Always be deeply cynical of stories that float around the mail systems, especially if they are accompanied by pleas for prayer, and/or onforwarding. Emotion and fact rarely marry in the internet chapel. Despite the caution I found myself warming to the alleged story (see below) behind this picture of a soldier trimming a patch of…
I wrote some thoughts about waterboarding in an earlier post. There is some interesting observations here by journalist Christopher Hitchens who thought be might pursue a story to its (almost) nth degree.
The number of boys being born in China is higher than the number of girls. By a long shot. It is a statistic complicated by and exacerbated by China’s single child policy and by sex selective abortion. According to the British Medical Journal the average ratio of male to female births can be as high…
Not every “bloke” is keen to put their heart on their sleeve, let alone doing so by writing a poem about how he feels. It’s not something we do well – as a rule. So a feather could have knocked me down when one of my colleagues let me read (and now publish) the poem…
Mark Twain enjoined “Let your secret sympathies and your compassion be always with the under dog in the fight – this is magnanimity; but bet on the other one – this is business.” Sadly our government too often confuses the two. Afghan travellers looking for a better life have their boat explode from underneath them,…
In 2005 the following techniques (listed below) were apparently approved (by the DoJ) for use on detainees. I can hear old school coppers all over the world having a chuckle – no reference to phone books, or fire hoses, or clamped cuffs, or … We would be foolish if we thought these were the…
Marketing is about convincing a potential customer you have a product they need or want. The message which is conveyed has to be convincing, whether you are introducing the product or closing the sale. If you are going to win that sale you want your potential customer to know you are serious, and have a…
Sir Ernest Barker, clearly part of “the establishment” if his Wikipedia entry is any guide, thought The Reader Over Your Shoulder is ‘a national service.’ Only a knight would judge a book on writing to be so. Actually a knight who was also a don at Oxford and a professor at Cambridge, which may or…
I caught an interesting review of an article written by Wendy Barnaby (published in Nature). It was intriguing because it neatly flipped assumptions about why nations go to war, and going to war over water is a base assumption for many strategic assessments held by our governments. Perhaps fuelled by Mark Twain as well who…