I posted a couple of weeks ago on a paper by a couple of economists which argued in brief, that globalisation - taking a historical view - tended to fail for political reasons: effectivedly, those who lose from it put the brakes on. Cross-posting this to Shaping Tomorrow’s Foresight Network prompted a long and considered [...]
I’ve written here from time to time on the evolution of Britain as a surveillance society, and the trends embedded in it. Now the journalist Henley Porter, in a submission to the Joint Committee on Human Rights, has produced a list of the ways in which surveillance has been increased in the UK since the [...]
There’s an interesting discussion going on in the economics world about the impact of the cost of the Iraq war and on the US, following the publication of The Three Trillion Dollar War, by Joseph Stiglitz and Linda Bilmes. Economic theory says it should have stimulated the US economy, but it doesn’t seem to have. [...]
New word of the month is ‘iWar’, conjured up by Johnny Ryan of Dublin’s Institute of European Affairs in an article in Open Democracy. It describes “attacks carried out over the internet that target the consumer internet infrastructure”.
The current scandals around surveillance in the UK reminds me that I meant to post about Privacy International’s most recent international league table. (Thanks to Our Kingdom for the prompt). England and Wales are in the bottom category - “endemic surveillance societies” - while Scotland, split out for the first time, is a little higher, [...]
There’s been a flurry of interest on the design blogs on the ‘FE-Mittelschrift’ typeface adopted for German number plates. It breaks pretty much all of the rules for typographic design, perhaps because it is designed to prevent manipulation of number plates. The most important ‘readers’ may be machines, not humans.
I meant in this post just to catch an amusing epigram quoted by the journalist Ian Jack last week:
What’s the difference between a dialect and language? Answer, a language is a dialect with an army and a navy.
But reading the article - on Scotland and the politics of Trident - made me realise there was [...]
More than half think that Britain “has become a surveillance society”, while experts suggest that the police should put new limits on its DNA database.
In his latest collection of essays, Hold Everything Dear, John Berger makes a striking comparison in a piece first published in 2002 between Hiroshima 1945 and World Trade Centre 2001 as representing significant turns in our perceptions of American power.
Sudan and Iraq are at number 1 and 2 in the 3rd annual “Failed States Index“, produced by the US non-profit Fund for Peace and the journal Foreign Policy. The index is built up from scores on 12 criteria (listed lower down) and the full matrix can be seen on the site so you can [...]
