Fluent Radical

Sad that it had to happen this way, but he’s made the right decision. Strictly is a good show precisely because it’s not just a popularity contest, the celebrities have to work hard and show some skill to do well. It’s difficult! I don’t want to watch a show where the standard of the contestant has no relevance to who wins, like X-Factor. If he had carried on much further than this I would have been switching off.

To the viewers who were voting him in each week: you were spoiling a good show. Cut it out. You shouldn’t need to be told that the ONLY valid criterion for judging a dancer is hotness.

I know Gavin doesn’t agree with me.

I started blogging in early 2005, with a big burst of enthusiasm. I left it at the end of 2006 with some regrets.

Looking around I’m a little sad at how few of my old blogroll friends made it from then to now. Non-trivial Solutions has left and his blog is missing. The Daily Ablution has given it up and his content is no longer available. Eu-serf has gone. Tory Convert has left and deleted her blog. James Hellyer’s Belief in Britain seems to be no more. Once More - the party group blog we started after the 2005 elections - is now occupied by squatters.

I understand that blogging is not necessarily something people want to do their entire lives, but I’m sad that the content is missing. It’s now as though they never blogged at all.

I believe that this blog will be online for many years to come, even though I won’t always be posting on it. I think it’s ok to post for a couple of years, drop it, and then come back to it. You’ll never be a network kingpin like Dale or Montgomerie, but your thoughts are still there to be reviewed later.

In fact I’ve had a real kick out of reading my old posts here. It’s great to see how fired up I was. I’m a little bit sad that I lost that.

So, to my future self: I hope you’re still blogging. And if you’re not, I hope you enjoyed reading this. And to friends who made it this far - Gavin Ayling, Little Man in a Toque, The England Project, Not Proud of Britain: it’s good to catch up with you again!

According to The Telegraph, a school’s isolation unit has been likened to Guantanamo Bay.

The room is painted totally black. The walls, the partitions, the window blinds – everything was black.

The partitions down one side created four cells where school kids are expected to sit at a desk all day.

I would rather take my son out of school than see him spend time in that dungeon.

Gosh. I recall on one occasion I was required to stand alone in the lobby of the school for one hour as a punishment for something or other. At the time it just annoyed me, but now I realize that it was in fact a shockingly medieval form of punishment.  Boredom plus public humiliation. Perhaps I should sue the school under human rights laws.

Get real. Boredom + public humiliation are just about the only punishments that you can legitimately apply in UK schools. Next they’ll be asking that teachers refrain from using sarcasm to humiliate kids in their classes.

The Mises Institute has an enormous selection of over 2,500 libertarian ebooks available for download from Mises Literature. I’m starting with The Roosevelt Myth by John T. Flynn (1949) and The Regulated Consumer by Mary Bennett Peterson (1971). Let me know if you have any recommendations.

The London Games Organizing Committee asked Wolff Olins for a logo that was:

1. dynamic … check
2. different to previous Olympic logos … check
3. flexible … check
4. instantly recognizable … check

I think Wolff Olins delivered.
Sadly the Committee forgot to ask for number 5:

5. Attractive.

Duh!

I once wrote a simple to-do list web application. It took me a few hours, and it was for my own amusement and understanding. No one but me ever used it or even knew it existed. It was online for all of a few days.

Yet still, that to-do list application was better secured than the MTAS system.

Tim Worstall has a good explanation of how security works in web applications. It might seem complicated to a lay person, but let me assure you that it is not. Tim is not joking when he says it is Day 2 of a script-kiddy cracker course. It is Day 1 of a web application design course.

Gross incompetence is putting it mildly.

I just deleted 4874 spam comments from the database. Wordpress crawled under the table and whimpered when I tried to use the normal interface, so I had to use PhpMyAdmin and figure out the database layout. Fortunately it wasn’t hard.

DELETE FROM `wp_comments` WHERE `comment_approved` = ‘0′

did the trick. I have now activated Akismet.

According to the BBC:

Network Rail, which runs Britain’s railway tracks and signals, is expected to announce it has made a profit for the first time in its history.

There is no sense in which we can call the excess subsidy that has been showered on this body a ‘profit’. Profit refers to your value added, to the amount by which you have made your customers’ lives better. Profit is not: compare your costs to the made up number which is what the government thinks it can get away with giving you, and if costs are smaller you win!

The very fact that subsidies are given to Network Rail means that it is NOT in profit. It would be in profit if it could fund itself by voluntary payments for services rendered to its customers. It CANT, so I have no idea where they get the cheek to say they are profitable.

Civitas has released a new set of ‘balanced’ student worksheets on the EU. Great idea, but what about this line in worksheet 4, paragraph 1:

The EU represents one of the greatest experiments in political history.For the first time nations have chosen to surrender aspects of their national sovereignty to a central body that has a responsibility to ensure that they act for the good not only of themselves but of other nations as well.

Aside from the tranzi sentiments (this is the pro-EU worksheet), is the EU really the first time that independent nations have pooled sovereignty to a central body? Seems like it might have happened before.

UPDATE: In a similar vein, Tim Worstall has problems with the same worksheet.

It’s beautiful.