November 2010

A Face-Saving Exercise

The BBC reports: A former soldier who was jailed for refusing to fight in Afghanistan has handed back a medal in protest at Britain’s involvement in the war. “There’s a real up-swell of awareness now among military families and among the military, and among the people in this country, that this conflict is, has kind […]

Read More

Cross In Box

Continuing the theme of suffrage, if you were unfortunate (and nerdy) enough to listen to Today In Parliament yesterday evening, you will have been treated to our law-makers displaying the sort of ignorance of the basics of the law and of European institutions that makes you embarrassed to be a British citizen as they debated […]

Read More

The Not Vote

The always-interesting marketing guru Seth Godin wisely alerts citizens of democracies who fail to exercise their franchise because they claim to hate politicians to an important fact they have probably overlooked: many politicians want them not to vote: Political TV advertising is designed to do only one thing: suppress the turnout of the opponent’s supporters. […]

Read More

Fighting The Good Fight

Spam—email spam, link spam, splogs, social media spam—is evil. I waste too much of my time dealing with it. It was inevitable that this Wired article about a new search engine would intrigue me: [T]here’s a new search engine in town that’s got a fresh approach to weed out the ever-proliferating junk and spam sites […]

Read More