Alternate Seat of TYR

OK. Remember a few months ago, the Sundays were briefed about one of Tony’s eye-catching initiatives - to launch a magnetic levitation high-speed rail link from London up to Scotland?
Well, if it ever had any substance, it’s now a dead parrot. And so are all maglev projects, which should bring a hearty cheer from everyone [...]

OK. Remember a few months ago, the Sundays were briefed about one of Tony’s eye-catching initiatives - to launch a magnetic levitation high-speed rail link from London up to Scotland?
Well, if it ever had any substance, it’s now a dead parrot. And so are all maglev projects, which should bring a hearty cheer from everyone [...]

Bacon Butty piles on to one of the notions I criticised here. Food miles are, if anything, less useful than embodied energy as a policy target - after all, a whacking 22 per cent of CO2 attributed to UK food transport originates from sea and air transport. Obviously, the first place to start, especially as [...]

Over the last few months, I’ve done a succession of posts which can be read under the tag TWOS, for the war on stupidity, which explore various forms of ideology and consensus. More related posts will be tagged as I go. But is this just an exercise in pooflinging? Beyond tirades about managerialism, Tony Blair, [...]

Over the last few months, I’ve done a succession of posts which can be read under the tag TWOS, for the war on stupidity, which explore various forms of ideology and consensus. More related posts will be tagged as I go. But is this just an exercise in pooflinging? Beyond tirades about managerialism, Tony Blair, [...]

Via comments at Our Word, Rob makes this excellent point.
It’s always struck me as a serious tactical mistake for those on the left to argue against laissez-faire on the grounds that it deprives people of economic security, because this hands a powerful rhetoric of liberty to the right, who basically only care about it for [...]

Apparently, Dick Cheney’s lawyers are actually trying to invoke in court this batshit insane doctrine they seem to have cooked up, that claims that Cheney is both part of the Executive and the Legislature, and that therefore he answers to neither.
That’s just head-spinningly weird. They are arguing, in a sense, that a sort of legal [...]

Following an unexpected referral to this blog, I came to this discussion of Theodor Adorno. Well, that takes me back. I remember having reams of him stuffed down my neck at Vienna University in the winter of 2001, which I didn’t like in the least. I certainly didn’t like the cult of personality some people [...]

Jamie K, hence the Madchester title, takes issue with a Johann Hari column arguing in favour of National Service on the grounds that it will make politicians less likely to go to war. Two points: first, as a commenter points out, making the army less efficient as a way of preventing war is stupid. It’s [...]

Does the idea of “embodied energy” convey any useful information whatsoever in the vast majority of its applications?
I ask because I recently read about the difficulties faced in calculating this metric. For the uninitiated, it means the energy consumed in creating one unit of product X. People concerned about climate change and the supply of [...]