is a well-judged piece by Johann Hari trying to work out how Harold Pinter ended up supporting Slobodan Milosevic: Pinter himself says "the most important line I’ve ever written" is when Meg’s husband calls out, as Stanley is taken away, "Stan, don’t let them tell you what to do." […]
The Crawfs have been slumped in family consumeristic torpor, the children with assorted electronic games and I with my excellent new Skeletool. Not so impressed with the Sony Reader. This is an idea which should be good in a few years’ time, but not yet (compare the early greyscreen must-have Palm Pilot with an […]
So many entries. So little time. Remember the BBC puff for kitschy little red Mass Murderer badges? Or the oh-so-cool Che poster picture as part of a free ad for Fidel Castro? Both worthy entries. But, in a late surge, the BBC reaches a new height. Can a supposedly serious […]
I make it into the latest Britblog Round-up, No 201. It led me to this latest tirade against Government Targets in the area of officially supported academic research activities: Government blithely assumes that management is weightless; but the direct cost of writing detailed specifications and special software, and assembling 1,100 panellists to […]
