More promising avenues for reflection have opened up. Continue to expect little on this channel. When America isn’t there, the conversation flows, reports Anthony Barnett: “I found this made it all the more challenging. How can I put this diplomatically? For the first time I found myself at an international seminar without an American participant. [...]
I’ve always enjoyed the writings of Kahlil Gibran. I was browsing through Gibran’s Wanderer a few days ago and this caught my eye: Two men were walking in the valley and one man pointed with his finger toward the mountain side, and said, “See you that hermitage? There lives a man who has long divorced [...]
Happy New Year to my two readers. Cruft for the first Monday of the teenies: Ban This Game, an entertaining-looking game which lands a few kidney punches on the authoritarian and self-defeating approach to Internet monitoring being taken by the Australian government. Devs, please make it a flash game that we don’t have to install! [...]
Dear Christmas carol singers, Don’t try to scalp me for a few quid “for charity” on my own doorstep ever again: it’s a waste of your time and mine. If you’re any good and can make it through a Oh Come All Ye Faithful without mumbling the second verse, the chances are you’re from an [...]
Practical Solutions, an organisation based in Blackburn, Lancashire, has set up a website to provide information about honour-based violence and forced marriages. The site has an online “confidential advice service” to enable a site user to request advice from an expert. A user creates an account with the site, and can submit a question after [...]
A Rannygazoo ” is … a statement of news out of all proportion and almost out of relation to the facts, and yet having a certain origin and shadowy foundation. … In the classification of the Washington newspaper men there are fakes, reinikaboos, and real news. [Chicago Daily Tribune, 9 Jan. 1898.]“. Not as easily [...]
Caught, sloshed: Indian sort-of-Sikh religious sect Dera Sacha Sauda starts a drive to “to halt the spread of HIV by offering respectable options to sex workers” by finding volunteers to marry them. The Beeb could have made a little effort and contacted organised sex workers to see what they think about this. On a sort-of-related theme, [...]
Wrung from the day’s rags: Silo but Deadly, an article about IT in the financial services sector, and it’s potential contribution to the creditopalypse. Global IT spend in the financial services sector is USD503 billion. However: “IT systems have led to a “deskilling of the risk process”, says SteveO’Sullivan of Accenture, a consultancy. At one [...]
My interests in gaming, technology and large scale atrocity appear to be colliding with more regularity, but two recent pieces of writing munge them together like badgers caught in a motorway pileup: A little Swiss NGO called Track Impunity Always (“TRIAL” – genius, right?) and Pro Juventute released a report called Playing by the Rules, [...]
Thanks Warren: “Twitter: The Grease Trap Of The Human Meat Computer”. We should all get our own mental driptray; this is mine.
