A recent post of mine told the story of the late Gaston Defferre (1910-1986). Defferre was the PS mayor of Marseille from 1944-1945 and again from 1953 until his death in 1986. He was responsible for creating a party machine and turning a blind eye to political corruption and organised crime. I’d said then that if you could compare Marseille before Defferre and after, you’d be astonished and upset...
There’s a wonderful Russian word – u’zhas – which means ‘awful’. It’s more than a literal translation, being one of two words of choice whenever one wishes to express disgust in a short, pithy way. The other word is kosh’mar – which means ‘nightmare’. It does pretty well the same job and I’d submit both are the...
One of the more amusing aspects of the term “secret summit” is just how un-secret they tend to be, at least to the agenda’s the attendee’s though occasionally not to what was actually said rather than what was reported said. Still, if you want to annoy a group of people and achieve the very opposite of what you’re aiming for, then letting the world know what you’ve been doing...
Oliver’s move came as public health officials and doctors joined a growing number of education and food organisations in criticising the education secretary. In a move that astonished experts, Gove insisted that he would not apply the nutrition standards that cover all other state schools to academies and free schools – even after a report by the School Food Trust charity found last week that many were selling sub-standard...
The other day, I quoted a guy on the awfulness of the new Gmail. Twilight came in, quite rightly, with the awfulness of Blogger: Blogger (linked to Google) is also parading a new interface and causing many bloggers to threaten emigration to WordPress. I understand that Google is trying to create a uniform “look” to all their their enterprises. Fortunately we can still toggle between old Blogger interface and...
I’ve become fairly jaded as my years have increased, the bright burning flame of fighting for what was right (then) gradually faded as the years past and the need to provide for family taught me a few valuable lessons on what really is important along with the suspicion that the real enemy is those in power, not necessarily those in government’ the rich or anyone different. Along the way...
Regarding Breitbart’s reputation: Breitbart lost all credibility when they took a hatchet to the Shirley Sherrod video. … it’s hardly the point whether his credibility has been lost in other areas. The point is simple – does this booklet exist or does it not? Even given that he may have not had control over what was printed, he certainly had the chance to see it and comment on its...
There are a number of ways to view the idea of post-normal science, but to my mind, the most realistic is to accept that the traditional science myth is finally dying. The idea that scientists selflessly pursue their theories and resolutely reject them if they aren’t confirmed by experiment is finally crashing into reality. And about time too. There is no scientific method. Scientists are opportunists – they go...
Never ascribe to malice what is explainable by incompetence. Possibly true but in the case of Cameron/Osborne, it does begin to look as if they’ve done their level best to split the Tory Party. For a start, Osborne is incompetent, useless for anything – he certainly possesses no knowledge of economics. When I started posting scathing articles on Cameron in 2007, I and a few others were called a...
The former mayor of Nantes, now Prime Minister, Jean-Marc Ayrault has named a provisional list of ministers. All are now required to run for office in June’s parliamentary elections. Should they lose, they will also lose their ministry appointments. That said, it seems as if the people on the list were chosen with care as likely winners. Ayrault has named 34 ministers in total, 17 men and 17 women....
The Sun's headline was "They culled Kenny"
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