Sep 14
Moving house I have discovered 30 copies of this book that I have put on Amazon for £5 – the inducement I need to go to the post office. Below an Amazon review that I quite like. Amazon Review (*****): Risk and Freedom is a book of historic significance. Published in 1985 and out of …
Sep 14
In the news this morning is the story of 7 year old Isabelle allowed by her parents to walk 20 metres from her front door to catch the school bus. Nanny, in the form of Lincolnshire County Council, discovered this case of parental neglect and threatened the parents with a child protection order. (http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-lincolnshire-11295617 and …
Aug 31
Resilience is a relative quality. There are no units by which it can be measured, but some have more of it than others. The ability to prevent bad things happening, and to mitigate their consequences and speed recovery when they do, is not equitably distributed. (full essay here)
Jul 02
Mrs Thatcher had a minister, Neil Hamilton, responsible for deregulation. Under Labour a similar agenda was pursued by the Better Regulation Task Force. That morphed into the Better Regulation Commission and then into the Better Regulation Advisory Council and, finally, into a whole Department of State in the form of BERR the Department for Business, …
Jun 09
This question was put ot me by an interesting website – Science and Religion Today . Not my usual stomping ground but, having reassured myself that they were defenders of Darwin, I decided they deserved an answer. Here it is: The pursuit of resilience involves risk management. The figure below describes the essence of this …
Jun 09
In your special (21 May) report on denial you speak of climate deniers. This is a curious term (who denies the existence of climate?) that appears to be deployed to smear reputable scientists who react sceptically to the “hockey stick” peddled by Sir John Houghton and the IPCC. You (Jim Giles page 42) ride to …
Jun 09
On 3 June Simon Jenkins published a devastating critique of the security industry’s promotion and exploitation of paranoia to expand its domain. It prompted the letter below, sadly not published. So I submitted it to my blog where it was accepted with alacrity. Sir, Simon Jenkins (Not every adult is a paedophile, a terrorist or …
Mar 02
In my last blog I noted that Benny Peiser and Sir John Houghton were having an argument in The Observer about something regarding man-made global warming that Sir John might, or might not, have said. To recap, Peiser had quoted Sir John as saying Unless we announce disasters no one will listen. Sir John, in …
Feb 15
Sir John Houghton thinks so. Former director of the Met Office, former chairman of the Royal Commission on Environmental Pollution, and former co-chair of the International Commission on Climate Change he is an influential voice in the global warming debate. He is currently demanding, in a letter to the Observer, an apology from Benny Peiser, …
Jan 27
Faithful followers of this website may recollect an earlier blog, Bicycle bombs: a further enquiry and a new theory, in which I called attention to the fact that, despite the absence of evidence that anyone-anywhere-ever had been killed by a pipe bomb disguised as a bicycle, Westminster police were impounding bicycles parked near Whitehall and Parliament …