22 October 2009 – 10:45 am
June? June?
Oh well – I’m back, probably.
What’s been happening? Looking back at the last two posts, both those papers got rejected; in one case it was more of a “revise and resubmit”, so I’m not particularly distressed. The other was more of a “hit the back wall without bouncing” rejection, which did stop me in [...]
15 February 2008 – 4:46 pm
Jamie picks up on a handy new proposal for making use of all those ex-servicemen the Iraq war is eventually going to leave us with:
Ex-servicemen and women should be retrained as teachers to bring military style discipline to tough inner city schools, a think tank has said. The Centre for Policy Studies says ex-soldiers could [...]
Will is keen to dispel some myths about think tanks:
Imagine you’re throwing a party, and invitations have to be equally split into three factions. Firstly you must invite your grandparents, great uncles and great aunts. Secondly, you must invite your colleagues. And thirdly you must invite the kids who hang around the local park. When [...]
2 January 2007 – 10:25 pm
Pessimistic Clive, 28th December:
When I find myself largely agreeing with UKIP leader Nigel Farage over the two new EU member states, despite disagreeing with the very basis of his party and being largely pro-EU, how much longer can the Union continue to keep its loose supporters on board with all this prevarication, shoddy decision-making and [...]
8 November 2006 – 6:43 pm
Business, Community, Discipline: the Strange Triumph of New Labour
Written 12th May 1997; not published
I didn’t vote Labour on May 1st. At my first general election in 1979 I voted Liberal, an early tactical voter in Conservative Croydon South. I found out afterwards that the Labour candidate had lost his deposit: every vote did count [...]
I’ve got a logical mind, perhaps excessively so; people sometimes call me a pedant, but I always point out that pedantry is characterised by excessive reliance on canonical sources and works of reference rather than by mere consistency in the exercise of rational thinking. That shuts them up, I can tell you.
Anyway, having a clear [...]
So we’ve just helped ourselves to a couple of chocolates from a left-over box of Miniature Heroes when our son walks in. He’s eating an apple, but his attention is caught by the chocolates and he begins at once to plead and beg in a frankly rather undignified manner. Wife points out that he’s got [...]
Let’s get productive!
At least 100,000 NHS employees will lose their jobs if the government carries through the health reforms Tony Blair wants as a lasting monument to his premiership, according to a report today from the pro-market thinktank Reform. Under the reforms, the benefits of a more efficient service, with greater productivity and a more [...]
Harry:
Hitler had his faults, of course, as he himself would be the first to admit. Many of his “Nazi theories” have now been debunked. With the benefit of hindsight his invasion of Russia was ill-conceived, and his scheme to exterminate the “lesser races” has been widely discredited.
Hitler was also a lousy manager. During the war [...]
Will Davies is cross with David Cameron:
he seems to have invented his own more radical way of by-passing politics. His mantra is to introduce ‘a new approach’. Where Blair can claim the ghost of Keir Hardie and the strategic acumen of McKinseys, Cameron has adopted a view from nowhere at all. All he wants is [...]
12 February 2006 – 8:36 pm
Apparently I’m up to blogpost #100, a little short of the blog’s first anniversary. How about some beer?
In south London, where I learned to drink, the bitter is generally tawny and malty. In south Wales and East Anglia, the next two areas where I tried the beer, the bitter is usually both malty and tawny. [...]
24 December 2005 – 11:12 pm
There’s some good stuff from Ross McKibbin in the current LRB:
the two major parties fundamentally share the same ideology. Despite assurances that the political elite is interested only in what works, this is the most intensely ideological period of government we have known in more than a hundred years. The model of market-managerialism has largely [...]
23 November 2005 – 2:28 pm
I recently attended an “e-Government Question Time” session, organised in connection with this conference. There were some good points made: one speaker stressed the importance of engaging with the narratives which people build rather than assuming that the important facts can be read off from an accumulation of data; one questioner called the whole concept [...]
19 October 2005 – 9:21 pm
Briefly (and partially recycledly): in comments on a recent post at Owen’s blog, Owen’s Dad wrote a sizeable denunciation of Margaret Thatcher, adding as an afterthought
(I should perhaps have added to the preceding catalogue her merciless destruction of the Conservative Party as a credible party of government and as an effective opposition capable of holding [...]
6 September 2005 – 10:30 pm
One possible reason why the aftermath of Katrina has been so dreadful is provided by the piece by Jamie I quoted earlier. There’s something weirdly soviet about all this. We’re seeing this immensely powerful country which has somehow stopped working. Perhaps we should take this image literally: perhaps the reason why it looks as if [...]
5 September 2005 – 6:34 pm
They order these things better in Cuba; there, evacuation means that everybody leaves, down to dogs and cats:
they have family doctors in cuba (!), who evacuate together with the neighborhood, and already know who, for example, needs insulin.
…
they also have veterinarians and they evacuate animals. they begin evacuating immediately, and also evacuate TV sets and [...]
Over at the excellent Burning Bird, Shelley recently announced that she was abandoning the Democrats and joining the US Green Party. Here’s one of the responses:
To say “the Democratic party does not represent me” is not a meaningful statement, because what a party stands for in America is constantly in flux, depending on what the [...]
Jurgen Habermas says:
Without the dynamic of economic interests, the political union would have probably never got off the ground. This dynamic only strengthens the worldwide tendency toward market deregulation. But the xenophobic perception of the Right that the socially undesirable consequences of this lifting of boundaries could be avoided by returning to the protectionist forces [...]
So, Blair’s responded to the May 5th result by announcing his intention to move yet further Right, and backed it up with new Cabinet appointments. Which is disappointing in itself, as well as representing two fingers to all those of us who chose left-wing alternatives to Labour. Given the scale of the left-alternative diaspora and [...]
