Alternate Seat of TYR

Here’s Simon Jenkins’ latest piece of work.
For the Tories it is sex, for Labour it is money. Financial scandal sticks to the latter like political napalm. From formula one to ministerial mortgages, privatisation contracts and cash-for-honours, the sign of a £50 note waving in the wind sends Labour politicians weak at the knees. Their only [...]

I can’t begin to imagine why LibDem polls are up; especially as at the same time more of the population now oppose than support ID cards.

Whilst we’re on the Pakistan blogging, immense respect is due to the Pakistan Policy Blog. It looks like Nawaz Sharif is coming home - like football, remember that? - apparently because the Saudis insisted that he be released from exile in Jeddah. The PPB makes the very good point that Musharraf has been gradually mutating [...]

This NYT story is an example, I think, of the way one’s mental models control one’s perception. The report deals with a proposed U.S. policy of providing the Frontier Corps, the paramilitary police of the North-West Frontier Province, with aid directly rather than via the Pakistani military. This is one thing. It is not an [...]

Dan Hardie keeps getting desperate e-mail from stranded Iraqi employees of the British Army. I haven’t yet, but I do regularly get people on NewSkies satellite-Internet links searching for information on how to apply for asylum.
Expect dramatic news from him tomorrow; you’ll need to write to them. Apparently David Miliband doesn’t think the matter is [...]

Right, I’ve got this honking great MySQL dump file, and I’d like to use the data in it without needing a MySQL db server; so I thought I’d turn it into a SQLite db, as python has native sqlite3 support. Various suggestions are on offer around the web; SQLiteBrowser, for example, claims to import and [...]

The Biggest Data Fart In The World Ever (BDFITWE) just keeps on getting better/worse. Check this out:
Sir John Bourn, the outgoing comptroller and auditor general, told a secret session of the public accounts committee that a senior business manager at Revenue & Customs had authorised the information to be released in its full form. His [...]

So now we know; looks like the Glock 17 caucus got a clean sweep of the “independent” MPA members.
BBC:
The MPA chairman, Len Duvall, said the watchdog body risked bringing itself into disrepute by the public and vitriolic attacks on Sir Ian.
I think I’m going to vomit. Excuse me, will you?
Anyway, the result was 15 votes [...]

It’s usually the Home Office that leads the way in the British government’s eternal Olympics of stupidity; but now and again, someone is inspired to go that bit further, to be a tiger, to raise the bar.
Having built a monster centralised database of every last child in the UK, the Revenue burned it to a [...]